The Blame Shame

Riding the el, I usually keep to my song or book I choose to focus on for the ride. Exams may have gotten to me, but I didn’t just want to ride the el today like it was any other day. I saw across from a middle aged black man, tired black boots, baggy jeans, checkered button down shirt, puffy black coat with mud on it, and a hat to keep warm from the snow outside. In his hand was a book, with a picture of a saintly looking man, beams shining from every direction of his face: Elijah Muhammad. Our eyes met as he caught me looking at his book.

“How do you like the book?”

“I enjoy it very much. But I’m sure you don’t know much about this at all”

“I don’t know much about the Nation of Islam. The extent that I do know of it is whatever I’ve learned from Malcolm X.”

“Smart girl. But his autobiography was factually off. The Malcolm you thnk you know, is not the real Malcolm.”

“The Malcolm I know is the one that wrote the letter home from his pilgrimage, showing an Islamic brotherhood that goes beyond race and borders. I respect Nation of Islam Malcolm. He had great points, especially the segregation of races in order to build your people up before assimilating into a system that is never theirs.”

“As a black man, that Malcolm doesn’t speak to me. The Nation of Islam does. It speaks to the problems within the system, what brought us here, and what is holding us back in this system that isn’t ours.”

My stop was here. Before I got off he let me know he was a history professor up at a university in the northern part of the city. He thanked me for talking to him, and I smiled and left.

Had there been more time, I would have told him that even though my knowledge of the Nation was non-existent compared to his, the one thing I do remember is the blame on the white man. Obama brought this up with a character in his book “Dreams of My Father.” In his book, that character constantly was blaming everyone else for his situation, but gets so stuck in that circular argument, he never takes responsibility to fix up what is going on. All he did was rile people up.  So, ok, so it happened. So now what?

This is how I see it. You are a kid at your parents house, drinking a glass of milk, and your brother comes by, smacks the glass out of your hand, laughs, and runs away. Your mom comes in and sees milk on the floor. She says “clean it up”. You start to plead with her, tell her it wasn’t your fault, you are not the reason the floor is covered in milk. She says “I don’t care who did it , you’re here, now clean it up.” It’s unjust, its unfair, its wrong. I agree. But if no one cleans up that milk, it will start to rot, the floor will be useless, and you will be the one in the house who will be blamed for it.

Maybe I am simplifying this too much, but this is what it comes down to. The more we keep blaming the past, the more we get stuck in the past, and don’t fix what is going on right now with our situation. I agree we need to know the past, but blaming is not going to get you anywhere. It is what you do now to build up what’s been shattered.

This same thought came to my mind with the recent NYTimes piece on Pakistani musicians who refuse to take responsibility for what the Taliban are doing to their country, it’s the West, it’s a Conspiracy. Again, so what? Do something about it now. You’re schools, streets, markets are getting bombed, and you sit back and blame the West. How does that solve what is going on right now? And one band even went as far as saying “we are just a small band, the big musicians should say something first.” Because small people never made a difference, there’s no such thing as grassroot efforts. Besides, if the NYTimes is coming to you for an interview, you are NOT SMALL.

How much longer can we blame the white man, the west, the Jews, the Christians, the Zionists. I’m tired of the Muslim way of blaming someone else. Let’s be like the Prophet and change it up.

*On a complete side note, a famous Indian advertiser Prahlad Kakkar made this statement in an interview “”You take brown skinned girls to your hotel-room, fair-skinned ones to your mother.” Even though this statement may seem unrelated to the post, it kind of perpetuates the system. You blame the system, and then become a part of it, only to blame it again. Guess what Prahlad, if you are walking down the street in America, people will point at your brown skin and call you a terrorist. Don’t blame the system, blame yourself for believing the same thing, segregating your own people by the color of their skin.