I am writing this letter in response to...
http://www.mlive.com/kalamazoo/stories/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1233984063217000.xml&coll=7
...where a recent political and social injustice representative of racist America was so nicely reduced to trivial child’s play by Julie Mack in her February 7th column, “Protestor protests the protest he caused.” And on a side note, I too would like to demonstrate my equal, perhaps superior, skill at crafting cute political alliterations.
Mack may be a self-proclaimed “free-speech kind of gal,” but she is clearly not an anti-racist kind of gal. She is a white kind of gal – the white kind of gal that is intimidated by her own white shame and white guilt. While this white kind of gal fails to acknowledge the race of the white male WMU DPS officers who physically assaulted me, and the race of the white male WMU students who defaced my property, she most definitely did not fail to mention my Muslim name. And she surely did not fail to mention “black crime” in her February 13th column. She seems to be working under the assumption that my Muslim name, of which I take great pride in, does not evoke a racist response in this political context. She seems to be working under the larger naive assumption that a group of bona fide, white, male, third-tier public university security guards did not internalize the beautiful milk-chocolate color of my skin, did not internalize my prominent and handsome ethnic features, did not internalize my intellectually-reasoned political dissent, did not internalize my Islamic faith, and lastly did not internalize me as just another brown, unshaven, big-nosed, American-hating, anti-Semitic Muslim terrorist.
Whether or not I was “looking to create a fuss” I have absolutely every bit of legitimacy in complaining about “the fuss that ensued.” Does breaking WMU’s “legal” ban on freedom of speech nullify racial victimization by a group of white male authorities? I was a fool to think the First Amendment was my permit to protest. And was the rabble-rousing Rosa Parks justly beaten for sitting at the front of that bus in Montgomery, Alabama? Rosa Parks was not a tired, old, black lady. She was trained by the NAACP to break the law and sit where she sat. She was trained to be arrested. Did that legitimize racist, white, male police brutality? After all, they were simply enforcing the law – making sure that justice was served. The Civil Rights Movement was professionally organized by black intellectuals and provocateurs – not by a group of underclass, jobless, uneducated free slaves. Does that legitimize the lynchings of black men by white America? Does that legitimize the legal rape of black women by white America? When did we forget Dr. King’s revolutionary theory on civil disobedience against unjust law? Probably when we were so preoccupied with painting him as just another hyper-sexual, black misogynist.
In an informal, e-mail interview with Mack prior to the publication of her column, she refers to my tactics as “doomed to failure” and “more intent on scoring points than having a substantial discussion on the merits”. I may have been “scoring points” in the paled opinion of this white kind of gal (and other white kind of guys and gals out there), but for us disruptive, tactless colored folk, scoring points is the daily lived struggle for freedom – freedom from the bondage and enslavement of white kind of guys and gals, like Julie Mack.
As an American-born Pakistani living in America, the mental and physical abuse I experience is justified in the name of patriotism and American nationalism. On the Web at mlive.com, what I assume to be another white kind of gal by the online handle “MarionGrace” responds to my January 17th viewpoint with “pity for Mr. Turk who is a citizen of a country, but who at the same time apparently has no respect or love for it.” Dear MarionGrace:
save your pity for when another American building is destroyed by the innately hateful, war-mongering, Jew-despising, Quran-indoctrinated, Muhammad-worshiping, taxi-driving, Arabic-speaking Muslim terrorists. And when it happens, DO NOT ask why – that’s your duty as a good, silent (white) AmeriKKKan.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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