This is my adorable, brave, intelligent father yesterday at the rally he organized, American Muslims Against Isis. #peaceformuslims (at Times Square – 42nd Street)
Islamophobia comes from ignorance, misunderstanding, and lack of empathy. This guy rules, obviously. He is courageous and amazing. But boy, I wish there were people like him -everywhere-.
I visited home last week. My family lives in Cranberry, a little suburb of Pittsburgh that has rapidly developed, population-wise and economically, in the last decade. 28,098 people reside there, and 94% of them are white. 3% of them are Asian. There are 351 black people in the entire township, and 107 “other race”. (data from http://cranberrybusinesshub.org/217/Demographics) It is noticeably homogeneous to me, almost creepily so, but that is because my daily norm is living in Boston – not exactly a pillar of racial harmony, but at the very least, a more diverse place by the numbers.
Religious data is harder to find than racial, but if you expand to Allegheny County ( which contains Cranberry), this implies that less than 1% of the people that live there are practicing Muslims.
How can I explain to someone who gets all their data from the awful, sensationalist, and often completely incorrect media? Whom has zero counter examples in their lives? Certainly, not everyone in Cranberry is Islamophobic – most people I know there my own age are vehemently in favor of social equality. Despite not having an everyday experience of diversity, they have an innate sense of the value of it, and even better, an innate distrust of mainstream media.
But even intelligent and compassionate people can sometimes hold illogical opinions, influenced more by what they hear daily and their own personal experiences (or lack thereof) than reality. I can explain things, show data – but until they have a Muslim friend I doubt anything will change in their minds. And in some parts of America, it is basically physically impossible to have a Muslim friend.
I don’t know what to do about this, and I would love some recommendations on how to create empathy in a place where the first condition – exposure to diversity – is not available.
Empathy Initiative team, assemble! Who else is interested? We can do this people.
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