Don’t Label Me
This story in today’s WaTi illustrates all too well why prejudice remains such a bad practice, why it’s never as simple as it might seem, and why it’s almost always a two-way street.
Certain airline passengers in Minnesota may have pre-judged a group of praying imams. In turn, the praying imams may have pre-judged the passengers. Meanwhile, racists often attempt to paint all Muslims with the same violent, anti-Democracy brush that defines only the extremists among them, only to be proven wrong (once again) when a group of Muslims offers to help defend non-Muslims against potential lawsuits filed by Muslims.
The world is indeed a quiltwork of individuals with multiple traits and conflicting allegiances. Shame on any one of us who attempts to over-simplify that quilt by predicting individual behavior on the basis of one allegiance vs. another. Have we learned nothing in the 60-plus years that have transpired since the U.S. imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in WW II?
4 Responses to “Don’t Label Me”
I’m not sure the passengers “prejudged” anything. Most of what I’ve read, thanks largely to Powerline’s extensive coverage, suggests that the imams went out of their way to ACT suspiciously, such as by having a normal-sized man request a seat-belt extender intended for use by over-sized passengers.
On the larger front, it’s entirely sane and rational to anticipate individual behavior on the basis of the allegiances which that person has chosen to make. What’s not rational is to use skin color or religious affiliation to predict whether an individual is a terrorist or otherwise bad person.
If someone has chosen to give his allegiance to, say, the Soviet Union, it is quite rational for me to predict that he will act in ways favorable to the Soviet Union. It is also rational for me to predict that, given a choice of two actions, one of which will benefit the Soviet Union and one of which will benefit America, he will choose to follow his allegiance and take the first action.
Likewise, if somebody tells me they are a good Catholic, I can predict that I would find them at a church on Sunday morning. If I see a little old Italian-looking lady with lace on her head, I’d be willing to put good money down that she’s Catholic and I’ll find her at the local church on Sunday, and also probably on Wednesday evening. If I see somebody dressed in clothing traditionally worn by Muslims, then I can also predict, with a fair amount of accuracy, that if I follow them around the rest of the day, I will spot them kneeling on a small rug, all facing in the direction of Mecca, for prayers, on 5 separate occasions during the day.
The problem with the Japanese internment was not that we locked away people with ALLEGIANCES to the Japanese Emperor, but that we locked away a lot of people with allegiance to the United States, but whose allegiance we suspected because their family was originally from Japan.
This was a rather moving story, I thought. It is a demonstration that American assimilationist approaches to immigration are working…even among a group with such extraordinary cultural antibodies to Western modernism as can be seen in the Islamic world.
The imans and CAIR’s decision to target the individual passengers was outrageous. It was quite interesting that the imans were taking notes of which passengers looked at them, how long, where they were sitting etc.
Clearly, if they were just flying, and were not intending anything further, would they have such detailed memories of the whole account including descriptions of so many fellow passengers.
This was clearly intended as an exercise in litigous intimidation. Let no one DARE look sideways at anyone of apparently Middle Eastern descent on an airplane…no matter how suspicious or dangerous they may seem to act…or they will be hit will multimillion dollar lawsuits.
While I thought this was a set-up from the start…it is one thing for them to sue the airlines…it is another for them to target fellow passengers who were likely quite scared.
The moderate Muslim group in this article clearly sees how damaging this will be to the view of Islam among the mainstream population. Kudos to them.
I would have been off that airplane in a New York minute. I am not suicidal, and I am more interested in my surivial than in being PC.
Pat you really need to branch out in your news sources.