Friday, January 09, 2015

I heartily condemn this event or product

So the other day I was teaching a discussion class, and as always, I started by asking students what was on their mind, what they wanted to talk about, &c.  And what they wanted to talk about was the Charlie Hebdo murders.  So we did for a little while.  I’ll tell you what we did not do: we didn’t spend any time explicitly condemning them.  Why not?  Because it’s automatically assumed to be the fucking default that people do not approve of horrible crimes, and the fact that you or anyone would implicitly assume that that wouldn’t be the case for Muslims along with everyone else just shows how fucked up we are.  The prevailing opinion was that “they”—meaning Western governments, media, &c—are going to blame “us”—meaning Muslims and Arabs in general—for the situation.  They didn’t even seem notably angry or surprised about this; it was more a matter of resignation—yeah, that’s just how it always goes.

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