Perhaps I will have answers
I have been reluctant to write about our current state... Simultaneously, I have written all of you many times in my mind.
When I started to organize this article, Ramadan had recently started, and as a recent revert, I was reading and listening to the recitation of the Qu’ran.
I am familiar with transliteration and chanting from earlier studies in Sanskrit and the research that comes with it. A friend, and brother, asks what I am getting out of it? Am I learning toward mysticism? To which I replied, ‘Perhaps I will have answers in a few years.’
I researched my Muslim name from a historical viewpoint and feel a connection to that... and I remember that I have not learned to pray properly, which is okay for me, as we are on lockdown.
Yet, others are dying to congregate and show their faith. To be present in the practice holds a ton of spiritual points. I am a kid here. I fast the same way children are taught and speak as many Bahasa words as my two year old nephew.
It was during this time that the Qu’ran was given and yet people could not participate in their faith as fully as they have in past years. This year, the world was inside.
At that time, I was really annoyed with the COVID Phone from Apple. I felt strongly that monetization is wrong when people are desperate. And that humanity is more important than profit. Yes, I am sure the money goes to a foundation — and one in which we will never see where those funds go.
Now, weeks later, if feels like the corona virus doesn’t matter. I am listening and watching all of the protests and some rioting from the murder of George Floyd. Most of the friends I have talked to feel the same way - sad, mad and oscillating between the two.
And the news... I don’t trust the news. In the 80s, I spent summers in Baltimore. I saw violence, what was reported as violence, and how it was reported. I felt pressure from other white kids to only hang out with white kids. And that sometimes these neo kids possessed police gear from an aunt or a father on the force, in case they needed it. What sixth grader needs a police issue baton or mace!? I saw black kids get singled out and punished more harshly from our white counterparts. And anger! I saw so much anger.
I recently talked to a friend about her growing up in a color-blind community outside of Chicago. As a child she remembers being the only black child in white households, where ‘you changed my mind about black people’ went hand in hand with ‘no, we don’t have black Barbie’s in this house.’ Later in life, she fell in love with a white man, who fell in love with her and ended their relationship because of his own family’s prejudice. The American Dream was full of limitations.
The American Mind is full of limitations. I am so tired of seeing people hate each other. I am tired of witnessing the lack of general curiosity that one may have traveling to another country become intolerance toward a neighbor who may be from that country. I am disgusted that We the People somehow exists in the backs of minds as only applying to white and white affluent people.
America was built on a genocide of Native occupants and the backs of Black bodies... and later Asian bodies...Latin bodies... The melting pot is only to melt away culture so you are left to look clearly at the differences of skin and facial structure. Even the Census groups are color related and still offer one of the greatest provider of statistics.
That’s what I studied in college - work occupation and segregation by race and gender. When we look at disease and systems and economics and we peer into the American psyche, we are saying that it is okay for men, women, children to be killed, incarcerated, neglected, beat, muted, displaced, fed into a cyclical system that continues to remove basic, human and constitutional rights. And that we can remove smoking and drinking ads but glorify murder and violence against black people.
When I was thirty, a friend of mine hugged me and said, ‘I did it. I’m not dead and I have never been incarcerated.’