New York City cabbies are warned to be wary after a passenger stabbed his driver Monday night for being Muslim.
All that race-baiting over the mosque being built several blocks from Ground Zero isn’t just talk — it’s having a real-world effect on the ground.
Ahmed Sharif, a practicing Muslim who drives a cab in NYC, picked up a passenger Monday night. His passenger was Michael Enright, a 21 year old White male who was later described by police as highly intoxicated. Here’s an account of what happened next:
Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said the cabbie who was attacked is Ahmed H. Sharif, 43, a practicing Muslim.
When he first got into the taxi Tuesday night, Desai said, Enright engaged in cordial conversation with Sharif.
He “started out friendly, asking Mr. Sharif about where he was from, how long he had been in America, if he was Muslim and if he was observing fast during Ramadan,” said Desai, who has spoken with the cab driver.
Then, after a few minutes of silence, Desai said Enright started violently cursing at Sharif and shouted “Assalamu Alaikum, consider this a checkpoint,” before slashing him in the throat, arms, and hand.
Though gushing blood, Sharif was able to escape and quickly flagged a police officer, who apprehended Enright, Desai said. Police said the suspect was highly intoxicated.
Nell said Enright has been charged with attempted murder in the second degree as a hate crime, assault in the second degree as a hate crime, aggravated harassment in the second degree as a hate crime, and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree.
Sharif, a father of four who immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh 25 years ago, has been driving a cab for more than 15 years, according to a statement from the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
This episode is inexcusable, and it’s also downright un-American.
“This kind of bigotry only breeds more violence and makes taxi drivers all the more vulnerable on the streets where there are no bully pulpits or podiums to hide behind,” Desai told CNN.
Blaming Muslims for 9/11 is like blaming Koreans for Seung-Hui Cho and blaming Whites for Oklahoma City. No person — let alone an American citizen – should fear for his life in America just based on the colour of his skin.
Prince of Persia,Twilight, The Last Airbender, Karate Kid, Red Dawn — this summer’s blockbusters seem to have gotten the blogosphere humming more than usual, with many writers examining Hollywood’s relationship with race.In my experience, sardonic or critical posts focusing on the latest pop culture icons fare far better among readers than dry, data-heavy sociological analyses (which take about 23 times as long to prepare). Pop culture diatribes tend to be easy to write, widely read and more likely to go viral. For bloggers who live and die by pageviews and ad-clicks, this is our bread and butter.
Since the NAACP passed a resolution denouncing racist elements within the Tea Party (the details of which NAACP chairman Ben Jealous explained on Change.org last week), Fox News has been spinning its wheels trying to expose what it sees as racism among the black community.For example, as Prerna Lal recently reported, Fox has lately been up in arms over the New Black Panther Party, a group that allegedly engaged in voter intimidation in 2008. In her post, Prerna cited video footage of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, in which he pointedly declares: “The evidence clearly shows the [members of the New Black Panther Party] breaking the law. Why were they given a pass [from the White House]?”
Forget about the fact that Obama isn’t the one that chose not to file a criminal case against the New Black Panther Party (that decision rested with Bush). O’Reilly’s choice of the phrase “get a pass” is a deliberate effort to suggest that certain minorities (specifically African-Americans) are getting preferential treatment in the Obama administration. He’s suggesting that whites are the real victim of racism here — a theme we also saw in the Shirley Sherrod case.
Across Fox’s coverage, we see the same message. It’s no coincidence that within days of the NAACP’s announcement, Fox devoted several segments to the New Black Panther Party — highlighting their supposed efforts to disenfranchise white voters. FoxNews.com also ran an opinion piece by Congressman Lamar Smith that explicitly accused the Department of Justice of racism in its failure to file a lawsuit against the group. In it, Smith writes, “Had the defendants been members of the Ku Klux Klan, I doubt the Justice Department would have dropped the charges. This appears to be a case of reverse discrimination.”
Back in March, the speech Shirley Sherrod gave before the NAACP seemed innocuous enough. In it, the Obama appointee urged her audience to heed the words of Toni Morrison, declaring, “we have to get to the point where race exists, but it doesn’t matter.” Sherrod — the current state director of rural development — also movingly recounted how her attitudes toward race have shifted since growing up in the South, at a time when lynchings were still commonplace.
Yesterday, though, Fox News managed to twist Sherrod’s words. The network aired a video that was edited to suggest Sherrod currently discriminates against white farmers. (View the edited video here.). As edited, the video suggests Sherrod has previously tried to avoid having to actually help a white farmer keep his land — and that she made this decision based on the color of his skin.
Actually, what Sherrod discussed was how her views on race changed after witnessing how a white farmer whose land was being foreclosed suffered the same apathy and mistreatment at the hands of wealthy whites that she’d seen black farmers experience. Ultimately, she encouraged her audience to view the world not just in terms of black and white, but in terms of “haves” and “have nots.” (Full speech here — the relevant anecdote is around minute 17.)
But so much for “fair and balanced.” Instead, Fox News chose to insinuate that Sherrod actively discriminates against whites in her current job with the administration. Fox News also went a step further to argue that the NAACP was backing Sherrod’s supposed discrimination against whites.
Sherrod holds a fairly obscure position within the Obama administration, and it’s plain that the edited video that surfaced was just that — edited, and heavily so. So why the sudden controversy?
The wonderful thing about democracy is that even the most radical political extremists can participate in our political process. But of course, this is also democracy’s curse — particularly if these radical extremists are noxious white supremacists that try to spout racist, intolerant hatred from the largest soapbox they can manage.New Hampshire’s Ryan Murdough is one such case. A fringe Congressional candidate running as a Republican — a man unknown to the state’s political powers-that-be — Murdough flew under the radar until earlier this month, when he wrote a letter to the Concord Monitor. In it, Mudough outed himself as the state chairperson of the New Hampshire branch of the American Third Position Party.
Sound innocuous? Actually, the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks hate groups in America) labels this group ”a fledgling political party…with the aim of uniting disaffected racists.”
Murdough is a textbook white supremacist who sees multiculturalism as a threat — not just to his cultural identity, but to his very safety. In his letter to the editor, Murdough wrote, “Statistics show that areas with high non-white populations have higher rates of violent crime.” In a one-on-one interview with the Concord Monitor, Murdough expands on this viewpoint by suggesting that non-whites are genetically predispositioned to committing crime. “I’d rather live in a place that would be safer for my kids, and most of those places happen to be white. New Hampshire is an example.”
Dr. Rahul Parikh, a San Francisco-area physician, writer, and sometime CNN contributor, responds to Joel Stein’s “My Own Private India“:
So … because you weren’t funny or incisive, what’s your point? Are you trying to make Indians prove our worth to the fraternity that is America? Is your essay part of some kind of hazing? Put up with your callous insults, and we’ll be able to live in the frat house?
What litmus test do we all have to pass to become bona fide? Does our God have to wear a big white beard and have only two arms? Do we have to turn in the dots on our foreheads for a baseball cap with “N.Y.” stenciled on it? Trade in our samosas and chai for potato chips and Bud Light? Should we make our parents throw their Hindi language newsmagazine in the garbage and subscribe to Time?
If it’s about fitting in with your standards of Americana, please, allow me to prove my culture’s utility to you.
Some of us have become wildly successful. We run Fortune 500 companies, have been elected to political office and have won Pulitzer prizes. Many of us work 40-plus hours a week to pay our mortgage. Some have paid their dues serving this country in war. Still others struggle to pay the bills, keep their children fed or their marriages together; and yes, there are those of us who are criminals locked up in jail. In other words, we’re just like everyone else.
Earlier this week, “unfunnyman” Joel Stein wrote a racist piece about how his hometown of Edison, New Jersey – a town that has become home to a flourishing Asian Indian immigrant population. Stein’s commentary, ostensibly about the nostalgia he feels about “pre-Indian” Edison, crams virtually every anti-Asian Indian stereotype he can think of into a single page of text. Here’s an excerpt:
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn’t want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
Were it not for the intelligent, fresh sense of humor of individuals like Mr. Stein, the world may never know about Americans who happen to be of Indian descent. Gags about impossibly spicy food? I’d never heard those before! Multiple Gods with multiple arms? Multiple laughs! Recounting racial slurs like “dot-head”? Oh, Mr. Stein, is too good! I don’t know how he comes up with such unique bits. (I was worried that he’d missed an opportunity to joke about Dr. King’s predecessor, Gandhi, but I see that he got to that hilarity on Twitter. More never-before-heard satire!)
Growing up a few miles from Edison, NJ, I always thought it was hilarious when I’d get the crap kicked out of me by kids like Stein who would yell “go back to India, dothead!” I was always ROTFLMAO when people would assume that I wasn’t American. He really captured the brilliant humor in that one too!
I hadn’t noticed earlier this week, but Time’s editors have updated Stein’s original post with a boilerplate non-apology: it doesn’t apologize for publishing Stein’s column, but apologizes that readers were offended by the column. Way to skirt the blame, Time.
Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.
Joel Stein seems to be singing a different tune after his unapologetic Tweet where he makes a crack about Gandhi. Frankly, his new “apology” reeks of insincerity: nowhere in his original column does Stein criticize his own discomfort towards Indian immigrants. In fact, the entire article is an unfunny diatribe about the Otherness of Asian Indians. How could anyone — including the column’s author – mistake it for a reasoned contribution to the immigration debate?
S. Carolina State Senator, John “Jake” Knotts, Jr., called fellow Republican State Senator Nikki Haley (and President Obama) a “raghead” on an Internet talk show on Thursday night. Haley is the GOP frontrunner in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, and Knotts supports one of Haley’s opponents. Knotts said:
“We already got one raghead in the White House,” John M. “Jake” Knotts Jr. said on the Internet talk show “Pub Politics,” according to the State newspaper. “We don’t need another in the governor’s mansion.”
(Knotts has since apologized, claiming that the remark was made as part of an “SNL”-style joke. As if, somehow, that makes it less racist and offensive.)
Haley has faced some seriously crazy opposition in her race, both as a woman and as a South Asian-American. She’s currently embroiled in a salacious smear campaign involving unverfiable claims that she cheated on her husband with men who support her political opponents.
And now, Haley is being labelled “raghead” — a racial and religious slur frequently lobbed at Muslim- and South Asian-Americans – based solely on the colour of her skin.
Really, I don’t know how the GOP could ever try to claim that they are the party of inclusion.
Here’s an interview Blair did with PrescottNews.com after the firing:
In the interview, Blair defends himself by saying that the mural was “graffiti” because it was on a public building and he, as a member of the public, disapproved of it. Yet, each of the murals that have been painted in Prescott have been on public buildings, with the approval of the building’s adminstrators. One of the biggest murals painted as part of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project was on the walls of a local public library — with the library’s full blessing. Blair didn’t have a problem with how that mural was painted. In fact, Blair claims in the above interview that he really loves the library’s mural – perhaps that’s because the “Beyond Words” mural depicts the literary history of Prescott, and prominently featured in the artwork are several (White) Prescott historical figures?
This is a scene from the Prescott public library mural. Strangely, Blair has no problem with this piece of art.
(If you want more information and pictures from the public library mural, you can see the library’s .pdf explaining the mural’s contents here. There also should be more information and images at Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project website, but last I checked it, the site’s servers had been overwhelmed following the mural controversy.)
In fact, Blair’s complaint in the interview above that the Prescott public doesn’t get enough say in how these public art projects are decided is outright hypocritical.
The elementary school mural at the center of this controversy is actually one of two eco-themed murals organized by the school as part of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project; the second mural is being painted on the walls of a public restroom in Prescott’s Acker Park. That mural’s design was also voted on by the students of Miller Valley Elementary School, and is being painted in part by the school’s children. Unlike with the school and the library, the park lacked an obvious administrator to make the final decision on the design. Thus, the mural design was put on public display and circulated to local residents; the Prescott city council — of which Blair is a member — actually voted to approve the final design.
So, Blair’s lament that the public isn’t involved enough in how these murals — and their designs – get approved is complete and utter bullshit. Heck, as a Prescott city councilman, who voted on the final design of the Acker Park mural, Blair should have been fully aware that the mural was part of a series of eco-friendly murals being painted by the Prescott Downtown Mural Project. Unless he is an utterly incompetent elected official who sleeps during city council meetings, there is no reason for him to have been unaware of the elementary school mural’s theme and design.
Yet, Blair claims he had no idea what the Middle Valley Elementary School mural was about. In fact, he claims that, like one of his radio show listeners, he thought the mural was a picture of Black man (presumably the President) wielding a stick, and that’s why he didn’t like it.
If that’s the case, Councilman Blair, than let’s be clear. Let’s not obfuscate the debate with ridiculous arguments over historical buildings or inadequate public approval. You don’t like the mural because you don’t like seeing the face of a Mexican-American child on your daily commute. The issue is no more complicated than this: you are racist, and you don’t like being called on it.
In Prescott, Arizona, an elementary school hired a local artist to paint a mural on two of its outside walls, celebrating green transportation. Children from the school were asked to submit photos of themselves; four were chosen to be featured in the mural. One of the children was a Latino boy, whose face (above) is the most prominent in the artwork.
These are the kinds of art projects that promote a sense of inclusion and community in schools. They are the kinds of projects that encourage students to volunteer, to enjoy the arts, and to learn more about green technology.
Yet, in Prescott, Arizona, residents driving by the art project were reportedly infuriated by the image of a brown face on the side of their local elementary school. The artist reports repeatedly being harassed by drivers yelling “n*gger” and “sp*c” out their car windows at him and the children who were helping him complete the project:
R.E. Wall, the artist who heads the Prescott Downtown Mural Project, told a local newspaper passersby regularly shouted racially charged comments at his group while they were creating the mural at the Miller Valley Elementary School.
“You’re desecrating our school,” “Get the ni—- off the wall,” “Get the sp– off the wall,” were common, Wall said. “The pressure stayed up consistently,” Wall said. “We had two months of cars shouting at us.”
Prescott City Councilman Steve Blair. Does he hate all Brown people, or just their elementary school-aged children?
Prescott city councilman, Steve Blair, has led the charge against the mural, speaking at great length on his radio talk show, the Daily Courier. In archives from his radio show, Blair claims he is “not a racist individual” while he simultaneously laments the insidious effects of diversity:
Blair said Wednesday diversity is a word “I can’t stand.”
“The focus doesn’t need to be on what’s different; the focus doesn’t need to be on the minority all the time,” he said.
Mistaking the central figure in the mural as African-American (it was painted from a picture of a Mexican-American student of the school), Blair complains that having to put up with a Black president (and four Black families in his neighbourhood) is enough multiculturalism for one lifetime:
“I am not a racist individual,” Blair said on a radio show last month, “but I will tell you depicting a black guy in the middle of that mural, based upon who’s President of the United States today and based upon the history of this community, when I grew up we had four black families – who I have been very good friends with for years – to depict the biggest picture on that building as a black person, I would have to ask the question, ‘Why?’”
In fact, Blair likens the mural to “L.A. graffiti” (because there are Black people in both the mural and L.A.?), and he argues that it is the mural, not him, that is causing the racial controversy:
“Personally, I think it’s pathetic,” he says. “You have changed the ambience of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn’t exist in Prescott, Arizona. And I’m ashamed of that.”
At least Blair is willing to admit that he wouldn’t be up in arms if the mural had depicted four White schoolchildren. And certainly, the school seems to be hoping this is true — the artist was recently asked by the elementary school principal to “lighten” the skin of the four schoolchildren (claiming that he wants them to look more “radiant and happy”).
What truly shocks me about this story is the fact that passersby in Prescott were so offended by an image of a Brown face on their local elementary school, that they rolled down their windows and shouted racial epithets against five- to ten-year-old children. The targets of their racial hatred weren’t imaginary: they were actual children at the elementary school, either depicted in the mural or helping the artist to paint it. That little boy whom Blair mistook for an African-American in his long-winded on-air ranting is a real boy.
Now, we can chalk all of Blair’s commentary up to the whimsy of conservative hate radio, but we must remember that Blair is the elected city councilman of Prescott. Blair represents all of the residents of Prescott in city matters, yet he has outright admitted that he has complete disregard for the 10% of his constituents who are Latino and Black. His abject, Jim Crow racism and hatred of children of colour (several years ago, Blair reportedly called Mexicans “taco flippers”) should not be tolerated in an elected official in 2010.
Act Now! Blair’s talk show — Daily Courier — has been pulled from its station KYCA over his on-air racism. But you can still let Blair know how much you don’t appreciate his racism. His phone number is 928-777-1100 and he can receive emails at this contact page. Contact Blair and let him know that he owes the Black and Latino residents of Prescott — and particularly the schoolchildren associated with this mural — a formal and sincere public apology.
Update: The owner of Blog for Arizona has made the questionable decision to invite me to contribute this, and other local Arizona posts, to his blog. Perhas he’s trying to sweeten me up, so I don’t whup his butt too badly at Catan tonight? In any event, this post is cross-posted over at Blog for Arizona.
