The Everyday Trauma Of Living With Anti-Muslim Rhetoric
by Bim Adewunmi
On 16 June Jo Cox, a British MP, was shot in Birstall, near Leeds, in northern England. She died from her injuries on the same day. The suspected gunman, Thomas Mair, who reportedly was a longtime supporter of a U.S.-based neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, is in custody. If her death ends up being treated as a political assassination, it will be an event we are unused to in the UK (the last sitting MP who was killed was Ian Gow, in 1990).
For maybe the dozenth time in a few days, when I heard the awful news, I burst into tears. Cox, 41, was a mother to two very young children, married to their father, and a beloved friend to many; her loss is a terrible blow to her loved ones, a shocking and unexpected event, the sort of thing that simply shouldn’t happen. In the wider world, Cox was previously an activist and campaigner, and, as of 2015, a politician – a first-time Labour MP who stood up in parliament this past April and asked the government to accept 3,000 child refugees from Syria. Her death extends beyond those who knew (and loved) her personally.
I am far from my London home, where we will soon be voting to either remain in the European Union or leave it – a “Brexit”, as we have clunkily portmanteaued it. The dialogue, even from this far away, has been a toxic soup, all of us choking it down and spluttering, but mulishly not leaving the table. It’s not even a new dialogue – Great Britain, formerly a colonial empire that stretched across the globe, has been oddly defensive about letting anyone else in for a long time. I live in America now, where another toxic conversation has been underway for a long time as well, currently spearheaded by the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican party, Donald Trump. The man who tweeted “AMERICA FIRST!” earlier this month has come up with some of the most repugnant rhetoric around pretty much every group of people over the last several years, with particular destructive vitriol reserved for Muslims, foreigners (and the children of foreigners), and women.
I am all three of those things, and I am tired.
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/bimadewunmi/living-with-anti-muslim-rhetoric?utm_term=.vuv4OQPoR#.yje96MGQY