The Ku Klux Klan famously encouraged and exploited anti-Catholic prejudice to amplify xenophobia and racism for their anti-immigrant cause. The details may seem absurdly unfamiliar to younger people today, but we are familiar with modern racism against Mexican American people, and families who’ve immigrated from other Latin American countries.
If we saw a rise of protests against Spanish-speaking church congregations today, we’d recognize this as a manifestation of that bigotry.
The ongoing obsession with immigration, even when packaged for PR with caveats like “but they’re illegal,” has the effect of constantly reminding Mexican Americans that they are not welcome here. The older folks already know it, of course.
But every day, young children get to learn for the first time that they are not wanted. In what is often the only nation they’ve ever known, the only place they could even imagine belonging, they are told in so many ways that they are not welcome and will never be welcome. Not because of anything they’ve done. Just because of who they are.
Yes, some of their parents broke the law. Most Americans break the law. The white suburban teenager who smokes pot and downloads music is breaking the law pretty much every day, but why don’t we say “he is illegal?” Why are we careful to judge his actions as illegal, but not his very being?
Even legal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries experience the collective punishment. If you look like you might be Mexican, you’re regularly treated as suspect. When illegitimacy is attributed to whole groups of people, we are telling them and their children that we will never accept them as real Americans.
If demonstrators were making and mocking caricatures of the Virgin Mary in Arizona today, we would recognize such Catholic-baiting as a manifestation of nativists’ anxiety about immigrants. We would be especially concerned about how this makes young people feel unwelcome here.
We’d recognize it because fear of Mexicans is a long-time component of our national discourse. It’s on our radar, finally, sort of. Most Americans weren’t thinking about Islam at all eleven years ago.
Drawing caricatures of Muhammad to make a statement is collective punishment.
Yes, a few Muslims have reacted violently to depictions of their prophet. That doesn’t make it fair to make statements that are hurtful toward the rest of our Muslim neighbors.
Don’t assert that caricatures of Muhammad aren’t hurtful. You wouldn’t even know. People in the dominant group don’t have to be aware of what others experience. That was the point of my last post, on how to treat atheists like human beings. Most people aren’t even aware of how saying “you have no basis for morality” is hurtful, because they’ve never had to consider it from a nontheist’s perspective.
American Muslims are trying to tell us that we are making them and their children feel unwelcome. We need to start learning how to listen.
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