Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Which voices are really being silenced?

An interesting response to last week's feminist blog kerfuffle.
There is no “community of apostates” online. Apostates from Islam are mostly silent, because they mostly aren’t in a place where they feel safe enough from their governments to speak out. And I get called a racist by American Muslim Black Converts for criticizing a religion that damn near destroyed my life — which I still feel actually did destroy my life because I will never get over losing my family. But of course there’s no silencing going on over here (silencing only happens when the Noisy Group says it has happened). Those who make it a habit of piling on liberal non-racist white feminists doing good work, pride themselves on calling out (in nasty vicious ways) what they think of as the white people’s blind spots. Yet their own blind spots are invisible to them and of course, since no one is lower on the victim totem pole than they, nobody can point out to them that maybe, just maybe, shielding Islam is not the most enlightened way to advertise your awareness of the suffering of other people. Maybe, just maybe, other oppressed groups — like apostates of Islam — find you trampling all over their “safe spaces” (yet another term they love) screaming about white privilege, rather… well, rude and disrespectful.
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