This was the day I created an islamophobic confrontation at a bus stop.
I say I created it because when the man behind me said he didn’t want a woman wearing a hijab on the bus, I refused to leave them both alone. And when I got on the bus but she didn’t, I became the focus of his hatred instead.
Waiting for the bus in my lovely little diverse-but-crime-ridden neighbourhood this morning, a man stepped back to politely let me get on ahead of him. As the hijab-wearing woman walked toward us, I stepped back to do the same for her. “We’re all so nice to one another!” I thought to myself naively.
“No,” the man told me as he moved to block the other woman. “Not her.”
“What? Why” I asked as we get on the bus, realizing the woman wasn’t wanting to get on anyway.
“It’s not safe” he muttered. “I know them. I was in a war.” He had an accent that told me he’d been in Canada for some years but wasn’t born here. Eastern European, maybe.
“Excuse me?”
“They’re Al Quaida. You have to be careful. We don’t want them,” he muttered as I looked at the bus driver, bewildered.
All of my plans for such a moment fell out the back of my brain as I responded awkwardly, “No way. There is no space for racism on Winnipeg Transit.” The driver nodded, silently.
My conversation partner moved to his seat, continuing to mutter to himself about the danger of Muslims. And then, loudly: “I used to execute them!”
Incensed, I looked around the bus to see if anyone else was paying attention to this man. All eight appeared to still be waiting for their morning coffee. “Do you have a policy about this or something?” I asked the bus driver. “This guy’s talking about killing Muslims.”
A look of vague concern crossed the driver’s face before he turned back to his work. It occurred to me that it would be helpful to have a picture of this man, but as soon as I pulled out my phone his actions started becoming aggressive, even from halfway across the bus. He began looking at me with those angry, suspicious eyes that one has when they’ve become a victim of their own paranoia.
He was clearly fixed on me, and my presence was upsetting him, as he continued to mutter and look back and forth from me to the papers on his lap. I was pretty sure that if I actually lifted the phone high enough to take a picture, he’d snap. That wouldn’t help anyone.
Moving to the back of the bus to get out of his line of sight, I tried taking a picture from behind and pretending not to care about him anymore. In a weird mix of anger and confusion, he pulled out a flip tone and pretended to call the police, apparently reporting me for stalking him.
The call was way too short and one-sided to have been real, but for a moment I was relieved that at least SOMEONE was calling the police and would keep this guy from getting out of hand. A couple of minutes later, as I furiously texted a coworker about what to do if the man escalated, he seemed to calm down considerably.
We got off at different stops on campus and I warned security of his presence. I have too many dearly-beloved Muslim students to allow a man like that to just wander through their campus at will.
Being in the middle of a homophobic episode is something I regularly expect. I have been denied jobs, housing, education, family, and friends for being married to a woman. But little white Christian me, in the middle of an islamophobic scenario? Not the usual start to a Wednesday morning.
And yet, is it really so strange that when one of us is targeted, we all feel it? A recent attack on a young Muslim woman in a London, Ontario grocery store has certainly made me question whether it’s a city I could ever feel safe in as a young gay woman.
While there is something strangely human about dividing ourselves into groups of “insiders” and “outsiders,” there is something fundamentally human about finding common group in connecting with our neighbours. To be human is to be experience belonging within ever-extending communities. When we cease to be connected, we die.
It is not uncommon for Christians to wonder why I work to make space for Muslim chaplaincy and students at St. John’s College. It is equally common for both Muslims and Christians to chastise me for marrying a woman. And I have come believe that this is never about Islam or Christianity or being gay.
It is about our fear of the unknown.
Humans are creatures of habit, and it takes a lot of hard work for us to expand those habits. Think about the foods you normally eat or the route you usually take to work. But when it comes to something like our sense of self or our understanding of what is right and good and true in the world, we are afraid to break our habits. We have no idea what the “other” might be like, and so we create systems of exclusion which put up barriers of false security between us.
Very often, it is this fear of what we don’t know that causes things like wars and racial hatred and shootings in America. It creates internalized hatred, where a gay man would hate himself so much that he would kill dozens of his own in an act of vicious anger toward his own community, his very self.
I know all too well what it’s like to belong to conflicting groups, where one is both insider and outsider. The push and pull sense of belonging and rejection can be enough to shut a person down some days. How will we ever create a world where our connectedness is more valued than our fears?
It will not begin with the end of Islam, or of religion generally, or even better laws around human rights. It will only begin when we are brave enough to put ourselves into the world of the other and get just a little glimpse of like as he or she sees it. It will only begin when we are brave enough to move into neighbourhoods where the “other” lives, to sit beside her on the bus, to share a coffee with her at work.
But it doesn’t end there. The angry man on the bus was the other as well. He is MY other, because I identified more with the young woman in hijab than I did with him. Learning to face my fear of the other means recognizing that this man was undoubtedly a victim of his own fear. An Eastern European war-survivor, I have no idea what he’s been through in his life to bring him to a place of such paranoia and hate. How do we bring him also into our community?
Gently. As the great liberation educator Paulo Freire teaches, the oppressed must constantly resist the temptation to become the oppressor. They must do power and politics and relationship differently, where both “us” and “them” are invited to sit down and eat together. Just speaking to such a man goes a long way toward inviting him into community, past his own fears and into a place that can be “home” for both him and the woman in the hijab.
It is what Jesus did, after all.
