By asking the peace-loving Americans who want to build an Islamic cultural center nearGround Zero to move their project to another site, New York Gov. David Paterson is acting like Karl Lindner, the faux-friendly racist who offers a black family cash to stay out of a white neighborhood in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic American play “A Raisin in the Sun.”With a deceptive smile on his lips, Lindner claims that the key to avoiding racial conflict is for black people to confine themselves to black areas of town. An equally disgusting, blame-the-victim attitude lies at the heart of efforts to relocate the Muslim center and mosque under development in Lower Manhattan. It would be disgraceful for any U.S. governor to accommodate such attitudes, but the fact that Paterson is African-American – and therefore inherits the memory, if not the experience, of centuries of racial oppression -- makes his action worse than shameful. It is inexcusable.
Like the villain in Hansberry’s play, Gov. Paterson cloaks his cruel, separate-but-equal pitch in high-sounding rhetoric about people sitting down to resolve their differences in an atmosphere of calm understanding. At a news conference on August 20, Paterson declared that he wanted to “promote some kind of ethnic and cultural understanding” by setting up “a dialogue with myself and others who might have some ideas on how to bring about a solution that’s favorable to everyone.” The governor amplified that view four days later, before discussing the mosque controversy with New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan. "We're not telling anyone what to do with their rights," the governor explained to reporters. “We're making an appeal.”
Unfortunately, Paterson is making the wrong appeal to the wrong people. The governor’s plan “promote ethnic and cultural understanding” doesn’t involve correcting the fact-twisting critics who wrongly blame the religion of Islam for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Neither isPaterson putting in check the McCarthyesque conspiracy crazies who claim that American Muslims are building mosques in a plot to undermine American culture and supplant the U.S. Constitution with Islamic religious law. (That’s an ironic claim since conservative Christians have been working since the Reagan era to impose their fundamentalist Biblical morality onto our nation’s laws and public institutions). Apparently, David Paterson believes that the best way to achieve “ethnic and cultural understanding” is to urge a group of Americans who have done nothing wrong to set their Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom aside in order to appease a pack of self-righteous, paranoid bullies who misunderstand and despise their religion.
Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core was correct when he told CNN that telling Muslims that they shouldn’t practice faith near Ground Zero is “like telling black people 50 years ago, you can sit anywhere on the bus you like, but just not the front.” That is a perfect analogy which Gov. David Paterson should recognize. Considering our history of struggle against racist exclusion and domination, African-Americans should identify with other minorities who are mistreated because of race, ethnicity or religion. Blacks should never side with bigots who seek to trample the rights of others. But that is precisely – and tragically -- what David Paterson has done.
At the end of “A Raisin in the Sun,” the Younger family rejects Lindner’s offer to buy back their house even though they’ve hit rock bottom financially and emotionally. Summoning pride in the midst of pain, the wise and proud matriarch, Lena Younger, declares: “I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never took no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth!”
That is how the planners of the Islamic cultural center should respond to Gov. Paterson and to everyone else pressuring them to accept second-class citizenship.
Altadena-based writer Cameron Turner comments on racial issues on KNBC’s “The Filter with Fred Roggin” and in his weekly column, “Turner’s Two Cents,” which appears in the PasadenaJournal and EURweb.com. Turner may be contacted directly atturnerstwocents@yahoo.com.
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