 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Critical Conversations, where we talk about issues related to American Muslims. The brutal murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers once again brought into sharp relief the institutional and systemic racism prevalent in our country. It has also forced various religious and ethnic groups to grapple with racism within their own communities. The American Muslim community is no exception. American Muslims are estimated to be about three to four million in number, and the community as a whole is ethnically and racially diverse. However, this racial diversity does not necessarily translate into racial cohesion, solidarity, and inclusion. Today, we're going to talk about how anti-black racism manifests itself within Muslim spaces and ways in which we can address it. To discuss this, we are joined by Tahira Amadal Wadood, who is an attorney and political and interfaith activist. Kenyatta Bakir, who is a research fellow and senior trainer at the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative. And Imam Nihal Khan, who is the director of Religious Affairs at the Islamic Center of Connecticut. Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you. Kenyatta, let me begin with you. You know, according to a 2017 poll, one in three black Muslims said a fellow believer discriminated against them because of their race. Could you share some of your own experiences around race and race relations within the Muslim community? Well, first of all, I wanted to just thank you all for having me on today. Forgive me, it's a little early here. It's about eight o'clock, our time. So if my voice is a little scratchy, we will adjust. And Bismillah. For me, I was born and raised Muslim in a predominantly black space, black American space. So my parents converted to Islam in 1968. They met in college in a small town, Warnsburg, Missouri, and then migrated to California. And so they came through what most black folks did during that time. They converted through the National Islam. And then later on took Shahada in 1975 when E-mail Warfee Mohammed took over and they became Orthodox Muslim. So my upbringing was in Muslim schools with the traditional Sister Claire Mohammed schools. My first real interaction with non-black Muslim spaces was probably around, I would say about 1920, years of age. And that first experience was my father saying to me, because at 16, my parents said to me, you need to choose whether you wanna do Islam or have Islam in your space on your own. Because we know that there's no compulsion in Islam, right? So my father had given me a Quran at age 12. I pretty was, you know, pretty fluent in Arabic at that time. I don't know about now, a little bit more so. And so that there hence went my journey. And so my dad took me to a space that was predominantly Pakistani and we went for Juma prayer. I had interacted of course with other races because I had gone to college, but the interaction at that time was more of, you know, let me kind of see what this is. But what I didn't care for was the separation. I was used to being in a space where it was, of course, the men sat in the front and the women sat in the back, but we were able to mingle and interact, right? So I was placed with other women in a closed off space. And at that time, there were no TVs, right? So we're talking, you know, 30 plus years ago. So there was no TVs, the sound system was really horrible. And it was not a very good experience for me. The women didn't speak to me, they were not kind. Most of them, you know, some would smile, but it felt forced, right? So when I came out and told my father, you know, I wasn't ready to go, really. You know, I was kind of turned off. My dad asked me what my experience was, the cup bar was beautiful to him. And so I kind of explained to him, so my dad pulled the mom over to the side and had a conversation and said, you should not treat your women this way, right? So from there, kind of a bad taste came in my mouth, but being very optimistic and being raised in a space where we believe in diversity, you know, I went to other spaces. So from there, I would go to masjids from here and there, not to say everybody was like that, but I could just feel like the tension of being different, right, and having those microaggressions as, you know, we speak about a Muslim anti-racism collaborative where you can tell that this person is trying to fill you out, right? But in a negative way, saying things like, well, when did you come convert? And I'm like, well, I'm not a convert, I was born and raised. Asking me simple questions, do you know al-Fatiha? Do you know the five pillars of Islam? So, you know, that microaggressive behavior, and I didn't really understand what that meant at that time because I had been so supported and celebrated in my space, right? So from there, I just started having conversations one-on-one and just trying to be more of a diplomat. But here recently, you know, in my last several years, I have different experiences. Some are very, you know, warm and kind. Some people are very obliging. And other folks, I think it's just sometimes culturally, people just don't always interact with other cultures. Sure. Kenyatta, thank you so much for sharing that. You know, you sort of spoke about moving from a predominantly Black Muslim space to where it was predominated by perhaps an immigrant community, and you said Pakistani. And Daira, let me turn to you about that. You know, there is this interesting dynamic that develops between the indigenous Black Muslim population and the immigrant community, right? So Black Muslims here in America make up about 20% of the American Muslim population and immigrants and children of immigrants make up about 75% of the Muslim community. How would you characterize this relationship between Black Muslims who've been here for generations and the immigrant Muslim community that migrated to the US within the last 60 years or so? Well, thank you so much, Mahukka, and our Pope analysts for having this conversation. It is a very necessary, relevant, timely, and I'm grateful to be a part of it. With Kenyatta, my parents also converted to Islam. When I was, they converted when I was a toddler, so I consider myself essentially born and raised. I do not consider myself a convert. My parents were formerly Christian and women adopted Islam. They adopted Sunni, Orthodox Islam, and I don't often tell people that my mother was one of 11 children. So I grew up with lots and lots of Christian, Black, American, Christian cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents, et cetera. And just before I go into the relationship between Muslims who have practiced in the practice that Kenyatta and I have come up to in these generations and our immigrant brothers and sisters for a second, third generation, I wanted to say something about the proximity to Christianity. As you know, I've been in for office a couple of years ago and people would often ask me, where did you have the most difficulty in a predominantly white history? What did you have the most difficulty? Was it your religion? Was it your race? Was it your gender? And I would always say that if people knew or came to find out that I had actually born into a Christian family, that that instantly gave me a level of privilege and relatability to those who were not Muslim and to those who were primarily Caucasian. So there's something about Christian hegemony which is quite powerful at times and privileged at times. So I just take that because when we think about the history of African-Americans in this country, we know and your viewers know by this point, we all know that with the slave trade of the transatlantic slave trade of 400 years ago and then came at least 30% Muslim. I had a brother tell me the other day that when he went to parts of West Africa and looked at the historic sites of from the state people and traveled here forcibly, he said he would suggest that it was probably 80%. And I thought that was very interesting. So of course we know that some of this information has been suppressed, it has been manipulated but let's just understand that the significant portion of the insatiable population were Muslim and fought very, very hard to maintain the Muslim identity. And there is some evidence to disdain certain parts of the country where some of that identity was allowed to be maintained. So people that trauma runs through the blood, we know that DNA reflects trauma. I also believe that love, belief, worship, et cetera also runs through the blood. So one moves best as to my parents and how does parents, the majority of African-American Muslims who are practicing today in a certain age range if a lost volunteer will just allow them to reconnect with the belief of their ancestors. So my concern about the condition of African-Americans and the American immigrant Muslim at this point is that the American immigrant Muslim and I'm just being very broad strokes does not understand or appreciate that history. Do not understand that we should pay homage to the ancestors. Our religious ancestors who have set the path for Islam in America and who are the American Muslims in this country, you owe a deep debt of gratitude to a lost Muslim and to Allah, through a lost Muslim and to Allah's servants who made the framework in 1619 and continue to fight with rights of all Americans all American Muslims, all African-Americans the Arnold Super Rights for the black American and for anyone who has immigrated here post 1964 from a non-predominantly European country that speaks to the mass generation of Muslim Americans who have settled here. You are here on the backs, the shoulders and the necks of the African-Americans who were my grandparents, my great grandparents the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And so when you really get down and deep about it and you realize that there's this history that has Muslims, we understand that our connection is greater than biology, right? We understand that when we look at the Sahaba we look at the whole Rasul Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam we claim that collectively as our ancestors, it's our history. So why don't we claim in place the enslaved Americans who set the path here for Islam? Why aren't we all? I don't get your Kurdish, Pakistani, Syrian you are an American Muslim, that is your lineage and you need to claim it, your children need to claim it and we need to be united and respectful of the people who've paid the price for that freedom and absent that we have the microaggressions that my sister just talked about, the microaggressions that my children who attend Muslim schools and they're the only African-American families that I've experienced the off-the-wall statements that my high schooler has heard from her Pakistani first generation colleague classmate of how black lives and the ignorance in which these children function in this world not realizing, I said to one of the children, do you understand that I fight for the right of my parents to travel here because of the Muslim man? You're not the type of black men who could be my daughters, uncles and aunts. Ignorance is reprehensible and it must be cured, it must be fixed and addressed. Absolutely, Daira, thank you so much for pointing that out and I feel like that's exactly right, just the ignorance around the history of American Islam and how the first Muslims were actually black Muslims who were brought here as enslaved people is something that a lot of our immigrant communities perhaps do not understand and also the fact that in 1923, the Supreme Court had passed this verdict essentially that actually prohibited South Asians from ever getting American citizenship and it really was not until the 1940s and then later in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act again through the labor of our African-American siblings that the waves of immigration were then allowed and then people started coming in from South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa and I think there just is not enough recognition and actually a lot of ignorance around that fact so thank you so much for pointing that out. Nihal, I'd like to sort of turn to you now. I mean, you are a religious leader, a community leader, have a wonderful, huge congregation. How in your position have you seen or observed the marginalization of black Muslims within our institutions? Firstly, thank you for having me. Bismillah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. It's been a pleasure listening to all of you, to Sir Thar, Sir Kenyatta and I hope to just add to whatever is there. I think it's a very multi-layered question because the way marginalization occurs most often than not, people especially within the Muslim community don't realize that it happens number one at a structural level, number two at a liminal level. So there, and it leads into something else because with mental health, for example, in the Muslim community, which is an area that I engage with, the problem arises when we don't name the problem. The problem arises and we don't call a spade a spade. The problem arises and we don't direct our attention towards that which needs to be addressed. And I think within the Muslim community, those, the way that we end up marginalizing the black community is on a very multi-layered front. It can be as small as, and not to minimalize it, but where every community event is South Asian or Arab food. It could be something small like that or it could be open to the level where you have no black speakers or if you do have a black speaker, it's a very tokenized way of recognizing black or the sisters in the community. We won't engage with them. We won't talk to them. And it also stems from this white standard of these colonized nations that a lot of our parents left that they saw America the Bright Light. Like they don't know about the national origins formula, which was that act that was in place in America from 1921 to 1965 that basically said, if you ain't white, don't come here. Right? Which is that if you're not white, don't come here. And so much so, at that time Adolf Hitler wrote about the national origins formula saying, look America's doing it, it's working for them. So why don't we do it? Hitler praised America at that time. And it makes you wonder that the sense of American exceptionalism that has seeped into the Muslim community saying that since, and I think this rings true to specifically the American immigrant Muslim community because there is this underpinning that I made it to America, so I did something with my life. I made it to America, so everything is good. I remember not too long ago, there was a lots of scholar who I really respect, you know, whose parents also immigrated here. And he said something like, oh, you know, a time is coming because of Donald Trump being in office, we're living will become tough, this will become tough, that'll become tough. Oh, be careful, we'll go into poverty or be careful X, Y and Z is gonna happen. We're gonna be racially discriminated against. We're gonna live in this dystopia. And somebody had said it, they responded that you're talking about the immigrant Muslim white collar population, but you have an African American population that's already living in the nightmare that you think is accepted, but it's already here, right? This sense of white privilege and American exceptionalism that the community is looking up to, it's harmful, right? And if you came from a non-white European country, it's because, as we mentioned in 1965 on the backs of the civil right movement, the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed by Lyndon B. Johnson saying, I, you're not white, I've come on in, but it was on the backs of the civil rights movement. And then we have the audacity to sit there and remember, you know, like this is the worst part about it, especially with Muslims from the immigrant population. And again, as a child of parents who came here from a different country, people really forget and have this sense of like amnesia as to the backs of the country is built on. It goes back to learning institutions, right? That we have to send someone overseas to a South Asian or an Arab country for them to learn their faith. We don't talk about like Senegal, we don't talk about Gambia, right? We don't talk about centers of learning in West Africa and other parts of Africa in which Islam has been studied for a longer time and has been more institutionalized there than in other places. You know, and the only discourse that ever exists in the community is that of the law of the Allah one because we tokenize him as if the Prophet Islam tokenized him. The Prophet Islam didn't tokenize him. The Prophet Islam gave him a place in the community because he was deserving of it. The Prophet Islam did not, he broke a system to include people. Like people forget that in the Quran, there's a verse. There's a verse. There's a verse. There's a verse. There's a verse. There's a verse. There's a verse. The Surah number 49, I think it was verse number 12 or 13. Don't quote me on that. But that you have believed. Do not mock. One group of people should not mock another group of people. And the reason that this verse was revealed was because certain companions, now keep this in mind, not non-Muslims, not the disbelieving Quraytists, certain Muslims kept making fun of certain segments of the companions. What do you call it? They say, look, his father, he was Abu Jahl. He was the worst Muslim. Now he wants to become Muslim. I'm not about that. So it was towards him. The second person, it was towards Suheba Rumi. They actually made fun of him because they're like, look how white he is. It's like discussing how white he is. The third person was Amir bin Fuhairah, who was a black man. And they say, look at this black man. He wants to become a Muslim. Then they made fun of Saman al-Fadih. Look at this Persian. And the whole verse of the Quran was revealed calling that out. A whole verse of the Quran. And that's the thing. And I feel like the issue in the community is that we are not having these conversations about what biases our mind has been accumulated to a whole at a very subliminal level to not talk about this issue outside of it being a very tokenized point of view. Like, okay, a lot of Muslims are like, black lives matter. That's great. Where were you like the last, about however many years that the community was being tarnished? Where were you during this time period? I don't know about that. But at the end of the day, what we have to keep in mind is that if we are going to move forward as a community, we need to recognize what are the subliminal messages that our mind is sending us that is causing our community to not grow in unison. Thank you, Nihal. I think that's very important. And we will get to the part in the discussion where we talk about the role of our institutions in recognizing our biases, first acknowledging them and then ways to address them. And we'll get to that. But I just want to shift gears just a little bit and talk about, go beyond the intramuslim racism that exists in terms of microaggression and all of those things and how they play out within our institutions, but also talk about how non-black Muslims have traditionally approached causes that affect our black siblings, right? So how non-black Muslims have approached black life matter or police brutality or racial injustice in the larger community and how supportive we've been of that. So Kenyatta, you are a member, you belong to the LA chapter of Black Lives Matter. Could you talk about the kind of support the BLM movement or your particular chapter has received from non-black Muslims over the years and how can we expand this support within the Muslim community and what are some shifts that you have noticed? Well, that's a great question. And I just wanted to say that Nihal, I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing your name incorrectly, and Tahira, you guys made extremely poignant examples of what this space of, when we talk about race, this is all coming from white supremacy. So if folks think that they are without, are going to be this model citizen and they're gonna love me, we just had the Muslim ban, right? We just had that to occur. And we know in history, we've had many accounts of banning us, right? So I just wanted to lift that up and say that I'm grateful that you all extended and spoke more on that. For non-black Muslims, firstly, in Los Angeles, you know that it's in Los Angeles alone, there's four million people, right? And we have a lot of like mini suburbs. So if you've ever come here, you literally can drive through one city in like five, 10 minutes, right? And so folks are always confused. Well, am I in Inglewood or I'm in NLLA or where am I, right? So if you drive in different spaces, you will see the diversity go from there. So why am I saying that? The point is, is that for some folks who are non-black Muslims, they see an allegiance. The younger population has aligned with us. I would say that more generation Z group even coming into the wise, that group is aligned specifically on social media. Of course, recently within the last three weeks of the uprising, we're seeing more people in the streets. I'm not physically out there because I'm asthmatic, so I can't go. But I'm seeing it on the social media platforms like my comrades are telling me about what they're seeing. And even fast, if I go back a little bit, at our Masjid, which is where I grew up, and it's predominantly black, we have some folks that are coming that are of immigrant descent that are starting to come into the space more, especially the last couple of years because of our social justice and the way that we operate. So we had actually about, I guess it's going on three years now, we had a town hall to celebrate Nabra Hassanin, the sister who was murdered in the DC area and who was Egyptian, right? And so we had about 150 people to show up and it was a call from the Masjid as well as aligning with Black Lives Matter, right? And so from those folks that came, there were non-blacks as well as there were, and they were just non-black, just Christian, whatever, Afrocentric, and it was doing Ramadan. And so that was a time for us to give a lot of daawa. And then we had non-black Muslims to come to the space as well. So it was celebrated. Then we have another side of folks who, and we have an older generation of folks that are starting to shift. I was on, I just have to give a credence to that. Someone shared on my Facebook that there was a, their mother who has been reading the New Jim Crow and she was talking about how in Texas, someone had invited the chief of police and she was like, how harmful this is. And she really lifted up, you know, the black American experience, right? And I was grateful to start seeing this context happen. And Muslim arc has been very integral in coming into those spaces as well and having those conversations. So there's kind of like two and three groups, right? So we have some people that are having this awakening and then we have some folks that are like, absolutely not, I won't support Black Lives Matter, right? Because it's a non-Muslim, they think non-Muslim space, right? And then we know that the founding members, 2.3 black women, two of them are gay, right? And so folks have an issue with that, right? Even though the Black Lives Matter chapter is a person who is heterosexual, you know? And so we get into these like, you know, minute, you know, kind of underpinnings of like, what is what and who should be doing what? But we're really missing the mark on, right now Black Lives Matter all throughout the nation is really calling for everyone, right? And they're saying all Black Lives Matter, right? And when our life matters, we didn't even want to turn, we didn't want to even take the title Black Lives Matter. We have another name, but it became so in your face and was so necessary that we had to take the term. So for us, we are wanting folks to understand that the mission is just as we were stating, this has been 400 years of oppression. So come with us and counteract oppression, bottom line. Very well said, Kenyatta, thank you. You know, I also, I mean, when it comes to racial injustice, when it comes to different communities being targeted, I think we also lack this intersectional approach that, you know, when you talk about white supremacy, it targets all minority communities in different ways, but we are all part of that same oppression. I think there is a lack of sort of understanding around that or recognition of that as well. And I've also had, you know, some of my own sort of South Asian friends talk about, well, you know, Black Lives Matter, racial injustice, that's more the issue or the problem between Black America and white America. That's really not our issue. And so, you know, just not really recognizing that connecting thread is a huge issue. Bahira, you know, you walk in many different circles and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how and why it is, in what ways do immigrant Muslims and Black Muslims experience law enforcement differently? You know, there is this sort of almost this deference towards law enforcement and local police departments when it comes to immigrant Muslim communities and they don't necessarily see that the oppression that their Black co-religionists are experiencing. And so there's this reluctance to condemn police brutality. Could you talk a little bit about that? Thank you. So that, you know, that you and I, we work on projects together all the time and we have these conversations all the time and we began this one a few days ago. In my mind, I've been thinking for so long, how do I talk about it? How do I, how do we think about it? And so what I want to do is I want to talk about it in a couple of steps. I want to talk about the house of worship. So the mosque or massajid, plural for masjid, for those who might need a little bit of a glossary on that, as an institution, just like as an institution functioning in the middle of a suburb that it exists on and I'm, again, over-generalizing of what this looks like. For houses of worship, they and those leaders want to maintain a good relationship to the law enforcement, right? As Muslim citizens and an institution, as a citizen, we want to enjoy a peaceful coexistence in the community in which we live or in which our house of worship is housed. And so my understanding of familiarity with local massajid and massajid throughout the country and some of the work that I've done has been to help keep those houses of worship safe. But they really pride themselves on having a good working relationship with local law enforcement, whether it's dealing with legal issues, whether it's dealing with traffic, having the directs to the massajid. It's noble, it's proper, it's appropriate for any institution who want to have a good relationship with its neighbors and its law enforcement, right? Hands down, no dispute there. The problem becomes much more nuanced when we talk about the system of law enforcement and how it interacts with the Muslim population in general, right? And we can hold space for both. We want to maintain a good relationship with our neighbors, our local city and town police department, while also holding space for the reality that as individuals, Muslims are under intense scrutiny by members of law enforcement, particularly in the federal government, and have always been, but most certainly, post-911 with the creation of law and security. Basically, identifying all Muslims as suspects, putting covert operators and FBI agents into massajid and to schools to promote and antagonize our young people into conversations that implicate them in some guilt to the point where this government has unjustly interfered with our right to assemble, to pre-speak, and to worship as we see fit. And this particular level of scrutiny is, it hits different for our immigrant brothers and sisters, like the African Americans have been under scrutiny since, again, the inception of slavery by law enforcement, and that's a whole other conversation. But we are experiencing on a contemporary basis this scrutiny, this surveillance, it's different because it goes to the very core of our American-ness, because we know that this government is hostile to the existence of Muslims, black and brown immigrants, and so there are deep, deep repercussions for American Muslims who are caught up in anything that looks to be suspect, by government that is constantly moving for trouble. So when we talk about what is the relationship like with law enforcement and American Muslims, I want our Indian brothers and sisters to think very much about experiences like the ensayers after 9-11 when all these Muslim men were lined up and deported. Who spoke with them? What was the relationship like with the American Muslim immigrant and the African American? Do you have alliances with allocations with and solidarity with that you were allowed to just disappear tragically from our soil because, again, of the nature of the surveillance conducted by the American government? If we were united and we would be there for each other, it gives me back to the fact that African American Muslims, African American people have always had difficult, harsh, way-threatening experiences with members of law enforcement and to go back to my analogy about holding space for wanting to have a good working relationship, but we also hold space for calling out ad unfair and harmful practices by law enforcement. We recognize that as the FBI, there's local law enforcement, there's state police, depending on what year it's situated and as the leadership of a misogynist of a congregation, of a community, we have to be able to have these conversations with our congregation and we have to move forward in the world, understanding that this is real and they are both sides of the same coin. I'm gonna pass it back to you, but really quickly, I just wanna say that I have beautiful African American children. My two oldest are males. There's a 22-year-old and I have a 26-year-old and for a Tarawi, this boy, my 22-year-old, leaves our inner-city hotspot in our urban center at night, 10 o'clock at night. He goes to the suburb with the mosquitos located and he comes back at two o'clock in the morning. And I just think we have some mosques with law enforcement for Eve at the mustard where he's worshiping and he comes and journeys back home to be unconcerned about his interaction with police department in the inner-city that we live in, to the site and he has a black child and I want to be the mom of the leadership of the misogynist who serves these constituents, understands that my child's journey back home is maybe very different to your child's journey back home. And we need to have that conversation and my child should not be embarrassed or shamed to express. These are his experiences and the misogynist, the mosquitos leadership needs to be able to make pathways for conversations and use the privilege and status in the community to have these conversations and dissect some of this injustice and oppression that is happening to members of its religious congregation. Absolutely, Dharah, thank you for sharing that. I mean, I just feel like those conversations are so important because the immigrant experience or interaction with law enforcement is a completely different experience than it is of our black co-religionists or African-Americans in the larger community and this just simply is not that acknowledgement. And we're so busy trying to maintain good relations with law enforcement that we're not able to sort of see the larger structural, systemic, institutional issues that have brutalized black communities for so long. And Mejwaka, may I just go back to what you're saying like, so yes, we're trying to maintain these relationships but they're kind of superficial. If it's only that the chief of police you've come across the most if you want to be, but yet you're afraid to say to that chief of police, I'm concerned about some of your practices. I'm concerned that your colleagues in one city over house the community of our African-Americans and our refugees, which have very hard experiences in helping people open the door. What are you preserving? You're preserving a superficial relationship. You're preserving a superficial relationship at the expense of real people who need those relationships to work for them. So we need to remember that at all points. Can I interject too, Mejwaka? I just wanted to say- Yes, please go ahead, Kenyatta. And I'm glad she lifted that up at the end and expressed that because we have a master here in Los Angeles who is known for having a police presence. I've even had speaking engagements and the police were standing in the background like literally armed, standing up and it's intimidating. And I've called it out right there on the spot. I'm like, you could just sit down. You know what I'm saying? You don't have to stand up and this is what we call over policing. This is what black folks deal with on a daily basis. And so I had some people who were of immigrant descent that came to me and said, wow, that was overwhelming. So now I kind of understand what you're saying. But here's my point for, you know, for Black Lives Matter, we are an abolitionist group, okay? And I know for folks hearing the term abolition is a hard term, but we have to understand where did this police force stem from? We know it started from 1850 out of the slave patrol. The star that was originated from the slave patrol still is on the side of most police cars to this day. I know it's in our sheriff's department, specifically here in Los Angeles. They still wear the star emblem on their uniforms. So we're talking about a history of persecution of the black body. We're talking about murdering of the black body. So the slave patrol, they had three tasks. They were told by the slave master to either go and get the slave and murder that person, beat them incessantly or jail them or put them in prison. And we see those three things still happening presently to this day. And so that's why we have the movement of defund the police. In Los Angeles, they have a budget of three billion, with a B, billion dollars a year. We know that that's ridiculous, especially since city employees are being furloughed every day here in Los Angeles. So we were able, after five years of speaking about defunding, we were able to get to demand, I get demand from the mayor, $150 million be taken away from the police force and given to black and brown communities, and then an additional $100 million will be earmarked. Lastly, I wanted to say, there are positions that can be put in place that LAPD just announced the CNN of interventionists, right, of people who can be put in place instead of having armed policemen at task on every detail, mental health folks. We know that policemen are not trained nor have degrees to be able to handle a mental health crisis. So I'm sorry, I just had to interject that really quickly as well. No, Kenyatta, that's really, really important. And I feel like that's another discussion that we really need to have about abolitionists versus reformists and what that means. And people, again, do not have that understanding about the history of police here and how black and brown lives have experienced over-policing and the militarization of the police and where it began. And that it's okay to have good relations with your local police department, as Thaira was saying, but to understand that we have to go beyond the superficial relations that we have and be able to collectively, collectively resist the racist, the Islamophobic policies that all of us have been subjected to. And we can only resist them much better if we have these conversations that are able to sort of approach it in a more intersectional way. So I really appreciate you bringing that up, Kenyatta. Nihal, let me turn to you now. There is such a huge focus and such a huge emphasis within Islamic tradition on social justice issues, right? And about how people within the Muslim community need to stand up for one another, not just for one another, but for everybody. The Prophet Muhammad said, Sola ala wa alaihi wa sallam, said that the ummah is like the human body. If one part is affected or in pain, the entire body will be affected. We seem to take that prophetic tradition to heart when it comes to supporting causes like Kashmir, Palestine, Rohingya, the Uyghurs in China, as we should. But we don't take it too hard when it comes to supporting our Black co-religionists. Why is that the case? And how do we change this trend? You know, there's a really interesting book by a professor named Christopher Cook based out of Connecticut from Western Connecticut State University. And, you know, he makes an interesting point talking about empathy versus compassion. And empathy is very important. Empathy is the idea that we put ourselves in the shoes of someone else and try to see things from where they're coming from. But the idea of compassion to him was that it's an unbiased form of care for another being regardless of expecting something in return. It's this understanding that we have to show compassion to the entirety of the world. And not to say one is better than the other because even within our tradition, the messenger says it tells us ar-Rahim wa ni-ar-hamuhum ar-Rahman, that those who are merciful to other people, that Allah SWT will show them mercy. And I think what it comes down to is, you know, if our communities can, and again, not to get into one about read, not to other eyes, but if we as a community can come together and say brothers and sisters, pray for Sudan, brothers and sisters, pray for Somalia, pray for Pakistan, pray for India, pray for China, pray for Kashmir, pray for all these different countries, pray for Syria. But if our own backyard, where people are dying and suffering, like we don't consider them our own comrades in faith, then that's a problematic stance. And we need to talk about this, which goes into something deeper. A lot of people who immigrated here may refer to something, some country called back home, that they haven't been to in 20 years. Oh, back home, we did this. Back home, we did that. Back home and this and back home and that, which I think has pushed forth this idea that we are either white American or we can identify with whatever country there we're from. And I remember not too long ago, like I gave a speech and someone was like, oh, I liked your speech. And this is where it actually drove me crazy. The person had said that I really enjoyed your speech because it was speak to our American children. And I'm just like, wait, but like what do you mean to think? Because our kids are becoming really Americanized. So this was like one generation, like maybe I could have given you a pass, but the person that was talking to me was born and raised in England to Pakistani parents and her kids are being born and raised in America. So I'm just like, you know, on one end, like again, white supremacy does not encourage multiculturalism. White supremacy does not encourage us to get to know one another and not come in the light at bottom that, you know, the best of you are those who are the most God conscious. And I think within our communities, the reason this comes up over and over again is simply because we have not identified that with the fact that we are American. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, right? There's a reason people are kneeling. There's a reason Cape her neck was kneeling. There's a reason all these different people are pushing back against what the American flag stands for. But then on the other end, you have this full endorsement of the system, which perhaps that flag represents that people wish to protest and you live in the United States. You live in the liberal Republic of the United States where you can protest, you have free speech, you can speak up. And within our communities, they don't know how to identify with it in between stands, right? They just, they don't know how to do that. So I think as a community, we need to teach people that look that the black Americans experience is different than the white American experience. The Indian American experience is different than the white American experience. And the Muslim Indian or the Muslim Syrian or the Muslim black experience is different. But if we can find a commonality, instead of keeping our identity as a dual identity, just like Muslim American or Indian American, no, like every community is different, right? And we have to recognize that, right? And it's also like, oh, we gave a hope about Bilal. It's like, well, that is, you're not solving anything by doing that, right? Well, the way you're going to solve it is if you can get into this structural abnormality as it exists and break it from within, and which we can talk to our community and grow in our community and then eventually put these different aspects together and see that, look, we have this problematic stance. We have to push back against it. We have a problematic issue in our community. We have to push back against it and we have to name it. That's the most important thing. And if we, ourselves, are not naming the problem that we have, someone else may name it for us. And it's not a personal issue. It's a community issue. So as a community, we have to call out things which are problematic. We have to push back against them. And there is room to disagree. There is room to dissent. There is room to grow. But that's the point. Leave a little bit of room for compassion and empathy. And then afterwards, keep moving forward. Keep pushing back, but leave a little bit of room for compassion and empathy and take a step back to take two steps forward. I think that's the best way to do it. And communities that have been blessed with money and you have a very solid white-collar community, you have to ask, how can you contribute to give the voiceless voices? Absolutely. Neha, we'll get back to what concrete steps mosques and religious community leaders are imams and board members of mosques can take to actually go beyond performative acts and really be able to engage meaningfully and listen, listen to our black leaders and black Muslim leaders and allow them to lead and allow ourselves as immigrant communities to be led by them. And so we'll get to that in a little bit. I also want to turn to you, Kenyatta, because you are part of this organization, the Muslim ARC, which is the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative. And part of their work and a lot of their work actually focuses on intra-Muslim racism within Muslim spaces. So could you talk a little bit about some of the work that you have done and that you offer if there are people listening, Muslim institutions, Muslim schools, the Muslim spaces, if they are so that they can tap into what you are offering. Oh, I think we might have... I muted myself, trying to make sure that there was no background. Okay, so thank you for that. Our organization, Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative was formed in 2013, or I'm sorry, well, just about that, about 2014. So about six years ago, and it came out of the need or seeing some of the issues that we've just raised, right? All of the microaggressive behavior, you know, this racism that we encounter in our Muslim spaces. And two of the, or the two founding members are Margaret Aziza Hill, who's the executive director, and Namira Islam Anani, who was recently our communications person, but has now become a board member and senior trainer. So I'm actually a board member and senior trainer. I need to update, I don't, I think I had the research fellow part there, that was at the beginning. But we have done much work in the realm of trying to counteract this inability of immigrants, Muslims, having an understanding of anti, or having an understanding of blackness and are lifting up anti-blackness, right? And having these microaggressive behavior. And so from that, we have four tiers of curriculum. I'll just kind of, for the sake of time, just kind of peruse them or go over them very, very briefly. So there is a Muslim art competency, where we really kind of delve into what is race, what is diversity, talking about microaggressive behavior. And we do it, we're not in a space of just preaching to folks. We do it in a more of where you take an initial test and kind of look at your biases, because we know we all have implicit bias. So we speak about implicit bias and what that looks like. We also give a very deep historical account of race in this country. And then we also do very interactive activities, right? And from there, we're hoping at the end, when folks have finished, sometimes we have six sessions, just depending on what level of intensity folks want to lift it up, afterwards they will take a test and then they will see where does their bias lie afterwards. Now we know we still are going to be biased in some way. But our contingency is that you will be aware of your biases, right? A lot of us come in and we have a lot of implicit bias specifically because we have all been under colonized systems, right? So white supremacy is embedded in many of our spaces, right? And then we also have a K through 12 curriculum, which is called All About Adam. And it really does a beautiful job of having children do in lesson plan form and also interactive activities of really speaking about race and catching it very early on. We know I'm a child development professor as well, we know that race is taught, right? Racism is taught. So if you and your family dynamic start having conversations very early on with your child or children, then you will see less interactions of that. And we offer this in webinar form, unfortunately right before or right around the time that the country closed down, March 13th and 14th, we were scheduled to have a two-day workshop space that was going to really go into detail about these issues and it was in Los Angeles. But we're all over the United States. We have worked with the Ford Foundation. We've worked with Disney. So now we're doing everything in webinar form and we have a really pretty good handle on it of how to do it. And we make it where it's still interactive, where people feel like they can gain from it because a lot of folks would like to be in person, but that's not happening right now. And so we have many resources on our website. You can also become a member for $15 a month and you will get typically bimonthly sessions that last for about an hour and they come in webinar form as well. And it's a group of members where you can interact as well. You can go to our website at www.muslimarc.org and you can find many of the things that I stated there. And so does an email. Thank you. Well, that's excellent. Thank you so much for sharing that and I'm sure you also have a very dynamic Facebook page. So if people are interested in, you know, sort of just getting updates, please visit their Facebook page as well. And Instagram and Twitter. Oh, excellent. Move the mark, all of them, yes. Thank you, Kenya. That is such important work. Thyra, let me just quickly turn to you. We're sort of running out of time, but I did want to be talking about institutions. And you, you know, when we talk about Islamic schools and we know how important schools are in socializing children to sort of understanding some of these things, can you talk about the role of Islamic schools in teaching the history of Islam in America? And also, you know, what you mentioned earlier about the contributions of black Muslims that allowed immigrant families then to migrate here and settle in this country? Well, as I mentioned and indicated a little bit earlier, my children do attend Muslim schools, Islamic schools, and they at this point have been to two. My youngest is just finishing kindergarten and my other school-aged child is 13, so it's four children, all details, you don't really need to know at this point. It's a set of states and the fact that they're in kindergarten and we are still thus beginning this journey, right? And I'm always very hopeful that Muslim schools will take advantage of resources, but they can not have mentioned offered by groups like Muslim art because we need to have those conversations not very much this three months, not when a problem arises, but it needs to be introvert to curriculum, every aspect. If we're talking about how proud we are on the Muslim identity, how proud we are to be Muslims, because both of those things are true in these schools, like they're excited and this is where we're American citizens, et cetera, then from day one, when my preschool nurse up to her preschool class, up to when she leaves at 12th grade, she needs to be infused with these reminders of who she is and what her identity is. As the Imam stated, there is often this conversation of back home or not really planting seeds here in this country and that creates a problem, I think, for most children generally, but it also creates a problem for my children when they don't always feel like they can connect or understand or really take full advantage of the depth and the beauty of the relationship of that second, third or fourth generation immigrant student who's now in their class and think that they're radically different instead of thinking that they're radically the same. So I would challenge schools and I consider it, actually, I consider it malpractice and school in the house of worship does not, with intentionality, take the bull by the horn and bring these conversations to our children right on up to our adults. And so I am a thorn in the side of my children's school but I pay way too much tuition to sit there and have my children miss out on a very important aspect of their education. I am sure and I hope that the schools are grateful for your engagement with them, which is so sincere in really trying to give all Muslim children a real sense of who they are and the contributions of their ancestors, Masha'Allah. So Imam Nihal, I'll give you the last word, we're almost out of time, just a few concrete things that you feel mosques and Muslim Imams and religious leaders can do to make a difference in this time. Sure, once again, thanks to everyone for contributing. I don't think I should have the, I'm gonna keep it very brief and just ask Masha'Allah on this, it's just a close up. But I think number one, it's really, really, really important for communities to begin to acknowledge, address and name the anti-blackness, the anti-black sentiment that is present within the community. Some people may feel uncomfortable with it, good, feel uncomfortable and sit with that discomfort and understand that discomfort that you have is due to a thing that has been unnamed that has to come out into the open and we have to be sure that we address it within the community. I think that's the most important thing. Number two is how that conversation, you know, what's interesting is that at the ICCT, we had, you know, we did a, we did a program called anti-blackness and racism, like you can't get any more clear than that in the Muslim community. We had Sheikh Khalil al-Durshid show up from Harvard, right? And we had a really good discussion, but this is my second point. It can't just stay in words. Those words have to transfer into action. How does that action happen? Number three, ask yourself, are you calling out racial slurs as they're occurring in private and public settings in your community? Are you calling out the fact when people are talking about the beauty of whiteness of skin and fair and lovely and skin whitening creams and, oh, we want our daughter or son to marry a fair skinned person. And it's even transferring into like, you know, the new generation. Like, I remember one person saying, you know, in that area, I'm good, like skin color-wise, like, oh, Alhamdulillah, Allah has blessed me with good skin. Like, what does that mean? Like, what are you saying, right? And mother, me and you both know what's talking about, right? Like, literally people will say, we want somebody with a skin color of powder, right? Like, you want somebody that looks like they're about to like fall over. Like, that's literally what's happening, right? And like, we make one skin color better or the other and we're making these ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous comparisons in Maqramah and the Lahi At-Aqam. Like, people have that sensibility lost from them, right? And then lastly, the most important point is that we begin to educate our communities. We begin to have those conversations through Hukba's, through programs and then also understand like, how are we engaging the black American community, the African American community? Who are we talking to? Are we having conversations about empowering narratives? Or are we just inviting a black speaker to the community to say we invited a black speaker to the community? Which, to be frank, that's what a lot of people are doing. So I think a consistent engagement is the most important thing. And I think we have to be committed to a process. Not a necessary result, but a process. And through that process, we may not see the changes that we want to see now. You may see it in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years, Insha'Allah. Insha'Allah. I'm still sorry we're actually out of time, but I just want to thank you all so much for your contributions, your insights, analysis, and a very candid conversation. And I hope that this does lead to action in our spaces, within my own organization, within our Muslim spaces, within our spaces that are not necessarily Islamic, but which have Muslim communities in them. So, Kenyatta Bakir, Tahrir Ahmad El-Wadud, Imam Nihal Khan, thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you, Mahlaka. Thank you to Critical Connections for having us. Thank you. Until next time, this is your host, Mahlaka Sundani.