(Part 1 below.)
Bigotry against Muslim Americans is headline news, even if the bigotry is not the headline. In contrast, bigotry against Roma makes little news, but it also is not usually recognized as bigotry.
1. Bigotry and Muslim Americans.
Bigotry against Muslim Americans comes from a mix of political calculation and public ignorance. Politicians and pundits exploit ignorance to incite hatred of Muslims. They do this to gain advantage over their political opponents.
a. Politically purposeful bigotry.
Politicians and pundits eagerly condemn the planned Muslim mosque in Manhattan near the site of the former World Trade Center. They assert hateful accusations against Muslim Americans, gaining political capital while our peaceful Muslim neighbors pay the price. They assert that the promoters of this Manhattan mosque are "insensitive" to the victims of 9/11, even though some 9/11 relatives support the mosque, and even though the mosque is intended in part as an interfaith meeting place. They assert without evidence that the mosque is intended to be a terrorist command center.
These politicians, pundits, and most of the public do not distinguish between the responsible, decent Muslims behind the Manhattan mosque and the deeply-evil mass murderers who piloted planes into buildings nine years ago. I discuss other defamations against Muslim Americans in my September 4, 2010 post, "Not Enemies but Friends", in the section called "Wedge issues".
To these cynical politicians and pundits, the Muslim American victims of their political opportunism are mere collateral damage. They victimize Muslims, but to them this is an un-intended but un-important byproduct of their political exploitation of the pain and anger over the events of September 11, 2001. The purpose behind perpetrating hatred of Muslims is the accumulation of political power.
This lingering pain and anger from September 11, 2010 puts most Americans out of sympathy for the rights and well-being of Muslim Americans. So demagogues enhance their political standing by telling lies about Muslims that the public is eager to believe. And this public anger means that when demagogues denounce Muslims or their freedom to build places of worship, they inflict harm on any adversary who dares to defend Muslims, tolerance, and religious freedom. Any opposing politician or pundit pays a price for appealing to the better angels of our nature.
The political boon of anti-Muslim bigotry goes even further than that. Some eighteen percent of Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, up from eleven percent in March, 2009. Politicians and pundits disseminate this disinformation hoping to politically damage the President. This is a new incarnation of an oldest, simplest political argument: "He’s not like us." This is the very base of bigotry.
As Republican former Secretary of State Colin Powell stated on Meet the Press, leaders in his own party encourage people to believe that Obama is a Muslim. As Powell points out, this is wrong-headed on two levels. First, there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim; there is no reason that a Muslim child should not be able to grow up to be president. But the accusers insinuate otherwise. Second, Obama is not a Muslim.
b. Ignorance as the agent of bigotry.
Eric Sevareid was a television essayist for CBS News. In his 1977 farewell broadcast, he articulated certain self-imposed "rules". Among them: "Not to underestimate the intelligence of the audience and not to overestimate its information." Politicians and pundits know that rule too, not so much honoring the intelligence that Sevareid spoke of, but manipulating the lack of information. They manipulate broad swaths of the American public who never thought about Muslims until planes flew into buildings in New York and Washington; nor learned more about Muslims thereafter; or, if they did, only fitted the information into a template of anger and hatred formed on that day.
Hatred of Muslims as a group is wrong, but I am not completely out of sympathy with my countrymen-and-women who harbor grudges against Muslims. I express this and the reason for it in my August 28, 2010 post, What the Islamic Community Center Controversy Teaches Me about Loving My Country. I also talk about the need for Christian humility among Christians: Muslims are better than we tend to think, and Christians are worse than we tend to think. I note thriving Muslim democracies, and I list relatively recent atrocities committed by Christian countries. I won’t repeat myself here, but if you want to see those positions argued, you know where to go.
On some level we tend to know that it is wrong to judge a group by its most perverse members; we ourselves could not emerge upright from such judgment. But the present political climate makes us overlook that simple truth. Leaders appeal to our baser judgments, counting on a feeble push-back, if any, from a public largely preoccupied with their own anxieties, affairs, and entertainments.
2. Bigotry against Roma.
Roma is the name for the group formerly known as Gypsies.
I’m not aware of national news concerning Roma, like news about African Americans, Latinos, or Muslims. But I have personal knowledge of bigotry against them.
More than other groups that are discriminated against, I find that there is no self-consciousness about holding against Roma the fact that they are Roma. For example, when I was a prosecutor in Alhambra, California, there was a sandwich shop run by Roma. Their sandwiches were good, made with fresh-baked bread. I once invited a detective to go there. He immediately said, "But it’s run by Gypsies – they piss in the bread!" Whether he literally believed this or not, his immediate, un-self-conscious response was a racial put-down. Having almost daily contact with this detective for two years, I never heard him speak that way about any other race or group.
On another occasion, I represented a Roma man in Monterey, California. He was accused of theft; having a loaded firearm in his car; and child endangerment. (The child-endangerment charge was because the children were young, and the gun was loaded and under a seat.)
The theft consisted of money taken for repairing a damaged fender. My client’s repair of the fender was, in the vernacular sense, a "rip-off", because he did a poor repair job. A poor repair job is not a crime, however; but it was treated as such. The officer wrote in his investigation report that this was a scam perpetrated by "Gypsies" all over California. To this day, I have no basis to believe that the officer had actual information to back up that statement; none was stated in the investigation report.
But, true or not, that statement was inappropriate and prejudicial. It was like saying that an African American must have intended to sell the drugs he had (a more serious crime than mere possession) because that is what African Americans do.
Character evidence is frowned upon under California law – generally, in a court of law, you can’t hold against somebody his own prior bad acts. But this was worse than character evidence. This was tarring my client not with his own prior bad acts. It was tarring him with alleged prior bad acts by others over whom he had no control, and for whom he had no responsibility.
Among the prosecutor, the judge, and me, I was the only one who seemed to perceive the inappropriateness of this statement in the officer’s investigation report. Only after hard bargaining and aggressive argument, I got the theft and child-endangerment charges dropped.
Bigotry against Roma is not inconsequential, even though it is not national news. Hitler persecuted Roma, as he did Jews, Slavs, and homosexuals.
3. Conclusion.
In part 1, I examined bigotry against African Americans and Latinos. Here, I examined bigotry against Muslim Americans and Roma. In part 3, I will discuss how bigotry saps America’s strength and afflicts bigotry’s perpetrators, and what we should do about it.
Sources:
9/11 families who support the Manhattan mosque: http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/
The truth about the promoter of the Manhattan mosque: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22imam.html?_r=1
An article about the promoters for the Manhattan mosque, and the plans concerning it: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bf1110d8-a5b0-11df-a5b7-00144feabdc0.html
18 percent of Americans think Obama is a Muslim: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1701/poll-obama-muslim-christian-church-out-of-politics-political-leaders-religious
The complexity of characterizing the "typical" Muslim: an article about the Sufis: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/opinion/17dalrymple.html
An homage to a great, tolerant Muslim elected leader: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704842604574642353284811682.html?KEYWORDS=wahid
YouTube video of John McCain refuting a supporter who calls Obama an "Arab": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzoyADkoFUk
YouTube video of former Secretary of State Collin Powell on calling Obama a Muslim and patriotism among Muslim Americans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYELqbZAQ4M&feature=related
YouTube video of Eric Sevareid’s 1977 farewell broadcast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHGHm8iPeUY
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