Last
month a video emerged and
went viral of an African-American man, Tyrone Mazyck, being abused and beaten
up in a horrendous fashion by Arab store owners in North Charleston, South
Carolina. The video prompted a variety
of responses, from defence of the store owners and derision of the victim to
xenophobic and Islamaphobic attacks on Arabs and immigrants. I do believe that what was missing in the
aftermath was an honest examination of the different angles to this incident.
My intention here therefore, is to distil a few pertinent points and add some
much needed perspective.
What
the store owners did to Mr. Mazyck was wrong. There can be no excuse for this
brutality and humiliation. It has been
claimed that Mr. Mazyck has a troubled past and had been caught stealing. Even if this is true, the correct way to
proceed would have been to call the police, not the bone chilling treatment
involving a gun and a sword that was meted out.
One does not have to venture far to locate where this behaviour stems
from and I have no hesitation in saying it unequivocally- racism. Many Arab and South Asian immigrants harbour
deep rooted racist beliefs towards persons of African descent. Some of them deny it and those that are also
Muslim spew the expected clichés when confronted that “there is no racism in
Islam” and reference Bilal, the companion of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be
upon him). The evidence however, is
overwhelming. It can range from violence,
use of words like “Abeed”, “Kala”, “Cheedee” and “Nurdo”, the spouting of
rhetoric centred on black pathology, and both subtle and open discrimination to
obsession with light skin and systematic aspirations to whiteness.
I
am of Gujarati origin and I grew up in a small, insular and rabidly racist
Gujarati community in Barbados where the views held about black Barbadians are
akin to those of white racist Southerners from the USA. I have been to India,
North Africa and the Middle East. I have
interacted with Arabs and South Asians there and in other parts of the world-
people born in those countries and people a few generations removed. I am
speaking from intimate and vast personal experience when I talk about the
racism of many Arabs and South Asians.
We
know all too well the story of Arab and South Asian corner store owners in working
class black neighbourhoods selling alcohol, cigarettes and lottery tickets.
These storeowners, despite whatever they may claim, are not there for
altruistic reasons. They are there for one reason- profit. That this profit is
based on exploitation and on contributing to the socio-economic decay of these
communities is of no concern to them.
What makes it even more insidious is that many of these storeowners are
Muslim, peddling the very evils that Islam prohibits. If they were genuinely interested in helping
the community and in displaying how a Muslim should behave, their businesses
would be socially inspired, contributing to the upliftment of these
communities. Instead, they demonstrate a
callous disregard for the black communities on whose backs they enrich themselves,
a disregard rooted in their racism. It
is this contempt and racism that most likely allowed the storeowners to abuse Mr.
Mazyck so freely, contrary to every single statement of the Prophet Muhammad
(peace be upon him) about how a Muslim must treat another soul.
The
reaction of right-minded people was outrage, and rightfully so. Unfortunately, the press conference of black leaders degenerated into a farce where these leaders in
speaking out against the actions of the store owners, decided to spout
xenophobic, Islamaphobic rhetoric. It
was quite ironic to hear black leaders talking about “this is America”,
“foreigner” and “go back to your country” and appealing to the same very ideals
and institutions that oppress their communities in a city like Charleston. A
city where Walter Scott was murdered in cold blood by a policeman who was then
incredulously found not guilty, a city where Dylan Roof murdered nine black churchgoers,
a city where the rates for incarceration, school drop outs and poverty of black
people are alarmingly high, a city where black people are routinely racially
profiled and stopped by police, a city where gentrification is fast pushing
black people from their neighbourhoods, a city where all of this is part and
parcel of a deeply entrenched structural and institutional racism. In resorting to anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and
anti-immigrant vitriol, they align themselves with the same very right-wing
forces who hate black people. It is
these types of “leaders” that Malcolm X denounced with some very apt
descriptions and whose failures to truly advocate for the people they pretend
to speak for led to a new generation of younger leaders exemplified by Black
Lives Matter.
Which
brings me to the right-wing. The most
ridiculous part of this entire episode was witnessing Trump supporters online
using the incident as justification for Trump’s Muslim ban. These are racist white folk who espouse black
pathology and who in their droves find themselves online justifying the murder
of black people by police. The irony of
them pointing to the beating by Arab storeowners of a black man as a deplorable
act that shows why Trump is right to want to ban Muslims! I’m still trying to
process this and I don’t think I ever will manage to.
