 Hello and welcome to the second installment of Religious Diversity in America. Today we'll be discussing the challenge of race relations. I'm Yusra Ghazi, Franklin Fellow at the Secretary's Office of Religion and Global Affairs and your program moderator, sitting in for Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Sharik Zafar, who is unfortunately not able to join us today. This conversation is part of a series of live web chats which aim to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing American society as a result of its rich religious diversity. My guests today will join me in discussing our experiences here in the United States, both positive and negative, as we reflect on the challenge of race relations. Every day, both in the United States and countries across the globe, we hear stories about the conflict and tension that arises from bigotry and discrimination directed against religious and racial minority communities. We hope that this conversation will express the different ways that inspiring American leaders, policymakers, educators, activists and artists are working to address this reality. My special guests today are Aaron Jenkins, the Director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Commerce and former Executive Director of Operation Understanding DC, a non-profit organization which fights discrimination through education and dialogue programming for African American and Jewish high school students in Washington, D.C. We're also joined by Heather Miller Rubins, Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at the Institute for Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies, where she has launched an initiative called Imagining Justice in Baltimore to address how interfaith dialogue can address inter-religious tensions in her community. I'm also happy to introduce Asma Naeem, an art historian and associate curator at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, where she facilitated the addition of a portrait featuring Yaro Mahmoud, a former slave and Muslim entrepreneur to the American Origins exhibit. We're also lucky to have Arjun Singh Sethi on the program, who is the Director of Law and Policy at the Sikh Coalition, an organization that promotes civil and human rights for all citizens. Arjun is joining us from New Mexico for this live web chat. I invite our special on-camera audience in Dhaka Bangladesh and all of you viewing from other places around the world to share your questions throughout the program. You can enter your questions in the online chat space or send them through Twitter at the handle at specialrepmc. We'll get started. My first question is for Arjun and Aaron. What is the connection between religious identity and racial identity in the United States? And how do you see them coming together in both challenging and inspiring ways? We can go to Aaron first. Sure. Good morning. Thank you for having me today. I'm really excited to be here. I think race and religion are important conversations to have in this country, especially in the United States for multiple reasons. The first thing that come to mind, I think, is that both race and religion and groups of those from both portions have played an important role in America. When I think of the religious freedoms that are allowed in America at its founding and even today that in our cities you can find faiths from multiple backgrounds, it's an important and integral part of the foundation of our country. And I think both in our race and religion, we found the beauty of our country but also the difficulties of our country that the freedoms that we espouse both are achieved and granted to these groups but also denied to these groups. I'm really heartened by the recent opening of the African American History Museum here in Washington, D.C. as it helps to tell the story of America from both its beauty but also its difficult past. So I think the two are both interconnected in America. I think they also have separate stories and why I think it's important that we have dialogues like this is that we have conversation about what those stories are. Thank you, Aaron. Let's go to Arjun in New Mexico. Arjun, what do you have to say about the connection between religious and racial identity here in the United States? Hi, everyone. Very happy to be with you today. So when you think about 9-11, what you found after 9-11 was six Muslims, Arabs, Hindus, South Asians, while all different, were often treated the same. Essentially, they were treated as the other. So as a consequence, what we found is although there are differences between six, between Muslims, between Arabs, and between South Asians, all of our communities were subject to similar treatment in the post-9-11 era. So, for example, we found that these communities are acutely vulnerable to hate violence. Recently, an Arab American in Tulsa, Oklahoma was targeted because he was Arab. We've seen something similar with Muslim Americans and with Sikh Americans. We've also found that these communities are also similarly vulnerable to bullying and to employment discrimination. So I think the fact that a lot of these communities are treated similarly and are acutely vulnerable to these civil rights challenges creates opportunities. It creates opportunities for racial and religious minorities to coalesce, to advocate together for better civil rights protections. But it also creates challenges. There are important differences between these different faiths, between these different racial communities. And while in many cases we would like to have a conversation about these differences, the route that many of us have taken in the post-9-11 era is to focus on our similarities rather than our differences so that during this moment of vulnerability we can advocate together and present a unified front as opposed to a more scattered one. Thank you, Erin for enlightening us about the connections between these two themes to the history of the United States and Arjun for speaking about what the kinds of collaboration between religious and racial minorities does and can look like here in the United States. Let's shift over now to hear from Heather and Usma with a slightly different question. What role does storytelling play in your work to promote interreligious and interracial harmony? We'll start with Heather and then we'll hear from Usma. Thank you so much for having me here today. I'm delighted to be here. So the ICJS is located in Baltimore, Maryland and we're an academic nonprofit devoted to the work of combating bigotry and misunderstanding between religious communities through study, through dialogue and through exchange. And Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all revolve around revelation, all revolve around sacred stories. And for centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have used their sacred texts to make sense of the world, to all of the social problems, political problems have been sort of looked at through that lens. And so it's a sort of a natural move for the traditions to also look at our contemporary social and political problems through that lens and to see our differences in our interpretations and in our different sacred stories as an asset in the American context to really increase a diversity of voices in the public square. Because I think the problems that we have are real and we need as much creative imaginings as possible. So storytelling both from individual believers and storytelling as far as mining our rich religious traditions is core to our work. Wonderful. Thank you for that, Heather. Usma, how about you? What are your thoughts about the role of storytelling in this work? First of all, thank you, Usra, and thank you to the State Department for having me here. And thank you to my wonderful co-panelists. I think this is going to be a revelatory conversation. So storytelling is a key component of the National Portrait Gallery, which is one of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. And I would highly encourage anybody who comes to D.C. to come visit our museum, because our goal is to tell the story of the nation. And that's through portraiture, through portraits, images of people. And it's a complicated mission that we have. We were created in 1962 with the mission of showing portraits of individuals who have contributed to American history, the national culture, and have made a significant impact in our daily conversations. So for many people, that idea of portraits of people who've made a significant impact on our nation is usually presidents, military leaders, inventors, scientists. And we are trying to complicate that understanding by showing images and portraits of people who have made smaller but still nonetheless significant impacts and have contributed to the way that our nation has grown in many different directions. So portraiture is really the aspect that I'm focusing on. And portraiture is in and of itself a story, because a picture of a person tells a story about that person. And what I love about the portrait of Yara Mamut by James Alexander Simpson, it's an 1822 painting. And are we going to be able to show an image of that? What I love about this portrait, which has been generously learned to us from the D.C. public library, and I want to thank them for this three-year loan, and Jerry McCoy at the public library, the D.C. public library for this, is that this portrait is of an African-American, a freed slave, and a practicing Muslim, and it's from a very early point in the nation's history. It's from 1822, and it tells a remarkable story about the plight of an individual who was able to overcome very difficult, very difficult situation. So Yara Mamut was born in Africa, and he was born in the west part of Africa from the Fudajalon tribe, and he came over here in shackles on a slave ship, the slave ship, Elijah, and he was sold to a plantation owner not too far from here in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1752. He was very young, but he could read Arabic, he could write Arabic, and he quickly learned how to read and write English. He worked very hard, and he was eventually, after many decades, given freedom. And the remarkable story of Yara Mamut is really this part that happens next, which is he was living in Georgetown, he started making baskets, he started making bricks, he started making charcoal even, he saved enough money to buy a house. He owned a house in Georgetown, which to our friends across the world is a very exclusive area of Washington, D.C. Now it's primarily white, 80% white, and he was able to become a homeowner. He invested money in the bank in that area, and he became a well-respected citizen and a beloved citizen of Georgetown. He would swim in the Potomac River, he was often heard singing Arabic verse, walking through Georgetown. This is in the early 1800s in the United States of America, this wonderful story of this slave, this man who came in shackles, who is now a homeowner and a beloved citizen. And that story is remarkable because he was written about when an American diplomat who actually himself was an immigrant, came to discuss the story of the District of Columbia. So we have these layers of stories, and he published his description of the District of Columbia across the world. It was published in Paris, and one of the people whom he discussed in that book is Yaro. And that's how Yaro became a local and national and international celebrity, and that eventually led to his portrait that we now have at the National Portrait Gallery. Wonderful. Thank you so much for opening us up with a bit of storytelling and getting us going. We are going to take time now to shift over to our viewing group in Dhaka, Bangladesh to join the conversation and to allow them to ask a couple questions of our fine panelists today of Arjun, Aaron, Heather and Asma. So let's get to our viewing group. Welcome to the program, friends in Dhaka. Do you have a question or comment for the panelists? Hi, this is Mooma Feddus, and I'm a state alumni from the Community College Initiative Program and I've completed also the English Access Microscopic Scholarship Program. This is Mooma for the Founder of the Faculty of Psychology. Actually, my question is, are there any parallel between the experience of the religious minorities, like mostly majority in the US, and the experience of ethnic religious? For those who are asking what the parallels might be between the experiences of religious minorities in the United States and racial minorities in the United States, in particular the experiences of Muslim minorities here in the United States. Let's go to Arjun first and then we'll go over to Heather. Great. So we've repeatedly found and observed a disturbing phenomenon in the last 15 years called flying while brown. Sometimes it's called flying while Muslim. So what happens is Americans who have brown colored skin and or are of Muslim background are increasingly profiled, not just by the TSA, but sometimes by airlines and often by travelers. So again, those who are perceived to be the other or those who are perceived to be a threat are again subject to heightened profiling really at every intersection of airline travel. From the moment they start to check in, check a bag, to going through security at the TSA and finally arriving and boarding an airplane. And in some ways that parallels the experience of African Americans and even some cities. So for example, when you look at something like Stop and Frisk in New York, we found that African Americans and Latino Americans are work for more than a decade subject to profiling by the NYPD. So again, while flying while brown or Muslim is in some ways a new phenomenon, we have nevertheless seen it happen in different contexts, at least in the example of Stop and Frisk in New York. Thank you Arjun for speaking to some of the challenges of traveling that are experienced by both religious minority communities, Muslims in particular, but also other minorities and black Americans or African Americans. Let's go over to Heather who also wanted to jump in with a response to this question. I'm coming at it from a different standpoint. Our institute was founded almost 30 years ago as the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies and was devoted to working on the Jewish-Christian relationship and specifically combating anti-Semitism. Our board and staff about four years ago became apparent that we couldn't remain true to our mission to combat bigotry and misunderstanding in the American context without engaging our Muslim neighbors and without combating Islamophobia. And so we've gone through a long process to culminating in the change of our name this year and hiring of staff and a real engagement with the Muslim community. But in our work we see a lot of connections between anti-Semitism in its contemporary form and its historical form and contemporary Islamophobia. Particularly we have a program coming up where we're educating middle school and high school teachers in Maryland around the refugee situation. I'm talking about Jewish refugees from World War II Europe and contemporary Muslim refugees fleeing also war environments and what is the American response to those refugees and what sort of prejudices that are religiously motivated or misunderstandings kind of ground anxiety about receiving and welcoming refugees. And so again that the sort of relationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia informs our work very deeply. Thank you for sharing that. It's really helpful to hear about the ways you are connecting the experiences of Muslim minority communities in the United States with anti-Muslim bigotry to the kinds of experiences faced by the Jewish community and also as it pertains to the refugee experience or the refugee struggle. Any interest in responding from either Aaron or Usma before we go to the next question? I can just add one thing and that's a historical point which is Thomas Jefferson owned a haran. He owned a haran about 11 years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence and as he was one of the founding fathers he was thinking about this idea of religious tolerance and religious tolerance is actually something that is embedded within the fabric of our nation within the four corners of the Declaration of Independence and it was a really challenging concept for Thomas Jefferson to map out with his colleagues as they were trying to consider the direction that this country was going in. The question of religious tolerance I'm bringing it up now because of Heather's comment relates specifically to the fact that all of the founding fathers were all of the American founders were Protestant and they were really scratching their heads and wondering whether this country should have a president who's not Protestant who is Catholic, Jewish, maybe even Muslim and Muslim really became, Islam really became the limit, the test limit of what kind of religious beliefs they would like their leaders to uphold and they found a way to accommodate that to realize that if they were going to be a nation that was free and allowed religious practices from all different faiths that they would have to consider people who came from the Judaic background or from the Islamic background. That's so interesting. Thank you, Asma. And I realize that our group in Dhaka-Bangladesh also has another question to ask us so if we could go back to them, let's see if they have an additional comment or question for us. Hi, I'm Aisha. We met in the last session. Yes, Aisha, thank you. You're welcome. So my question is, in the time when we're speaking about inter-religious harmony and we understand the importance of respect to religious but at the same time, few things about the Islam where three Muslims were targeted and killed so in this situation, do you think does it affect the relation of Muslim minority with the mainstream population of USA? Okay, so thank you, Aisha, for that question. It's about the targeting of Muslims in the United States and Aisha mentioned a particular incident in which Muslims were targeted in the US in the recent past and how that impacts the interaction or the engagement between the Muslim minority and the mainstream population. Does that sound right, Aisha? Wonderful. So I'm going to throw that to the panelists and see if you have a response. Aaron, it looks like you're... No, it's making me think. So in my former work, I ran an organization that works with Muslim, Christian and Jewish students. It's called Operation Understanding D.C. I'm going to draw upon the experience from that program to answer the question that was raised. I'm really thankful for the D.C.A. audience for being here and for raising this important question. So two things come to mind. The first is that here in America, one of the beauty of being able to practice your religion freely is that you not only practice that in your house of worship but outside of it. So the wearing of hijab, the wearing of artifacts or clothing that reflect your religious belief are important. And we realize that sometimes wearing those things can also visually make you both a representative of your faith, but in some ways we've had minority groups share that it can make you feel as a target. So some of the honest dialogue that I used to have with my young students in the program was that students could relate from different background, those wearing hijab or kufi wearing a covering of their head, those wearing a yamaka who were Jewish, those wearing a cross, and sometimes intolerant people responded to that visual cue. We've seen this across the world. We've seen that these visual cues can make people feel uncomfortable and cause people that are ignorant of that faith to respond in an ignorant way. Something that was a great benefit of having the program experience that I had was that we would take students to masjid, to synagogue and to church and people from different faith backgrounds would go to those places of worship. And we found that the ignorance that people had of what hijab meant and its significance and what a kufi meant and what a yamaka meant were changed once they had a chance to spend time with each other. So we call that effect the educating of people through experience or experiential education. So one of the ways we kind of see that combating happening is that persons take the time to get to understand people that don't think, feel, or look like them. We often call that wearing the shoes of the other person. And a beauty or benefit of having religious freedoms is that it allows us to engage in each other's faith traditions in a different and unique way. And we found that once those happened, once those things happened, we found that people were more understanding and aware of their neighbor who were of different faith traditions. So in the incident that you shared, we found that folks that have been engaged in that way, we found, for example, my colleague and panellist Arjun mentioned on the plane flying while Muslim, we've had people run the gamut of responding negatively, but also we found people speaking up for the minority, people who are non-Muslim using what we call their privilege to speak up and speak out, pointing out to airlines that it's not fair that their Muslim colleagues are treated differently. We find the same thing happening in schools where students are aware of each other's faith traditions in the background, students with privilege, those who are from a majority background, partnering or aligning themselves with those that don't have that and saying, I stand with you and I will not tolerate mistreatment. Thank you, Aaron. Any contributions from Asma, Heather or Arjun? If not, I'd like to go over and switch to our online viewers and take one of the questions that have come in from our viewers all over the place. Here is a question that I think I'd like to pose to maybe Arjun first and then hear from the rest of the panel. How does the Black Lives Matter movement impact your work and advocacy efforts? How does the Black Lives Matter movement impact your work? Let's hear from Arjun. Sure. So what we've found and seen is that African-Americans are disproportionately stopped, arrested, prosecuted and received lengthier sentences than their white counterparts. We've also found anybody who watches the news has seen that African-Americans are also disproportionately subject to police violence. So mass incarceration, police brutality, these aren't Black issues. These are civil rights issues. These are human rights issues. And the sick American community, for example, stands by the African-American community in fighting police brutality, in fighting mass incarceration. No sick American should be profiled, should be subject to discriminatory treatment on the basis of their faith. Similarly, no African-American should be subject to discriminatory treatment on the basis of their ethnicity. So for our community, and I know I'm speaking for many other racial communities, many other faith-based communities, we stand with Black Lives Matter and we see it as an opportunity to fight and continue the civil rights struggle that really began decades ago. Thank you Arjun. So Arjun is really speaking about the ways that the Black Lives Matter movement has allowed a variety of communities to come together similar to what you were saying earlier in the program, and to have some joint advocacy and talk about the shared value of civil rights. Let's go back to our panel here in D.C. Heather, any responses or thoughts to this question? I'd like to give a little bit of a historical perspective and also how that has impacted our work specifically. You're looking at American history and you look at the sort of civil rights movement in the 1960s, and you see the sort of charismatic religious figures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. coming to the forefront and organizing around justice and organizing around civil rights issues. And you look at Black Lives Matter today and you don't see that sort of similar kind of great man leading the charge in the same way. The Black Lives Matter movement has been characterized as leaderless, and their response has always been, no, no, we're leaderful, that we're not relying on one kind of charismatic person to lead the charge. And so as a result, it's really made us question our work in thinking about, well, what does religious leadership look like? Does it extend beyond sort of ordained clergy? How much do these young activists draw on and use their religious identities and their understanding of religious tradition to inform their work? And so we've actually expanded our profile of what does it mean to be a religious leader in response to thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement and are making the sort of case in our imagining justice in Baltimore initiative that there's a variety of people who are leaders in the pursuit of justice in this country and who can use their religious voices in service of that. Really interesting about the ways that we're reassessing that your organization is reassessing the role of religious leader in this work. Any additional responses or comments from our panelists? Sure. I think the Black Lives Matter movement is a continuation of that civil rights struggle. And I'm drawn to the connection that faith communities have had with it. I've noticed here in Washington, D.C. and other faith communities that there's specific programming that's tied into the Black Lives Matter movement from posting the popular hashtag along church synagogue and other faith tradition houses of worship, but also the participation in marches and civil gatherings. And I think it's important that we think of two things. One, I love that the founding of that movement or the organization of that movement started with three women who, seeing injustice on television within the United States, we have had a rash of shootings of African-American men. And it's been a chance for people to say it's not their problem, but it's our problem. That as Americans, we will not stand in a country that has freedoms as one of its main pillars to allow this to happen. So if you've ever been to one of these organized protests, you'll see that it's a diversity of people, but also young people. And I like your point you made about religious leaders, is that what this movement has done is that it's inspired people to get engaged. And I really share with the audience that, you know, one of the things I admire about the Black Lives Matter movement were that people responded to a problem that they saw and they took action. And I'm really reminded of a quote that I've heard, not only that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, but that the change that usually happens anywhere, whether it's small or large, usually happens from a committed group of people. And I've seen that being an important tradition that's been continued with Black Lives Matter and other movements that have started that are similar. I'm really glad you mentioned that, Erin, because it relates to another question we've gotten from our online audience. You've already started to respond to this. How have you seen conversations on race relations in the United States change or not in the past year, and in particular, have you seen any creative alliances being formed, such as between civil society and cultural or interfaith organizations, as a response to these challenges? We've heard a bit from Arjun about this as well, but I'd like to take this question to the panelists and see if there are additional thoughts along these lines. Yusra, I wanted to, if it's okay, jump back to the last question and just add a little bit about the National Project Gallery. We can't necessarily deal with a historical movement as it's unfolding because we are a historically-based museum. The National Project Gallery is this unique intersection of art, biography, and history. And so we have an entire section of our museum devoted to the civil rights struggle and other leaders, portraits of leaders who have made advances for various minorities or those who are disenfranchised in whatever way. And I will say that while we haven't added an acquisition or a new work of a Black Lives Matter movement leader, we have been considering ways to tweak our labels and to put up more portraits that reflect this growing area of concern for many people across the nation. And we've been trying to ask visitors through our labels and through our juxtapositions of certain portraits next to one another, ask our visitors to ask themselves how history has this strand that is showing itself today. And as Heather said and as Aaron said and as Arjun said, that there is something that is truly another chapter in the civil rights movement that we're witnessing right now. Is this something you've seen visitors to the gallery engage and or have conversations around specifically in regards to the portrait of Yaro that you spoke about earlier? We haven't received comments back. We wait at the end of each month. I believe there's a cycle that we have to wait through to receive visitors' comments. But I do feel like I've seen one or two comments that are excited, that reflect excitement, I should say, about the addition of the portrait because the portrait is in a very interesting place within our museum. It's called the American Origins Exhibit. And as I suggest, it traces the nation's history from the time of Christopher Columbus to about the end of the 19th century to about the Gilded Age. And we begin in this very chronological order. We have a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. We have a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, et cetera, et cetera. And Alexander Hamilton. And then amidst all of those portraits is this portrait of Yaro. So that's a nice break from what people expect. A diversion from what we are normally taught in our history textbooks. Thank you, Asma. And thank you for giving us more context and background about how the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery is thinking about this topic. Now the question that we have received from our online audience is about the kinds of creative alliances that may have been formed between civil society and cultural or interfaith organizations as a response to the challenges of race relations in the past year. And so let's see if we have some responses from the panelists. We can go to Arjun again. Sure. So one thing that the SICK Coalition recently did, and we had a lot of success with, we had a photo exhibit called The SICK Project in New York where we brought two internationally renowned photographers from the UK to the United States. And they took photos of sick Americans from all walks of American life. So we had a sick farmer. We had a sick entrepreneur. We had a sick soccer player. We had a sick artist. And the exhibit was held in New York. It was open to the public. And we had an overwhelming reception. And what we found was that, you know, solidarity building awareness comes in many different forms. It comes through advocating for stronger civil rights laws and the government. But it also comes from storytelling. It also comes from telling our stories through photos, through creative artistic collaborations like this one, which I believe was visited by tens of thousands of people in New York, and not just Americans, but of course international visitors, because New York is an international city. Well, thank you so much, Arjun, for the interesting example of a photo exhibit as a way of highlighting the diversity within the sick community in the United States. Yes, Heather, I think it sounds like you would like to also respond to this question about creative alliances in response to these challenges. I think that partnerships are sort of at the core of what we do as an organization. And I wanted to talk, actually, to relate to the arts. We did a partnership with the Walters Museum in Baltimore with the Pearls on a String exhibit, and the Walters is a home of one of the largest Muslim manuscripts and art collections in the U.S., and had created a wonderful exhibit, actually grounded in storytelling and biography, and sort of brought an understanding of Islam through the pieces in their collection and that they had borrowed. And so we again brought our religious leaders, our educators, and our activists into that space and had joint programming with them. The program that we're doing on refugees is through a partnership with the Jewish Museum of Maryland and made possible by their staff resources and archival resources. And then our imagining justice in Baltimore program, much like you were saying, Aaron, we're going to St. Bernadine's Catholic Church in West Baltimore. We're going to the Islamic Society of Baltimore. We're going to Betham Synagogue and we're going to Coppen State University. And so I think for our organization, it's incredibly important with getting people into different parts of the city that they normally don't go into and vice versa and creating partnerships with institutions and our neighbors and that really strengthens our work and strengthens all of the pursuit of justice that we're all trying to pursue together. Thanks, Heather. You've got quite a lot of interesting partnerships involved in the work that you do. And yes, Aaron. And so my vocational work, I work at the Department of Commerce and everyone's called the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and I had to talk about it. And one of the things that's amazing about it was that it was expanded upon by an executive order by President Barack Obama so that there are 13 federal agencies who look to connect faith-based communities and nonprofit organizations with the resources of government to provide assistance, programming, information, policy. And the reason that work is so important is I think our institutions and our individuals have to work together in these ways to address problems that come up. I really like that Arjun highlighted the thought of solidarity and it made me think of a couple of solidarity moments I've experienced here in Washington, D.C. In my personal life, I have experienced a group called the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. They've been around for almost 30 years organizing a number of ways that interfaith communities from a multitude of religious backgrounds can work together. This year, working with the 9-11, 15th anniversary, they hosted something called the Unity Walk, which has been a really popular program. Imagine this. Several faith communities along a one-mile radius saying, on a Sunday, we're going to open our doors and invite as many people in as possible to tour our grounds, to meet our faith leaders, and to learn about what we believe. The Sikh community opened their doors and had the most amazing vegetarian meal I have ever had in my life. The Islamic Center opened its doors as near the end of Ramadan and we're approaching Eid, and you had not only people allowed to come in and make prayer and learn what that was about, but you also had gospel choirs singing and people sharing information. And I think if I've learned nothing from our recent movement, which has been not only Black Lives Matter, but people responding to the things they've seen, it's thinking about how they can do the most that they can in the places where they are. So how can we get our faith communities? How can we get our institutions? How can we get our university students? How can we get our high school and middle school students engaged in the important question of how do we speak out and speak up against injustice and what am I going to do about it? So I think of the Unity Walk. I also think of two years ago during Rosh Hashanah, when again we were having this massive shootings, I remember the 6th and 9th synagogue hosting a program where they invited in African-American communities during this festival of a new year to celebrate or to share what it's like being African-American during that time. So again, these are just examples of how interfaith communities, institutions, and governments have worked together to kind of speak out on important topics. Thank you so much to all of our panelists for providing some really rich and exciting examples of the kinds of work that's happening in the United States between diverse communities to address the challenges we've discussed in the United States. Now before we go back to our viewing group in Dhaka, let's take one last question from our online audience or one more question from our online audience that we received on Twitter and as a reminder, questions or comments can be tweeted directly to us at the handle at specialrepmc. And here's the question. How can we ensure activism through programs on racism? It's about ensuring activism. Yeah, Heather. So in thinking about this, the interfaith organization devoted to learning and to study, and I think if I was going to characterize sort of interfaith in the U.S., it can be roughly broken into two groups. So sort of the interfaith doers and then the interfaith dialogueers. And you've got your doers who are focused on interfaith cooperation who are going out and doing food drives together and maybe, you know, building houses or doing something sort of material with their hands, a direct services. They're focused on learning, understanding and dialogue. And I think it's become apparent in our organization that those two need to be wedded together, that if you're going to have resilient inter-religious relationships, you have to both create real relationships. It is great to do something together, but that you also have to have real knowledge. You also have to have some grounding in the sacred texts and the histories and the stories that animate people's lives and really separate the doing from the dialogue. And so I think that if I can guess what the question from Tritter is getting at is that, okay, this is great, this is all talk. How do we make sure that action is on the table? And I think that's something that we're very conscious of as an organization, but we also don't want to have action without information. So it's finding that balance. Yes, thank you for that, Heather. Now let's go back to our friends in DACA for additional questions or comments. What's up for me is that we are here because there are different races with religious people in America. And they may have some challenges, some problems living together. So actually we are here to discuss the challenges. So my point is that actually it is diversity of religion and diversity of race actually is an issue for thousands of innocent human race. But in our modern world, actually we really have to discuss or take the challenge that can we not develop ourselves thinking that we are all human beings? That's it. That's the one and one race actually. But in our school, we are not actually teaching the students saying that it's okay, we are all human beings. We are trying to develop by discussion, but we don't have that kind of active teaching, if you want to listen. Saying that all are saying there's no race actually, although we can see someone is black, someone is brown, it is the human being. And another issue that I find that because of the diversity, hatred comes and why actually we are focusing on the diversity, if you look at 9-11, we will find that after 9-11, then when we found, we were trying to find out actually who were the criminals. So once we found the criminals, then we tried to find out exactly who are they from actually the race or their background. Do the media actually should disclose this kind of ethnicity of the criminals or should they actually tell them this is the criminal and this is the crime they have actually done. So the criminal should be punished, that's it. But why do you have to look back that is what is the ethnicity? Because once we talk about the ethnicity and we find that they are from the minority, then hatred comes, that people start hating, those kind of people, although they are from that ethnicity, one of those ethnicity have actually done something such kind of crime. The media should be very careful with sourcing information that it's okay, this is the criminal, not go beyond that point because a criminal is always a criminal. It does not matter which human race he is coming from. So if the media and all of our discussion is very, in our discussion we become very careful and believe that this kind of hatred and this kind of chalice will not be there. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so what I heard were two really important comments and questions. One is about the need to teach the value of a shared common humanity when we engage young people in conversations, rather than emphasizing all the different ways that our communities are separate or different or distinct. And the second really important question you raise is about the role of the media and whether or not media agencies should be highlighting the religious or racial identity of subjects that they're reporting on who have perpetrated crimes or terrorist attacks. And so I want to share these, pass these questions over to the panelists, but perhaps before we step away from our viewing group in DACA we could take one more comment or question and then have the panelists address all of these. And do we have an additional comment or question from DACA? I'm Aisha. Hi. We're talking about race and religion at the same time. So my question is how are the challenges about the races connected with the challenges of the religion? And how the United States making it short that all the citizens are getting the same treatment? How is it possible? Is it implemented or what are the challenges and what are the relations? Okay, thank you for that question. So what I understood from your question is what is the United States doing to ensure the equal treatment of all communities and for our panelists to speak to the ways that these challenges are faced by both racial and religious minorities and the ways that in the United States we ensure all of these different communities have their rights. Okay, so thank you so much for that question Aisha and colleague for asking the two really important questions about education and the media. Let's now go to the panel. They are busily jotting down notes and responses to your questions and perhaps we can start in New Mexico with Arjun and come back to D.C. after Arjun responds. Sure. So in response to the first question I think similarities are beautiful but so are differences. And I while I'm certainly a human being there are unique components to the Sikh faith to my South Asian background that I think are beautiful that I wouldn't like to celebrate and I find again that though we are everyone, most human beings are very similar in spectacular ways but also different and there's nothing wrong with celebrating and learning in building from those differences. I think the point about the media is a very important one and I think we found repeatedly that the media at least in the United States and elsewhere is often intentionally or unintentionally Islamophobic. So for example we repeatedly found that Muslim Americans have a very hard time being positively portrayed in the media. That has real consequences if the only time an American viewer sees a Muslim on television is through the lens of terrorism or through the lens of a terrorist attack it's going to lead to Islamophobia it's going to lead to hate violence. We've also seen this in response to how the media responds to mass shootings versus domestic terrorism. It often seems that the media is more likely to call an incident a mass shooting if the shooter was a white American. However, if the shooter happens to be Muslim they're more likely to call it a terrorist attack. And we found that once the media calls an incident a terrorist attack it ends up leading to a much longer deeper discussion about profiling policing and even the war on terror. So I do believe that the media has to do a better job and has to give Muslim Americans more of a fair shake. I'll turn to the other panelists and then perhaps I'll close with a few comments about how the United States actually enforces and lives up to its promise of equality under the law. Great, thank you so much Arjun. Panelists, Asma, Heather, Aaron your thoughts on this on these very important questions coming from our viewing group in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We can start with Heather. I think that Central to our work is trying to dismantle the kind of habits of othering of essentializing, of saying I understand someone as either a victim or a perpetrator by saying that they're black, they're Muslim, they're Christian they're Jewish, right? Just by that one word I have an understanding of who they are and that sort of layering of complexity sort of what's going on with media references in that way what are the sort of habits to unpack those for people and to point out when media is sort of crossing a line and using quick summaries to demonize and essentialize a whole group of people that that's something that has been a long-standing habit in the media that's not a recent habit in the media and so we have sort of historical analogs that we can draw on to point this out. One interesting and I think intersection with religion and race on this topic is the habit of talking about President Barack Obama as a secret Muslim, as part of a sort of othering process with him and with his presidency and that being mixed up with an African-American heritage as well as anxiety about Islam is sort of a perfect storm and that unfortunately lingers in a lot of different pockets both in not necessarily mainstream media but in sort of darker corners of the internet and other forms of media and communication and I think it is an example of what we're trying to work against that kind of habit of othering and easy essentializing. Thank you Heather. I think yes, I'd like to take it I think that there are two things that are really powerful we've seen the use of technology to kind of change the narrative of many of the stories that we've heard as you pointed out in traditional media and one of the things that I think have made a really big impact are people telling their stories and making sure that they have a multitude of stories. So I know in my own use of social media I look for articles, I look for images that reflect the things that I would like to see. I had an intern one time challenged me she said all I see is negative news I wonder if there's any good news out there so I make it a point that I seek out those things that tell those stories so they're going to be told or should be told I look in my own life with friends of different faiths and backgrounds and look for those opportunities to share those things because I know that historically we have had a traditional sense of how media has shown their bias and I've seen that I still believe heartily that education and information are the best things to combat the ignorance that we see and I think that the faster we respond to those things the more quickly we can address them to make sure that a positive and a more whole story is told. Okay, great, thank you. Yes, Asma. Just to piggyback on to Erin's comment piggyback maybe two of a colloquial term just to add on to Erin's comments thank you for those questions in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I think museums play a fascinating role in everything that we're talking about in terms of education particularly of Michelle the president's wife Michelle Obama the comments that she made when the Whitney Museum of American Art opened in 2015 and she basically called out how museums can sometimes be alienating to people of different backgrounds and of different social classes and she called on to museums to be more inclusive to show on their walls images to reflect the people who could come through their doors and that's something that we at the National Portrait Gallery have really been striving to achieve is to show the changing landscape of our country and to show how different people from different backgrounds have made an impact on our national history and culture and so it's not just the founding fathers that you'll find in our museums it's local community activists from Latino American to Muslim American and the last point I'll make is this wonderful intertwining narrative between African Americans and Muslim Americans you know scholarship is really growing in the field of the transatlantic slave trade and the religious backgrounds of many of the Africans who were forcibly taken from their home and brought here to work in this country and whether many of them had to convert or had to hide their religion or Islam once they came here and that is a I've met so many people who are writing dissertations on this I've read some very interesting new books that have come out discussing this and the truth of the matter is we don't really know exactly how many African Americans were Muslim I should say how many Africans were Muslim when they came here as slaves but it's estimated that there was a great amount of support of how he was able to practice his religion how he did not hide it and how he was honored and had his portrait painted is a wonderful uplifting story that we can now share at the National Portrait Gallery Thank you Esma, thank you panelists now we've in the past few minutes gotten a couple questions from our online audiences and have just a few minutes before the end of our program this is a question from a viewer in Washington DC how can we have a nation united when we practice many different religious traditions and here's another one what advice do you have for our viewers who may be interested in addressing this issue through the arts, advocacy, policymaking or educational initiatives some really great questions to close out our program and to make final remarks I think let's first go to Arjun Mexico and then we'll come back to DC for our final for our other panelists great listen it's been a pleasure being on this panel I'll conclude with this short statement my advice to those watching is to not be a bystander silence is part of the problem we live in a world where everyone has a voice especially given the proliferation of digital media so my suggestion to those watching, to those listening is speak out, make your voice heard if a Muslim American an African American if anybody in your community is the victim of a hate crime condemn it if a mosque is vandalized write the mosque a letter if there's bigoted political rhetoric that makes you uncomfortable share an article on social media so don't be a bystander speak out, everyone has a voice be heard thank you Arjun, Erin we shall overcome was the title of the closing song the civil rights movement used when they were closing mass meetings and I think that statement can be past, present and future we have overcome a lot in our history as a country we've had times of difference but we've also had times of connection we are overcoming it's the constant dialogue we're having today that's important that we discuss things that are difficult that we are and that we make sure that that is something that is important to increase our education, our changes and then we will overcome the problems that we face today are possible to be changed if we keep working for that change Erin, final remarks, Heather religious diversity has been an asset to the American experience since the founding and while that diversity has expanded and will continue to expand I think celebrating our religious diversity religious voices in the public square makes it a more robust public square and a positive engagement of pluralism is a wonderful thing and we as an organization are devoted to doing that work and have on our website and also on the Huffington Post a series of spaces where we bring a diversity of religious voices, religious activists into the public square consensus is not the goal but being able to actually articulate how you understand justice is and I think that we need to encourage that and again use your voice Thank you Heather and Asma I would just like to say that I think that diversity is an important part of who we are and I think that there are many different interesting ways that that diversity has shown itself but I think one of the easiest ways for members of our of our wonderful humanity to understand this around the world is to think of us as a nation of immigrants always been a nation of immigrants nobody was here before the Native Americans I guess is the right way to say that but we have always strived and achieved because of our diverse talents and I think I'm going to throw out Lin-Manuel Miranda's name because Hamilton is such a national phenomenon because he capitalizes on the strength of different voices and of different faces Wonderful, thank you Asma We are at the end of our program today It has been really inspiring to hear from these speakers and very exciting to hear questions and comments from our global audience I'd like to thank our speakers Asma, Arjun, Heather and Erin for joining us today Thanks also to our viewing group at the Edward M. Kennedy Center in Dhaka, Bangladesh and thank you for sharing all of your questions Thanks to our global audience for joining the conversation If you enjoyed this discussion please follow the U.S. Special Representative to Muslim Communities Shariq Zafar on Twitter at SpecialRepMC to learn about future conversations as part of our series on America's Religious Diversity I'm Yusra Ghazi and on behalf of the Secretary's Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State Thank you