A Christmas Carol of Imagination and Chaos, as seen by a feminist Muslim panentheist

Thou hast thy mighty wings outspread

And brooding o'er the chaos shed

Thy life into the impregn'd abyss

The vital principle infused

And out of nothing's womb produced

The heav'n and earth and all that is

                                                  (hymn by Charles Wesley)

Wesley also wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," but I prefer this one as my Christmas Carol, the universe being born when pregnant potential, infused by the creative life force, gave birth to quarks and leptons.

And are not you and I part of the original potential of the big bang? Are we not a dream, a promise that it held to unfold its possibilities? We've got promise, just like her, we've got potential.

We are the promise of our Mother Chaos ancestor and her dreams to unfold herself, to create on higher levels. We are born limited as a collapsing of her random possibilities, born in the midst of a different kind of chaos - humanmade, societal injustice. We are born embodying the principle that evil is a failure of the imagination, that zero-sum games are discreation, that many binaries and definitions we assume get us unnecessarily into a mess and cause massive, collective denial, and that such denial itself constitutes a crime.

But as co-creators with God, we can unlimit our imagination, and in doing so unleash the potential of our ancestors, through a daily recovery program: and I say "daily" and "recovery" to bring attention to the fact that we are addicted to our limited ways of thinking. Optimism is a crime: there is no cure here, no one-off born-again enlightenment that allows us to transcend old scripts.
Nevertheless we can learn to question ourselves, to be more receptive to challenges to our deeply held and cherished attachments, investments, assumptions, loyalties. We can learn to say "not either/or but both/and" a bit more.
We can validate things we disagree with on some level, however limited.

I open myself up to thee, Allah. In my manger of making the same mistakes over and over again, I ask that you impregnate my soul with your rūḥinā / rūaḥ. By being open to your creative coping, to your healing life force, new paths appear, where there once stood only limitations. To prepare myself, I seek to balance my moments of drive, seeking, calculating, consuming, task-orientedness with awe, slowness, not doing anything, chanting, playing (doing something not as a means to an end, not having an end-point in mind before beginning), improvising, so that I can be *listening* to what is inside of me,

I lift my open hands or put my antennas out, just to receive a message from the moment, to create a space, to see what it tells me. I certainly don't do this enough, I often run away from empty spaces. I'm afraid that they are a waste of time and I have a million things I should be doing, could be doing. I think that these spaces are nothing.

But nothing is pregnant. And that is something to sing about.


(*now PLEASE go back and click those links, to Torah-influenced process theologian Catherine Keller, and what the Torah and the Qur'an /and, separately, / James Baldwin and Catholic theologian Thomas Merton in conversation have to say, as well as various links which you can concretely apply to your racist cousins)

Fact check: Did the Pilgrims actually kill Indians, is Thanksgiving originated in oppression?

Fact check: The Pilgrims actually killed Indians, making Thanksgiving a holiday originated in oppression. Rated: Mostly False.

The Puritans committed a genocide. The Pilgrims often get blamed for it. People get satisfied with this blame and move on.
The more we blame the Pilgrims, the further from truth telling we get because now there's no motivation to investigate the Puritans, the actually guilty party behind the evil Thanksgiving. White people can't afford generalizations about our ancestors- we have to know which ancestor did what and to who. How will we take responsibility for genocide if we don't face history accurately?*

*Though this doesn't negate that the word "pilgrim" may be triggering to people of color, a generic term used colloquially as interchangeable with the Puritans (two U.S. Presidents have even confused the two groups); even in their day, lower-case "p" pilgrims was once used as a generic term for both Puritans and Pilgrims.

We need to let people know there are no sacred cows in American history. Jefferson, Franklin, they were total white supremacists who wanted America white (and certainly not "men of their time," because other white people disagreed with them). And Columbus was very much a Hitler, or worse, because Hitler didn't even rape children and help establish child prostitution rings. And just as some cities have changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, Thanksgiving needs to recognize how New England today is the result of the systemic genocide of Native Americans. We need to use it as an occasion to give reparations that Natives want (monetary, land, healing, power over their resources and destiny, centering of voices, truth-telling, etc, not one-off and on one day but as a process, and year round). But we should not be so iconoclastic that we conflate the Puritans and the Pilgrims.

the Pilgrims didn't kill Indians for Thanksgiving, it was the Puritans. I think that's an important distinction to make. The Pilgrims who landed on the shore and fasted with the Wampangoag (that's not a typo for "feast", they actually had a three-day *fast*) were peaceful white folks, and the Puritans were bloodthirsty extremists. It's like the difference between moderate Muslims and extremists. When the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony had Thanksgiving, it was with the Indians. When the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony had Thanksgiving, it was thanking God for winning a genocidal war against the Indians. Two very different Thanksgivings, reflecting two very different cultures.
*Not that it made much difference to Natives like Will Rogers who understandably regret letting any Americans on shore.

One author quotes Plymouth Governor William Bradford, who was the Pilgrim leader, as he described the war which led to the Thanksgiving. But while the author almost makes it sound like Bradford endorsed the war, in actuality, he was only describing it. The war, led by Puritans leaders John Endecott and John Winthrop, was led by bands of Puritan butchers and it was Puritan Winthrop who was the governor which Bradford describes as declaring "a day for Thanksgiving" for winning this war. Pilgrim leader Bradford actually criticized this war as fueled by ignorance about natives; Bradford likely could have had no sway over the hotheaded Endecott, because Endecott's own men tried to stop him from raiding Indians, and they were ignored.

The Puritans and their ways eventually overtook the peaceful Pilgrims, just as the peaceful Quakers and Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had their voices drown out by the aggressive money-and-power lovers. They just weren't interested in empire, in subjugating, quantifying, and regulating bodies, and in the kill-or-be-killed world, they all ended up losing power in government. Quakers and Pilgrims sat by as aggressive and ethnocentrist factions within them took advantage of their newfound freedom when greedy, power-hungry people took the helm after the utopian leaders like Bradford died (Pilgrims) or quit politics in protest of the French and Indian war (Quakers). These aggressive mobs taking Indian lands acted with impunity in Plymouth (leading to King Philip's War), and Indian Boarding Schools proliferated in Quaker lands. And then there is the issue of those who sat passively by as potential for justice turned to self-serving silence in the face of injustice; the masses needs then, as now, to be reckoned with. But their utopian ancestors - the ones at Plymouth who protested bigoted whites going to war with Indians, the ones in Quaker lands who instead of condemning Indian religions sought to learn from them because they already saw them as "communing with the inner light," they need to be recognized and honored.

The first generation of Pilgrims at Plymouth were a mostly peaceful time, due to the leadership of Gov. Bradford and Wampanoag leader Massasoit. Pilgrims could be, and were, executed for the murder of Indians, and sometimes Indians received more lenient punishment than Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were not perfect; there were often political reasons for this fair treatment. And the Pilgrims certainly thought they were the hottest shit. According to womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, they saw themselves as defenders of their ancestor's folk culture which had been tainted by Catholicism, represented by the high Anglican Church/Church of England. There was also petty theft. They also almost starved one year soon after they landed, and went looking for Indian help. They happened upon an empty Wampanoag village (that turned out was abandoned, but they had no way of knowing this) and after realizing no one was home, out of desperation, stole from a granary and graves. One Pilgrim said "we meant to have left some beads and other things in the houses as a sign of peace and to show we meant to trade with them," but left in a "haste...but as soon as we meet the Indians, we will pay them back for what we took" (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pg. 86). (Sounds like a self-serving rationalization to me.) Despite these several survival attempts involving petty theft of empty villages, which continued, half of the Pilgrims died within the first year, including that winter of starving. This happened before the first Thanksgiving dinner, with the Wampangoag, which took place in in 1621.

In 1637, over a decade after the first Thanksgiving, the Puritans went to war with the Indians- it was called Pequots war. It was ethnic cleansing. The Puritans celebrated it as Thanksgiving. *This* isn't the one that we celebrate as a Holiday, and it's important not to conflate the two. The Pilgrims present a good opportunity to show that we can't just say "well the Puritans were just people of their time," or "well Indians were hostile so they had to defend themselves," because not all white people were getting into fights with Indians and stealing their land and slaughtering them; the Pilgrims prove this. Because of the Pilgrims, apologist arguments justifying racism don't work.
After the deaths of Massasoit and Winthrop, just a few years apart in the 1660s, the Pilgrims lost their stabilizing forces that had maintained peaceful relations, and became more like their aggressive Puritan cousins in their ways- they hungered for land, English cultural domination, and they treated Natives more harshly during sentencing. This went against their ancestral culture which told them to behave like good Christians toward the Natives, something which Puritan culture had lacked. Josiah Winslow, for instance, was the son of a Pilgrim who dealt fairly with the Natives; Josiah, unlike his father, however, undertook evil land dealings; he was thus more Puritan in his style. By the 1690s, the Pilgrims lost their charter and were absorbed completely into Puritan culture.

We celebrate and romanticize the first Thanksgiving (the Pilgrim one). We ignore the second one (the Puritan one). We should not do either. The Puritan one lays bare the violence of whites and their twisted logic, whose justifications and motivations are the inherited legacy of New Englanders' white Yankees. We inherited Puritan culture, not Pilgrim culture, and we must reckon with it. So this claim that Thanksgiving originated in genocide may not be true, but it has an important element of truth in it that we must be reckoning with. That's why I rate this claim as "mostly false."

Yet the Pilgrims who washed ashore, probably looking lost as hell (they had aimed for Virginia), offer a strain of whiteness not defined by inhumane desire for control and consumption. They represent a potential: that first generation who managed to have fair dealings with Natives all the way down to their criminal justice system. Whites must be looking at the Amish, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Pilgrims, and reckon with this element as well [they were not perfect]. Some of these groups not only resisted slavery but on principle resisted any dealing with people or companies related to the slave trade. What made them different? How can they be a model, however a limited one? These are questions we should also be thankful to deal with, from ancestors we Euro-Americans should be thankful to have.

Sources: "The Truth About Thanksgiving" by Richard Shiffman on Huffington Post
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas

Further reading on the Puritans [must-reads for white Americans]:
American Nations by Colin Woodward [start with this easy-to-read one]
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer [an epic]



"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history." – James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 92.

Opioid Crisis is a white, corporate terrorist attack

"America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks." 2017 Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction.
"They attack us, but they also attack their own people, that's crazy." White Americans at the dinner table when talking about Muslim terrorists killing Muslims

Opiates are the new opiates of the masses? Compare how many Americans were killed due to religious (Christian, Muslim, etc) violence last year (19 in 2015, the last year I could find data) to the 62,000 killed from opioids (more than car accidents or homicides). Realize that one family-owned corporation is behind this and has been to court before for criminal misbranding and exploiting doctor's ignorance about the strength of oxycodone (2007 trial, guilty plea), and is now (Jan 2017) being sued by an entire town for allowing their drugs to enter the underground market by ignoring suspicions going back to 2009 reported by lower-level employees (Everett, Washington). Entire states have done this as well: Kentucky sued them in 2015 for $1 billion. And as I began writing this article, the states of New Jersey and Alaska just sued them for fueling its opioid crisis as well, for "deception." New Hampshire also claims this corporation refused to share information with them or heed their calls for investigation.

The Sackler family's Purdue Pharma is a terrorist organization whose destruction is just as devastating as overtly violent extremists; the Sacklers wipe out entire towns, and use legislation to kill DEA regulations (2016 Amendment to the "Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act" (find the link to it on this article) gives drug companies more *freedom* to police themselves from ending up supplying the underground market, like the gun companies; just like the above case where Purdue ignored suspicions its drugs were being smuggled. But piracy and capitalism have a long partnership). All in the name of liberty, this country's god (to quote Jefferson who said this); more to the point, freedom to increase profits without accountability, which in this country is our *real* god.

In order to be omnipotent, Purdue cornered the market by making Valium compete with Librium, a drug which was basically the same. To do this, they created a term for "stress" called "psychic tension" and linked it to everything from sleep problems to indigestion to depression. It became the first $100,000 drug by being marketed for virtually everything.Then they discovered oxycontin, which was at first solely for cancer patients. Their gold rush was about to run dry when the patent ran out, so they had to regenerate and reinvent themselves: they created a time-release oxycodone. Instead of marketing it just to cancer patients, they did it for back pain, menstruation, for toothaches. The terror began: more and more people would feel insecure that they would not be protected from pain if they did not have that painkiller their neighbor did, and more and more doctors would feel insecure if they were not thinking they were treating their chronic pain patients the best they could. No one knew the true strength of the drug they were getting. They weren't supposed to, leading directly to the guilty plea mentioned above.

In America, we fall. A lot. It's the leading cause of emergency room visits. But because medical knowledge is as inaccessible to us (especially if one corporation created the drug and has trade secret privilege) as the divine was to the non-priest/scholar, the Sacklers were empowered to name and define our reality, to take on the religious role of healer for us, we get over-prescribed (but don't think WebMD is the new Reformation).

We also fall into the Western idealist trap of thinking that our bodies don't matter, that we should just consume tasty foods, drinks, and electronics, with bad posture and lack of moving around. Society reinforces this by placing demands on us that tell us we don't have time to care for our bodies. ** These are all religious standpoints, and we're buying into it.** Lower-back pain and other issues related to sitting and doing repetitive motions are on the rise, common sources of opioid prescriptions, according to doctors and workplace safety organization OSHA. Our postures and motions are as determined for us as Catholic kneeling-and-standing and Muslim salat rituals- it's the corporate ritualization of America.

So we are being killed by a terrorist organization that is trying to brainwash us, to do all of our thinking for us. We all claim to follow the same religion, the American Creed of "give me liberty with as few restrictions as possible." Purdue Pharma is a part of ALEC, a lobbying group that goes so far as to write draft legislation for politicians, and uses the word "liberty" all over their website, claiming to be in the heritage of Patrick Henry, who once said, "Give me liberty or give me death!" This is the use of ideology, of religious conviction, of jihad; and what religious extremists always do is hide their lust for money and power under seemingly innocent religious terms.

Terrorism involves the intent of inciting fear, people tell me. Maybe both the drug companies and ISIS have the goal of inspiring a mindset of insecurity. One is the insecurity of terrorized Americans not feeling protected from outsiders, the other is insecurity of not feeling protected from pain and stress. Both end up killing people in the process. Is this not terrorism, then?

Remember, the number one victim of Islamic terrorism are other Muslims, it not seem that way because they happened outside of our borders. We Americans are likewise our own greatest victims. We are the greatest sacrifice to America's Moloch and Mammon- control of resources (including human resources) and greed-driven profits.

For a country that values freedom, addiction should be the antithesis to this. But we'll never cure opioid addiction until we cure our addiction to the rhetoric of "liberty" when used by corporations. Purdue Pharma is just one of many corporations who exploit that rhetoric to kill fellow Americans and say they're doing it to save us, but it's really just to regenerate themselves through profit bonanzas. Our bodies are their frontier for their gold rush, and they won't stop until they've tamed us. Our bodies are means to a religious end - a heaven on earth of stored treasured - they won't stop until they've emptied our pockets and killed us. It's parasitic.

And why didn't Trump declare opioids a "national emergency" like he said he would, and like NJ governor Chris Christie called for him to do? He only now declared it a mere "public health emergency" which will not fund the response as much as a national emergency would. A 9/11 every three weeks and Trump isn't being tough on opioids, but he's only tough on religious extremists since it doesn't fuck with corporate profits. In fact, Trump nominated Rep. Tom Marino, Big Pharma's advocate, to the position of drug czar, which is like letting the fox guard the henhouse.

**********

JOE RANNAZZISI: That’s out of control. What they want to do is do what they want to do and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die. … This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.

BILL WHITAKER: Who are these distributors?

JOE RANNAZZISI: The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream.

BILL WHITAKER: You know the implication of what you’re saying, that these big companies knew that they were pumping drugs into American communities that were killing people.

JOE RANNAZZISI: That’s not an implication, that’s a fact. That’s exactly what they did.

[But an investigative journalist who did a piece for Esquire called "The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis" responded to this interview.]

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Joe Rannazzisi, who ran the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, which regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry, speaking with CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker. Of course, he became a whistleblower. Christopher Glazek, talk about the significance of what this man said.

CHRISTOPHER GLAZEK: Well, you know, the opioid epidemic has many different actors in different parts of the chain. And this investigation focused on the distributors, who are basically the people who carry the opioid pills from the manufacturer and give it to specific pharmacies. And there’s been a lot of litigation focused on them. Some thought that, you know, they knew, that they had had reason to know, that certain pharmacies maybe were involved in diversion. And they have this ongoing struggle with the DEA about what’s appropriate to seize and under what circumstances.

In my view, what you want to do when you look at the opioid crisis is look at where the real profits are. And it’s actually not with the distributors. It’s really with the manufacturers. And, you know, people kind of think they’re following the money. And McKesson and Cardinal are these huge, giant companies. But you really want to follow the margin, because that’s going to tell you who’s controlling a market and who’s kind of like a minor toll taker. And the fact is that the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, which really created this market, created all this business for Cardinal and McKesson, etc., they had much more detailed information about where pills were going. They knew down to the prescription level, you know, what doctors were prescribing what. The distributors didn’t know that. The distributors—all distributors knew was about pharmacies. So they really are just one part of this giant chain. But Purdue had the aerial vision of the entire thing."

Source: Democracy Now, "Who Profits from the Opioid Crisis?"

I am a Latino Klansman

So many Latino names and faces emerging in the alt-right Charlottesville rally/riot and KKK. Have Latinos joined the quest to be the next Irish, Italians, Jews? To "become white"? (whiteness used to be restricted to Anglo Saxon Protestants) Of course. It's been like that for a while, but not to this extent before, I don't think. There's deep desperation here on Latino's part, to fit in. And there's desperation on these white supremacist group's part, they must be strapped for membership, and trying to prove they're not racist, just concerned about white people's place in an uncertain future where Latinos and other immigrants will surpass whites (in population terms! Don't worry), and hoping they'll help maintain power (see? I told you not to worry. They won't surpass you in power. You can train them!)

A devil's bargain. Hate groups accept Latinos who hate and blame the same people they do, Latinos who will throw poor Latinos under the bus too.
Latinos get acceptance and the feeling that they're better than section 8, welfare collecting brethren who thinks the world owes them something. Of course, this involves making gross generalizations, but no matter. You know there's at least *some* stereotype fulfillers, and, hey, you're getting to wear these cool outfits and to troll people.

But how happy are you? Something's missing and broken inside. You yearn for a holy war, but then you'd be bored if you killed all your enemies. Deep down you believe that redeeming is much more meaningful. But you need a better job, and you're pissed at people on welfare because you're not doing much better than them by working.

Or you're in college and women are everywhere in power on campus taking out hatred of men on you, and passing oppressive rape laws, and you need to start a revolution that creates an America that rewards the best mental genes that rise to the top out of the barrios and from across the borders, that brings eternal renewal to our country , by deporting, by exterminating, or by sending to work camps the parasites on the top at the Federal Reserve and UN and media and big banks and Soros, and all the parasites at the bottom who hit you up for money but have a welfare mentality themselves.

But what if you're really boring and unoriginal, perhaps slow or unloveably weird, just another person whose resume is so-so, what if you get discovered? Discovered as desperate? You need enemies to distract from this. And you need to show you're down for any and everything, in excess.

Even if you worry you're not special, at least there's a bunch of whiners out there thumping Rules for Radicals and Communist Manifestos as they rage about identity politics whom you can point to as the *real* whiners. You selfish dividers focusing exclusively on your identity group. American has no color.
I should know, I'm a Latino Klansman.

People used to shut me up every time I expressed negativity, so I don't know how to love others who express negativity, because I don't know how to love myself. No one came to attend to me when I cried. Or, if they did, I got called a pussy. Then when a woman - a woman!- called me a pussy one time, I knew I had to shove it all into a black hole. Now anyone talking about reparations and privilege and "safe spaces" is done. Life isn't fair. This is America. Get over it. Fuck away from my hard-earned money you jealous crab. Get your own! The stars and stripes means motherfucking freedom you Muslim Nazis and hey did you know Hitler was a Socialist? #makeamericagreatagain #maga sorry do I offend you, you must hate free speech too

I could be the next person to be rich as Jay-Z, rich as Trump! But you lazy liberals want free everything, at *my* expense, by taxing me. I'm struggling with debt and my job is high pressure and I don't see my family often and I think my wife is turning my kids against me but I can just *taste* that big money, that Trump sized net worth, right around the corner. But Democrats, you know those n***as and wetbacks and Jews [there's a difference between Black people and n***as,  Latinos and wetbacks, it's just that there's more bad than good, I'm just a special breed] and libtards possessed by guilt are only thing preventing me from getting there.
Fuck em. This is war.

This is war. Who cares if Shirley Sherrod had to be taken down due to doctored tapes that made her sound like a reverse racist. Reverse racism is real. Who cares if Planned Parenthood provides the only accessible necessary services in town for poor people. This is a Holocaust against babies. Yet y'all want my tax money?

My tax money is only going to F-16s, and badges on patrol against animals who hate the police and law and order anyway. Who cares if a few Iraqi or North Korean children get incinerated, the best defense is a good offense. Who cares if a few people get racially profiled, it is Black people and my disowned brown people coming from the bad neighborhood doing all the crime anyway, who cares if I myself get stopped, here's my ID officer, better safe than sorry. Did I take the words out of your mouth, officer? Btw, I'm not one of *those* Latinos. I'm more like Zimmerman. I'm your self appointed lapdog. Notice me. Recognize me. I'm Latino and validating everything you say. Isn't that good press for you? Need me. Please for the love of God, can I finally be indispensable for once?


note,
This is written by a white man of Cuban* and European descent
*Which means I'm part West African**, because conquistadors didn't bring women with them, and my DNA test didn't result in Taino blood
**8% to be exact.

A Problem With Simply Framing Racism as Evil

Trump today: “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans”

Yes, Trump, racism *is* evil. However, the more we talk about it like that, the less people are going to admit that they are racist. I am racist. I'm in recovery, but I'll never be cured. Talking about racism in addiction terms has helped me go from 8th grade me: "let's kill all the racists and that'll solve the problem," to today where I realized that it's not a matter of identifying enemies and "bad guys" (which is very self-righteous of me).

Overt racism exists on a spectrum, and what I think really matters is the degree to which we've internalized and actualized unconscious racist belief systems and emotional reactions. I think it really matters that this is a spectrum which everyone is on, including everyone I know and love, and myself as well.

From this angle, focusing my energy on overt bigots/white supremacists is finding scapegoats at the cost of holding myself and my community accountable.

I've heard a Trump supporter say that Dylan Roof should be shot. I've heard a police officer say that the cops who killed Laquan McDonald should be executed. How convenient: now there is no responsibility to look at how white supremacy and police brutality don't happen in a vacuum, but in fact are part of the dominant culture in America. There is no responsibility to see how they or I could have become Dylan Roof or those murdering cops if a few things in our life had gone differently. These men are my friends and I don't want them thinking that they should be ashamed when they realize that they have the same implicit biases against Black people as overt racists (see the website projectimplicit and take the test "race"). Or the University of Colorado test where average people hesitate less when they pull the trigger on unarmed Black and Latino people.

Instead I want them to think about the implications of these subtle, unconscious biases playing out in how Black Americans get treated in terms of pay, job offerings, respect, homes, 911 calls, arrests, sentencing, parole, and being put on a track (college prep, remedial, special, advanced placement, etc.) in school and manager track at work, etc. and how this plays out in their occupation. I want them to think about how politicians can ring all sorts of bells when they say phrases like "welfare queens" and "supercriminals," etc. I want them to think about how we can stop these stereotypes.

I want them to think of themselves as people in recovery trying not to be in active addiction, knowing it's a life-long process of self-examination and working the 12-steps. We're not completely in control of our thoughts and feelings, which can be fucked up ("what is he [this Black man] doing in this [my] neighborhood?" I recently thought to myself because it was so unusual and I had to categorize him by making up a context), but *we* are not fucked up for having them. We're doing just what we were trained to do by a system that can't get over its denial (polls show most white people think they are the most oppressed victims of racism), self-obsession (making historically non-white characters white; not casting Latinos, Asians in roles enough and Black people mostly for stereotypes), willful ignorance (this Pepsi commercial), and fear of changing ("I'm not a racist but I'm scared about the future of America becoming mostly non-white. Fuck press 2 for English!"). In other words, a system that displays all the characteristics of addiction.

The question is, for me in this context (far be it for me to say "the" question), can we wean ourselves, our loved ones, and thus our country off of white supremacy- not just in white pride movements but in the actual literal white supremacy where "The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today" and we all know that in this country wealth means access to happiness (family time, vacations, chance to find ourselves, travel abroad), politics (lobbyists), influence (buy media time), respect (sadly, our country believes that the ability to generate wealth is alone enough a sign of virtue, though the opposite may be true), justice (attorney fees), services and aid (potholes fixed; no botched response to hurricanes or lead poisoning in water), and most tragically of all, health (see the PBS special Unnatural Causes). Currently America is a white supremacist nation for all of its policies which exacerbate this condition of whites being supreme over Blacks in terms of respect, power, control, etc. - policies which are enumerated in many books but to me most importantly in Black Wealth/White Wealth and The Hidden Cost of Being African-American both by Tom Shapiro, and Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood by Peter Medoff (about the obstacles in place for a Black community who tries to, God forbid, have control over its own resources in this country if they want to develop their own neighborhoods their own way).

The kind of racism of Roof and those officers who killed Laquan McDonald, and the man who plowed into a group of antiracist protesters, is criminal and tragic and deserves full prosecution. My point is, the FBI doesn't just go after the muscle/hit-men in the Mafia. These are the ones at the bottom of the pyramid, with the crime boss on top. America's crime boss of racism is its own institutions, its own psyche. In order to change that, that takes work in our own community institutions' to undo its complicity and teach our children about invisible structures of modern racism, reading books to know how we got here and what to lobby for and against, it takes a campaign to delegitimize commonly held assumptions (such as "urban renewal" and "war on police" and "school redistricting"), it takes work on our own selves and its complicity (from our unconscious biases, othering language, to our gentrifying bodies). Not just a dismissal of racism as "evil" or the idea that we can punch or kill or protest our way out of this. (though some strategic violence and protests are important once one has identified key institutions and higher level culture-setting individuals)

What the Chesapeake Bay told me about Post-Racial America

They do that to 'keep the riff raff out' - that's how they think about it," the waitress told us, when we informed her that the closest beaches were $17-$20 for out-of-towners, namely, those "from Prince George's County." (It's $7-$8 for county residents)


This explained why the white women in Chesapeake Beach uniforms were staring at my friends as they walked back to the car I was in. I was weirded out by how intently her eyes followed them as they came back to the car. Were these women grumbling about the"spics" who had just wasted their time? I saw her eyes burn holes in their backs, something I had never seen before. I also saw fear.

"The price increase was recent wasn't it? I don't remember it being expensive?" Asked my friend at the restaurant.
"There was an incident- the Hispanic gang- sorry - if you guys are Hispanic, I don't mean to say any generalization-"
"No," said my other friend, "you're just describing them"
"The gang- What is it called- MS-13!- had taken over the beach."

When she left, we mentally noted that the price increase was racism and classism in the form of collective punishment, and my friend said that the fear that led up to the price increase was "dog whistle politics"- words like "riff raff" no doubt ring all sorts of bells in local's minds, locals being residents of Calvert County,  which has one of the highest median household incomes in the United States, who feared the darker neighboring Prince George's County. Prince George's County certainly has the largest Black middle class (just edging out DeKalb County, Georgia), but, especially close to DC, it had neighborhoods born of the sacrifices which the gentrification gods demanded, and was abandoned by public and private investment, leaving them prey to political corruption and criminal enterprises.

We found a public beach - Breezy Point- that was a lot more racially mixed than Chesapeake Beach- a family listening to bachata to our left, and a family listening to Jay-Z's new album on our right. On the beach with my brothers watching the undulations of the Mother Ocean as she runs through the Chesapeake Bay, I began thinking about how I may have ancestors from Maryland blasphemed Her by bringing shackled human cargo down Her.

Whether or not I literally did have those ancestors (some swear we're related to Lord Baltimore), I metaphorically did.  The first slaves in America were sold in the Chesapeake Bay from the Dutch (who later went on to found New York). If you're a white American, this is your inheritance.

Everything from our porn to our primetime TV shows ("Popular television shows" like Scrubs, House, and CSI "that put black and white characters on an equal footing as doctors or detectives demonstrate racial bias nonverbally," in their facial reactions, according to a study published in Science that cropped out characters being interacted with and asked viewers to assess body language) bears witness to the white shame and discomfort born of that day. We know in our hearts what we have all turned a blind eye toward, for the heart cannot be reached by the frontal lobe and their rationalizations and self-serving "bootstraps" ideology. Immigrants to this country cannot fully understand the level of obsession whites have, as a whole, with race. Kicking Black people out of our towns by threat of the gun barrel and dynamite, segregation, and pretending to be indifferent to Blacks did nothing to stop, say, states like Mississippi and Georgia from today having the highest porn searches for "ebony" and "Black," according to Pornhub data (and America has "Black" as the highest relative search, meaning, compared to other countries, it's the most uniquely American thing we look for in porn, just beating out searches for "step mom and son.")

My friend, who is the son of immigrants from Latin American and almond-colored, not having to experience the Black or white perspective, looked baffled as he said, "I'm glad that I don't know this obsession. It sounds like so much work."

Exactly. This framing of it highlights the truth of the situation. America is afraid of the work it takes to admit it has a problem and deal with it- but doesn't realize how much work it is doing already, hiring lawyers to find loopholes for Flint officials and police officers, settling lawsuits, being vigilant for the slightest criticism of the police and scouring social media to defend the undefendable in hour-long online debates, finding ways to keep out people of color; defending white supremacy costs emotional energy, stress-and-anxiety freedom, time, and money that it purports to be protecting. Any weight trainer will tell an obese person that it takes a lot of work to maintain being obese- the same amount, in fact, it would take to achieve weight-loss, just that it's out of the comfort zone.

When white supremacy is a path of least resistance, how do we show America that the death of its identity is worth it? Maintaining our calculatedly insane status quo is costly, and it doesn't make death go away; we simply die a million times a year of coward's deaths, because we hide from the cries for us to change as they surround us yearly- from Flint, now from Chicago, now from North Carolina, now from  a town just one county over. It's every captured cell phone video, which acts as an alarm clock to some, but the alarm clock is a vague sound incorporated into the nightmares of the still-sleeping others. "And indeed, We are able to show *you* that which we have threatened *them*" (Qur'an 23:95).

 For me it was Barry Deloatch of New Brunswick, for others it was Trayvon. I began my process of dying with *humility*, choosing not to see challenges to my preconceived notions about race as a threat. Though I could have just the same have taken the *humiliating* route of trying to defend the innocence of America, of living in denial, Self-Obsession, willful ignorance and fear of changing, like an addict in active addiction. Though people who are not Black or white can fully understand, my friend's comment shows their input and insight into our our blind spots can be something valuable.

" (idea of humility vs humiliation taken from an online 12-step forum I witnessed years ago).

Women's Rights & What America Could Learn from Shari'ah Law

Jan. 21st, 1975: Women finally gain equal access to American juries. The issue was whether Louisiana law had a "conceded systematic impact" to eliminate female jurors from the jury, in a trial case of terrorism against a woman who survived an aggravated kidnapping, sexual assault, and robbery. The Magna Carta, from 1215, "was enshrined in the US Constitution as the promise that 'no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.'

"The wording seems expansive, but that is misleading. Excluded were “unpeople” (to borrow Orwell’s useful concept), among them Native Americans, slaves and women, who under the British common law adopted by the founders were the property of their fathers, handed over to husbands. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1975 that women gained the right to serve on juries in all fifty states." [1]

In places like Florida and Louisiana, "a woman could not be seated as a juror unless she had previously declared in writing her desire to serve." In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court case Hoyt v. Florida had Ms. Hoyt argue that "female jurors might have been more understanding of her 'temporary insanity' defense and more compassionate regarding the facts of her case. (Apparently, she had assaulted Mr. Hoyt with a baseball bat 'in the context of a marital upheaval involving, among other things, the suspected infidelity of appellant’s husband…')"

"Citing the Fay case, Justice John M. Harlan extolled the virtue of the Florida law, which, like the New York statute, gave women “the privilege to serve but does not impose service as a duty.” He reasoned that, '[d]espite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly considered to be reserved for men, woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.'" *************

Thankfully, in 1975, the Supreme Court heard Taylor v. Louisiana. Justice Byron R. White wrote the majority opinion “it is no longer tenable to hold that women as a class may be excluded or given automatic exemptions based solely on sex if the consequence is that criminal jury venires [panels] are almost totally male."

"The holding in Hoyt was specifically disapproved [and overturned]. This surely was a unanimous opinion, right? Almost. Justice William H. Rehnquist, who later became Mr. Chief Justice, dissented." [2]

Law is tricky when "precedent" is an authority. People whose privilege has been enshrined don't always see this. In the new movie Hidden Figures, the NASA director says to our whip-smart protagonist, "There's no protocol for a woman attending" an important meeting she seeks to gain access to. "There's no protocol for sending a man into space, either," she judiciously replies. Indeed, "precedent" is often used as a weapon, even as contexts themselves become unprecedented. So for all American's fear of shari'a law, we have the same troubles updating our laws as well, too often appealing to "tradition(al notions of a woman's sphere)" over "justice." 1975 was NOT that long ago, and since then the late Justice Atonin Scalia called himself a "constitutional originalist" to oppose any kind of change ("The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring"), which is an argument, along with "judicial restraint," we can expect to hear more of in the era of Trump and Republicans [I called it; Trump's pick turned out to be someone who identifies as a Scalia originalist]. Perhaps we can learn from Muslims, who created the concept "Maqasid al-Sharia," or "Objectives (English)/telos (Greek)/finalite (French)/zwek (German) of Shari'a." Way back in the 1300s, Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi (died 1388)'s idea (or realization) made Islamic law receptive to continual adaptation.

Like us, al-Shatibi faced conflicting rulings from various partisan schools of thought, each one arrogantly asserting that their interpretation of shari'a was "enshrined statically" in the Qur'an. He himself was a jurist in the Maliki school. He identified five goals which shari'a promoted:
- preservation of life (nafs) against "murder, disease, imprisonment, or other constraints" which keep individuals from thriving,

- preservation of religion (din) - note that "religion" is a modern term and thus limited translation, as "din" is more of an all-encompassing way of life, as an expression of responsibility to a higher power

- conscience/reason/judgment ('aql) "so that moral agents are free from coercion or deprivation to bear responsibility for their decisions,"

- posterity (nasl), the parent's reproduction of children, and their subsequent responsibilities in the upbringing of children

- personal property (mal), private ownership necessary for economic livelihood that is free from "theft, confiscation, and corruption" [3]

Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, a Sudanese engineer, businessman and martyr for reform in the 20th century, argued that while the Qur'an and Sunnah has laws now seen as unchangeable, they are really local applications of universal norms from the earlier verses. That is, the laws (set forth in Medina) were the best attempts *at that time* (in that context) for implementing the universal objectives (preached earlier in Mecca) [4]. Likewise, al-Shatibi believed he had identified the universal, without getting limited to the particular. Flexible changes in the law could happen, as long as the five objectives were used as a criterion, for the promotion of human welfare (maslahah). al-Shatibi himself was verbally attacked, writing, "I found myself a stranger among my contemporaries." His ideas came back into heavier use among the anti-colonial nationalists of Egypt, like grand mufti Muhammad 'Abduh and his fellow al-Azhar scholar Rashid Rida. Also, the concept of "universal principles (qawa'id kulliya)" were independently realized by the Hanafi school's jurist Ibn Nujaym during the Ottoman Empire reforms of the 1500s [5] (the Ottoman Muslims later decriminalized homosexuality about a hundred years before the UK, and well before the U.S. who finally did so in all remaining states in 2003)[6].

******

Unfortunately, neo-colonialism (Great Britain and U.S.A. on the Suez Canal of Egypt, propping up bloody and/or corrupt puppet governments, etc.) promoted a deep resentment that in Egypt fueled the rise of more close-minded scholars at al-Azhar University, extremists, and the conservative Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is feared by Americans, when really the Brotherhood knows, as the Jews did before the Maccabean revolt (from which we got Hannukah), that the slow erosion of religious identity in the name of cosmopolitanism is often the first sign of a takeover. Western culture, in this analogy, is the Greeks who are trying to globalize one way of life upon the world. This valid fear causes the Brotherhood to try and resist change, which they have been using moderate political means to do since at least the 2000's. In fact, it was not this group but the university of al-Azhar that, in the 1980s and 1990s, called for the execution of intellectuals (who, ironically, sympathized with the Muslim Brotherhood in their youth, examples being Nagib Mahfouz and Hamid Abu Zaid), which led to stabbing, death threats, forced divorce, and assassination. Muslim Brotherhood's Yusuf al-Qaradawi blamed the extremist violence in part on the failure to give Islam "the place it deserves in government, legislation and guidance." However, not all Muslims bow to the conservative scholars (nor can they be; Islam is a bit anarchical), despite these high-profile attempts to go back to an illusory idea of a static and pure tradition. What you won't see in the news is Malaysia's Muslim population, which has some factions who provide a good example of maqasid al'Sharia in motion:

"the leader of Malaysia’s PKR, Anwar Ibrahim asserts:

'[T]he maqasid al-shariah (higher objectives of the shariah)

sanctify the preservation of religion, life, intellect, family, and

wealth, objectives that bear striking resemblance to Lockean ideals

that would be expounded centuries later. Many scholars have

further explained that laws which contravene the maqasid must be

revised or amended to bring them into line with the higher

objectives and to ensure that they contribute to the safety and

development of the individual and society. Notwithstanding the

current malaise of authoritarianism plaguing the Muslim world,

there can be no question that several crucial elements of

constitutional democracy and civil society are also moral

imperatives in Islam—freedom of conscience, freedom of

expression, and the sanctity of life and property—as demonstrated

very clearly by the Qur'an, as well as by the teachings of the

Prophet Muhammad.'

"This approach is reflected in PKR’s political manifesto in which priority

is given to economic development, poverty reduction, safe and fair

working conditions, education, healthcare and housing." [7] (2006)

Indeed, the right to property, unlike in our society, does not necessarily give bodies of people the right to harm human welfare (maslahah). I'll revisit the topic of public ownership in the next article. *********

Selections from Timeline of Women's Rights[8] shows that the Islamic world, while behind in some cases today, was way ahead of the West in other cases:

Arabia 600s CE: Islam is founded in Arabia and the Qur'an allows women the right to inherit estates, own property and initiate divorce. Ensures women would not be passed around from father to husband, then, after husband dies, to husband's brother.
In all except financial court testimony (where two women's equal one man's), women have equal rights in judiciary matters.
Despite this progress, there was inequality. When a parent dies the eldest son receives a double share of the inheritance. Women don't always exercise the right to divorce and testify, however, because of social factors, and men are allowed to inherent a portion of their wive's estates. Though interestingly, Muhammad's first wife, Khadija, inherited a trading business from her father and was Muhammad's boss before she proposed to him (she is reported to have given much of her profits to orphans, widows, the poor, the sick, and girls needing money for marriage)

Northern Europe, 800s: Anglo-Saxon laws allow women to own their own property, before and after marriage. In Norse societies, women are also allowed to conduct business as equals with men.

England, 1100s: English common law, a combination of Anglo-Saxon and Norman traditions, leads to the creation of coverture, which is the belief that married men and women are one financial entity. As such, married women cannot own property, run taverns or stores or sue in court. Those financial rights could be enjoyed, however, by widows and spinsters. Over time, coverture is corrupted into the view that women are property of their husbands.

(This system is brought to America)

US, 1839: Mississippi allows women to own property in their own names. It is the first state to do so.

UK, 1870: UK passes the Married Women’s Property Act.

France, 1881: France grants women the right to own bank accounts; five years later, the right is extended to married women, who are allowed to open accounts without their husbands’ permission. The US does not follow suit until the 196os, and the UK lags until 1975. ^this shows that women in Islam had greater rights than the West up until 1975 in the case of owning property

UK and US, 1922: The UK finally allows equal inheritance.
Egypt, 1923: Tafsir al-Manar, a work written by our anti-colonial friends 'Abduh and Rida, says that women only do not have equal financial court testimony due to lack of experience, noting that "foreign women" are an exception to this, opening the door to reform

USA 1995: The Muslim Women's League-USA calls for equal inheritance, at least in countries in the non-Muslim-majority world, since the older law assumed that male relatives and then husband's dowers would provide for all of women's material needs and depends upon women having recourse to laws to defend this provision, which is no longer guaranteed [9]

Egypt 2008: People's Assembly Deputy Speaker Zeinab Radwan declares women's testimony is equal to men's in financial contracts because “[t]he Quranic verses on the issue of the testimony of women were related to specific and limited [historical] occurrences and the changes in [today’s] situations impose changes on that ruling.” The (mostly male) scholars at al-Azhar, rather than seeing this is a woman's rights issue, attacked her credentials to speak on this and called her "molded by the West," despite the fact that she has a PhD in Islamic Philosophy and has done work on political Islam. [10]

[1] https://chomsky.info/20150323/

[2] http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/justverdicts.asp

[3] Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Mohammed_Taha

[5] Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam

[6] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-25927595

[7] http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/58072/86643_1.pdf;jsessionid=087F3F4B183F373A1F54039D82934693?sequence=1

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

[9] http://www.wluml.org/node/4260

[10] http://www.politicalislam.org/Articles/PI%20524%20-%20A%20Muslim%20Woman%20takes%20center%20stage.pdf