I have been struggling all week to write coherently and think clearly. As a non-Muslim woman of colour this is what I feel about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons:- I paused a long time when I saw those caricatured images of brown men with large noses, facial hair, vulgarly screaming being passed around. I paused a long time when I saw images of brown and black women in hijabs drawn in such ugly ways. Because thats also what this is: it is a project in inscribing such incredibly vile ugliness, inferiority, and notions of barbarism into the bodies of people of colour. Its about dehumanizing brown people, black people, Muslims. When I saw those images circulated, defended, sometimes by white people I care about deeply, there was a strange silencing that I experienced. And Ive been struggling to even have a conversation around that - without coopting/using the identities of people very dear to me as a way to speak about my feelings - because whatever I feel in this doesnt matter in the sense that Im not Muslim. Its not about my pain or frustration when discussing Islamophobia. But I am brown, a WoC, and I dont want my solidarity to be a clinical voice of allyship either. Defending Charlies comics means defending racism. You cannot have it both ways. Calling what they do satire or art is a cop-out to excuse their racism because the message that people of colour are ugly is widely known to us. We deal with it every day and its racism. Even IF Charlie Hebdo at all also depicted white people in the same way, its not the *same way* simply because of the wider cultural context of white privilege, racism, and racialised power. What I saw when those images were passed around by white francohpone friends on facebook was the very real reminder that I do not inhabit the same world they do. What I saw was this utterly basic conflation of mourning white bodies while villifying brown ones. It was so utterly. basic. Cant you mourn without defending such cruel depictions of people? You actually need people to explain to you why the sheer repetitive boring sad vomit-inducing depictions of brown people was racist? Its moments like these that remind me of the sheer, viscerally horrific ignorance-coupled-with-power that is so much the essential character of white privilege. That after months of conversations, deep discussions, and even love, I could learn that for so many of my white friends, mourning white deaths was so instinctively tied to defending colonial-era understandings of Muslims, of Africans, of any culture Other. And you know something? They did naturally. They did it with ease. Defending felt right, felt good, felt solid, felt correct. They called it satire first, and then they called it art - as though either are above critique. So dear white friends, I see with heartache and real pain where your instincts lie, and where PoC humanity goes to die. Heres the sickening reality: Calling something art or satire was enough of an excuse for you to exercise that instinct without any critical thought in the moment. I do think, in this case, nonMuslim PoC should take it on themselves to do this work, to educate, to challenge, at least in our own communities. Im still working out now what my responsibility is in challenging the very instincts of white people
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 02:31:39 +0000
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