Lent 2018: "First they came for the Muslims...."

            After being stymied the past two years by Islamophobic-Trumpist forces thinly veiled as zoning concerns, the Muslims of Bayonne, New Jersey will finally be able to build their mosque and community center.

            Bayonne, the self-described “Peninsula City,” lies just south of Jersey City in Hudson County.  Surrounded by Newark Bay and Upper New York Bay and separated from Staten Island by the Kill Van Kull to the South, Bayonne used to be a mostly white immigrant working-class town.  Many of those Jewish and Irish-, Polish-, and Italian-descended families still reside there.  So does much of the port-industrial base that originally made the town thrive—now with a light rail that connects commuters to Manhattan and a cruise terminal.  Bayonne contains the grit, the diners, the traffic, the population density, the ethnic melting pot and lack of actual melting, the industrial and post-industrial landscapes, the chip on its shoulder in Manhattan’s shadow, and the unforgettable characters that make it both the stuff of epic Springsteen backdrop and the butt of jokes.  

            I first started my daily trek to Bayonne, across Newark Bay, three and a half years ago as a student-teacher at Marist High School, a little Catholic school at the north edge of town founded by the Marist Brothers.  First opened in 1954, Marist was all boys and almost all white.  As the demographics of Bayonne and nearby cities changed, so did the demographics of the school (also, it is now co-ed).  The brothers whom I befriended in my three years there impressed me in their dedication to their mission, even as fewer and fewer students were Catholic.  Their job, in the spirit of their founder Marcellin, was to serve their kids, no matter their race or their denomination or their socioeconomic status.  A handful of those students were Arab and Muslim.      

**

The Bayonne Muslims had begun renting the basement of St. Henry’s school in 2008 and after seven years, all the while growing in numbers and raising funds, they had purchased their own property—a vacant industrial lot—to build their eventual mosque and community center.  That plan ran into push-back from certain corners of Bayonne.

In February 2016, I received an email from my Veterans for Peace chapter that called on us to support the Bayonne Muslims.  There was to be a zoning board meeting later that week at City Hall on their proposed mosque, and anti-mosque, anti-Muslim forces were going to protest outside.  The Muslim community put out a call to friends in the area to counter-rally.  I told my principal about it, and she encouraged me to wear Marist gear and told me that if anyone asked, “Don’t be afraid to say you work at Marist.”  She got it.  

Muslims and non-Muslims, teachers and students from Bayonne High School, Arab, Indian, Pakistani, white, black, young and old, and a couple veterans all together, we outnumbered the anti-mosque side at least three-to-one.  The air was frigid, but the solidarity warmed hearts and bones, and I figured we would—we shall—overcome.  After all, the mayor and other local representatives were all purportedly behind the mosque.    

The next day at Marist, I broke two rules of the work lunch table: never talk religion and never talk politics.  I did both at the same time.

 **

Eleanor, our beloved long-time secretary, was like a grandmother to our students, mostly students of color.  She listened to them, she looked out for them, she gave them extra bus tickets, and she stored and handed out extra ties and belts.  As a non-adversarial figure, she let students who were in trouble sit in the main office and vent.  She loved them, but it was a tough love.  She challenged them, often with a good joke or zinger as they headed out.  She became a sort-of-grandmother to me as well.  I always had a full lunch, but she often brought extra food for me.  Our school didn’t have much money, but she made sure I had all the supplies I needed.  She gave me, an outsider, the inside intel.  She was the gate and first face of our school, laughing, welcoming, and dishing out wit.  She loved us, and we loved her.

            Which is why the day after the mosque rally upset me so much.

            “I heard you were down at City Hall last night?” she asked.

            “Yes, I was,” I replied.

            “What were you doing down there?”

            “I was down there to support...to stand with...to support our Muslim community.”

            “So, you were on their side?  You like them?”

            “Well...uhh...yes, I think…”

            “What business do you have being down there?  You don’t live in Bayonne.  Why do you care?”

            “Well, I work here.”

            “But you don’t live here.  Why do you support them?”

            “Well, I think they’re being discriminated against in a similar way that the Fitzgibbons’, and then later the Romanos, the Witowskis, and the Cohens were when they moved to Bayonne many years ago.”

            “Well, I don’t like them…(wait for it) what they did on 9/11….”

            I was caught off guard by the turn of the conversation and then the 9/11 bomb.  I felt frustrated.  Blood rushed to my cheeks, and I got small-mouthed.  I tried to reason, but I lost my cool.  I tried for a quick slice of Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern politics and history with the starter, “Well, fifteen of those particular nineteen Muslims were from Saudi Arabia…” but reason proved no match for the years of pent-up Hannity-ism (presumably) that was to follow: “those people get everything...a stabbing by one of them near that mosque...the noise...the parking...sharia law...9/11 (again)...after what they did….”  Then, it was a segue into the larger O’Reilly narrative: “And, black people—they get everything these days.  Why isn’t there anything for white people?”

Somehow, we got to black people.  The dog-whistle was thrown away—just a whistle now.  This was all with our black and Latino students in the backdrop in the cafeteria, twenty feet away.  And Mo and Souhail, too—two of our Muslim students.    

“I don’t understand why so many people not from Bayonne were there,” she closed.

Finally and angrily, I dropped my v-card: “Well, I joined the navy and this isn’t the type of country that I fought for!”

True, I was (am) a veteran.  But, I didn’t really do any fighting, unless you count the war games and weeks of driving in circles in the middle of the Pacific.  No enemy there, or anywhere else in the globe for that matter, threatened our religious freedom and plurality.  And so, I may not have employed strict logic in that heat of the moment, but the veteran card ended the conversation.  

            The next day, Eleanor brought me in zucchini bread.  She apologized for getting angry and arguing, and so did I.  We hugged, and we never talked about the mosque again.

            Furthermore, I didn’t think too much about the mosque afterwards.  It apparently had the support of the board and city council and the powers-that-be.  Eleanor’s criticism of my outside-agitating did have one grain of truth in it: since the Bayonne mosque was neither my geographic nor my religious home, my privileged activism could afford to be just a flash in the pan and I could go on with my life.  But meanwhile, the mosque was delayed for a year.  

In March 2017, the mosque debate came to a head at a five-hour zoning board meeting that had to take place in the high school auditorium due to the number of attendees.  The board did not have enough votes to approve the requisite variances for the mosque to go ahead.  It seemed like the Trumpist forces had won.  The Muslims lost.    

In January of this year, I took a small group of Notre Dame undergraduates (staying with us during their “Urban Plunge”) to meet with two members of the Bayonne Muslim community at the Broadway Diner.  Without major resentment but with an honest combination of sadness and optimism, Yaser and Ibrahim told us their story.  They updated us on the case.  They informed us that the community was suing the city.  Ibrahim told us how he met some old high school classmates before that five-hour meeting and then was surprised to see them get up and speak against the mosque.  A latent fear not unlike Eleanor’s.

The good news is that the Bayonne mosque is now moving forward.  So is the mosque in the more affluent and suburban Basking Ridge thirty miles west.  The bad news is that the fear and hate continues, both in its latent and active forms.  

**

Sadly, Eleanor died last year of cancer.  Despite her no-longer-secret Limbaugh-ism, I loved her.  She was grandmotherly.  And, her fear was a window into the common, yet unjust fear in most of us white people.  I never did go back to talk to Eleanor about the mosque, about “those people,” or about those other, black people.  About why she felt so threatened.  "Where does it hurt?" Ruby Sales asks.  I probably wouldn’t have changed her mind, but in an inviting way, I could have listened and perhaps pricked and piqued.  I could have perhaps learned more about myself and “my people.”  I could have given her space and felt discomfort for a time, while still not accepting outright falsehoods.  But those are uncomfortable conversations, and I tend to shy away from them and any type of confrontation.  

White supremacy lives on.  It, unfortunately, dies hard.  Not just in the Alabama that almost elected Roy Moore.  But in Eleanor’s New Jersey and my Pennsylvania, too: the Northeast, often Catholic, often Democratic (the insular-peninsular Bayonne is only 8% Republican by the way) version.  “As long as you're south of the Canadian border, you're South,” so said Malcolm X.         

Whiteness is a lie, both historically and psychologically.  White supremacy’s most devastating form has certainly been anti-black racism—blacks by far its most devastated victims.  It has morphed to include anti-Latino xenophobia and, especially since 9/11, Islamophobia.  White supremacy has, for the most part, always resided in the White House, but now it resides there quite proudly.  And sometimes in Bedminster, New Jersey and Mar-a-Lago too.  Its chief law enforcement officer is the "Anglo" Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.     

  White supremacy has existed from the founding of this country, but how and why does it rear its head now, in its current fashion, enabled by its highest office-holders?  I do not excuse it, but I seek to understand it (in the same way that I do not excuse Islamic-inspired violence but seek to understand it).

Ruby Sales reflects:  

I really think that one of the things that we’ve got to deal with is that how is it that we develop a theology or theologies in a 21st-century capitalist technocracy where only a few lives matter? How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality? And this goes beyond the question of race. What is it that public theology can say to the white person in Massachusetts who’s heroin-addicted because they feel that their lives have no meaning, because of the trickle-down impact of whiteness in the world today? What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is whiteness and power and domination? And when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying or they get caught up in the throes of death.

Alienation.  Dislocation.  Loss of place in this rigged political, economic system.   White supremacy then becomes the drug itself—historically much deadlier than heroin.  The crude trick of this drug encourages many of its users to support the conman Trump, a chief beneficiary himself of the rigged system.    

It is important to both fight against racism-Islamophobia as it exists and understand the conditions that enable it to flourish.  I just finished teaching a unit on the World Wars.  It is trite but true: alongside Hitler’s vile theories and policies, we must look at the post-Versailles world that proved fertile ground for fascism.  Godwin’s law be damned: just as we fight Trumpism, we fight the deep causes in this long-sickening democracy.  And we the somewhat-winners (for now) in this world order—not as winning as the hedge-fund managers—should reflect on how we have created this fertile ground.  Or if not created, at the least, how we have been too asleep or distracted to recognize this alienation, dislocation, and despair.  In response to this world order, some people shoot themselves in front of City Hall, some blame immigrants, and some (too many) fall for the Trump scam—not the university or the casinos this time but the presidency.  This is not an apology for Eleanor or for white supremacy; nor is this an attempt to reduce the current celebration of racist ignorance to merely economic problems.  To be sure, people of color across the board have suffered even more under the prevailing economic system, and many destitute people the world over do not turn to hate.  But, whether it be the Muslim or the black or the Salvadoran bogeyman, we have to look inside to understand why we need that "other" in the first place.

**

In a beautiful conversation with Rabbi Sarah Bassin and hosted by Krista Tippett, Imam Abdullah Antepli said:

If anybody tells you, “Islam is” whatever; “Christianity says…”; “Judaism believes…”—shy away from these people.  At its best, they are just naïve and uninformed.  At its worst, they are just lying.  No religion of 1.6 billion people, 1,400 years of history, says one thing or believes in one thing or strongly condemns or endorses one thing.  That’s just not—and Christianity is not what New Testament says, only.  Judaism is not what Tanakh says, only.  Islam is not what Qur’an and Muhammad said 1,400 years ago.  Islam is what Muslims do.  You have to see the human manifestation of that text over time, and not just one community, one episode, one time period, but over centuries….

It is so easy and cheap and quick to say, “ISIS is not Muslim.  Hezbollah is not Muslim.  Hamas is not Muslim.” You can’t say that.  As much as they turn my stomach upside-down, as much as I am disgusted, what they represent, I cannot disown it….

Solution is not to divorce ourselves from our moral responsibility.  We have to own this cancer, and we have to defeat it in its theological, ideological ground, and we have to defeat it in its social, political, and cultural ground….

You have to face the ugliness in yourself and in your community.  Most of the moral conversation is this: hitting the chest on the other side, what moral failures that you see.  But the real moral conversation is to put an honest mirror, put yourself into a CT scan, CAT scan, and see what the report is.  What is in you, in your community? How much moral energy and commitment and drive is behind what you do, and how much of this is shallow politics?  That’s why it’s very difficult, but we should absolutely shake the moral imagination of our communities.  We have to improve the level of self-critical moral awakening, moral courage, in our communities.

            At the same time that we fight for the Bayonne Muslims’ right to their mosque and against Muslim bans, we must face the ugliness in our communities and in ourselves.  Righteous indignation at the state of the world, and humble repentance for our role in creating it, at the same time.  This is our perennial, Lenten calling.