By Noor Mir and Rooj Alwazir
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Farea wasn’t there to try to win the hearts and minds of Senate by giving them policy or reform suggestions. He was there to tell his story. But white privilege and its associated subjectivities were clearly in action.
“I have been to Yemen,” Lindsey Graham said to Farea al-Muslimi. Our blood pressures rose. “Isn’t your country in turmoil?” Graham continued. “We have some problems.” replied Al-Muslimi. Graham ended his questioning, self-indulgent smirk on his face, as if to say, “I rest my case.” Although we doubt he is even aware of the terminology, Graham’s neo-colonial presumptions about Farea’s understanding of his own country were disgusting.
No, Senator, you do not rest your case. We, as citizens of the United States and witnesses to the turmoil in this nation, do not accept your reasoning. Schools are shutting down across the country and students are staging walkouts on this very day to protest this blow to their rights to a fair and equal education. Affirmative action is still a subject of debate, as though structural inequalities are a myth. We are still waging an endless, futile and racist war on drugs and extending a school to prison pipeline that is tearing apart families and disenfranchising youth. Racial profiling is rife, with a Palestinian woman in a hijab being assaulted in a Boston suburb last week following the bombings and a Bangladeshi man being savagely beaten in the Bronx on account of the color of his skin. This country is ripped down the middle when it comes to gun control despite the serious shootings that have devastated Aurora (and remember Columbine?). Monsanto damages our food diversity and destroys our health but props up our elected officials with one hand and stifles small farms with the other. There are uprisings, there is dissent, there is police brutality. This country is in no lesser turmoil than Yemen, or Pakistan, just because the standards to which you hold our homelands in comparison to yours is whitewashed by your condescension and insensitivity to difference. Your bigotry precedes you, Senators -- your causation is fundamentally flawed.
Lindsey Graham was not the only one whose self-righteous “understanding” of the political and cultural landscapes of places like Pakistan and Yemen barred him from actually exploring the human cost of war. The majority of the hearing focused on analyzing the flaws of the current administration’s reliance on an overbearing executive authority and reforming the AUMF. We waited with bated breath for it to go beyond what we had hoped was only a self-obsessed, stagnant battle of the egos, but it did not. Questions prized legal, constitutional and operational aspects over ones actually pertaining to stories that Farea could have told, their commentaries punctuated with “We thank you for coming such a long way,” or “We thank you for that chilling perspective.” Nobody apologized for bombing his village, Wessab. They ascribed so profoundly and unwaveringly to forceful measures of “counterterrorism” as a given strategy with no room for questioning that they, in turn, tried to reject the validity of his personal experiences.
http://www.zcommunications.org/drone-wars-how-white-privilege-obscures-real-dialogue-by-noor-mir
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