Khalid Latif – Living in A Trump State
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Welcome back. We had the wonderful opportunity not
too long ago to attend Under the Stars
Naseeha Fundraising Gala to talk to ma'am Khaled
Latif about his personal experience living in a
Trump state. How is his day to day
life being impacted?
How has this political situation inspired and reenergized
him to stand up for other social issues
like Standing Rock? Before I take you to
our both engaging and emotional interview, let me
tell you a little bit about Imam Khaled
Latif. Imam Khaled Latif is a university chaplain
for New York University,
executive director of the Islamic
NYPD.
Here is our interview with him now during
his visit to Toronto.
Welcome to the show, ma'am, Khalid. Thank you
for having me. So I know you flew
in here, to support the Nasiyyah Muslim Youth
Helpline. Why is that something that's important to
you?
You know, Nasiyyah is important to me just
given the work that I do. I end
up seeing a lot of people who are
survivors of domestic violence, sexually assault,
people who are experiencing
mental wellness issues, emotional wellness, spiritual wellness,
suicide ideation,
personality disorders,
relationship issues, grief issues, anything that you could
think of,
makes its way through my doors in some
capacity.
And I think
the idea that
individuals can have access to a resource
that allows for them to engage somebody of
their faith community
that is trained and is a professional
and is able to help elevate them through
some of the realities that they find themselves
in to get to where they're fully entitled
to be in terms of moving in their
life forward. Something that's remarkable. These guys,
are fielding tens of thousands of calls from
all over the world,
from a lot of people in the United
States where I live.
I think it's just important to support them
in what they're doing. And do you think
it's important for us to have a youth
line specific for Muslims like Nasihah?
I do. You know what? The
way a lot of mental health works is
not just based off of
credentials and training, which is a really important
part. That people are gonna connect to people
that they have a certain familiarity with,
for individuals to understand the nuances that exist,
within the Muslim community in terms of race,
ethnicity, culture,
social class, lived experience
necessitates
the person across the table
being as familiar as possible. And
unfortunately, many people who work in the mental
health profession that are not Muslim are not
beyond their own stereotypes.
You know, they see dress as a symbol
of religiosity.
So if someone is wearing or not wearing
a headscarf,
someone has a beard, does not have a
beard, is wearing a kufi, is not wearing
a kufi.
Skin color becomes a symbol. And so someone
who is not South Asian or not Arab,
but is African American,
is Latino, is Caucasian,
is somehow engaged differently in terms of their
level of religiosity.
And so to just know that the person
across the table
kinda gets what you're going through and not
having to explain yourself over and over, or
feel as if it's not working for reasons
that have nothing to do with counseling,
but just the fact that the person
is not so acquainted with your experiences,
makes a huge difference. Now I know you
mentioned a little bit about different racial groups,
and I wanna take the conversation a little
bit different now. You know, Trump recently got
elected.
I guess I know I was shocked. Were
you expecting that to happen?
You know, towards the end of the election
cycle,
I thought Trump was gonna win. You did?
And so I I didn't
feel so shocked. I have to ask, why
did you think that?
You know, I think the reality of people
who are pretty disenfranchised
with the current establishment,
also tied to really the deeply embedded racism
that exists in the United States
that
I think what people are more shocked by
is not
his being voted in,
but now they can't deny certain realities around
systemic and structural racism that exist. I The
country in and of itself is founded upon
realities where indigenized populations,
were killed, pillaged, their land was taken from
them.
Slavery in and of itself
is a reality
that the country was built upon,
and the treatment of black people until today
is something that is undeniably
inequitous and oppressive,
not just on an individual level, but on
an institutionalized level. I think for many people,
what they're becoming more woke to
is the idea that
race
is something that people experience very differently,
and they can't pretend any longer that it's
not a problem.
What about you in your profession? Do you
experience some of that systemic racism? Because I
know you're a police chaplain
and you're not a Muslim chaplain. You're a
mainstream chaplain.
Yeah. So, you know, I work as a
chaplain for the New York City Police Department.
I also serve as the university chaplain at
NYU.
I share the title there with the rabbi,
and we have about 60 affiliated chaplains of
various religious denominations.
And in both capacities,
I work with a broader
community,
the importance of providing just pastoral care to
whoever needs it,
anyone who's looking for that kind of support.
I think whatever I've experienced in terms of
policy that infringes upon my rights as a
Muslim,
I would say pales in comparison to the
realities that black people face,
especially in the United States. You know, I've
traveled to a lot of countries all over
the world. The unfortunate reality is that there's
a lot of racism and there's a lot
of inequity that exists,
racial disparity in pretty much any country that
you could think of. But
to
take
the mode of false equivalency,
and to equate what it is that I
would go through or people of my racial
or ethnic background go through in a way
that somehow undermines, like, the black experience,
I think is really problematic.
What I see in terms of my realities
is that there are many minority populations that
are distinct from my own,
who live realities day to day that experientially,
I have to be able to relent to
the idea that I've never gone through what
they've gone through. So I know recently, and
it's very interesting to hear a Muslim,
you know, talk about different racial groups and
the challenges that they're going through. I know
off air, we spoke briefly about, the fact
that you just recently attended Standing Rock. So
tell me a little bit about that and
why you chose to go.
So, you know, I we took about,
15 students from New York University.
Myself, we met Sheikh Dawood Yacine from Zaytuna
College,
and about a dozen Zaytuna students as well.
Linda Sarciore, who's a good friend of mine,
came with us also.
And I took my wife and my kids
as well.
And,
you know, the importance of it, I think,
was to not go and do something, but
just to be there to serve the people
there. It's really remarkable
when you walked in, you know, the indigenous
populations,
our native brothers and sisters,
the chieftains of their tribes were telling everybody
who came into the campsite
that this is a prayer camp, and we're
meeting the oppression
and inequity
with spirituality and with prayer.
And I think that was something that we
didn't expect going in, but created a different
frame, at least for me personally, to really
reflect upon my own connection to my faith
and spirituality
and
a connection to tradition.
I mean, these were people who had a
long lasting
embracement of a tradition, and they understood deeply,
you know, our connection to our tradition.
And I think to understand where there was
a spectrum
of
behavior in front of us, people who are
heavily motivated by greed, the acquisition of wealth,
selfishness,
who wanted to build this pipeline
regardless of what it would do to the
water there, what it would do to the
land there, how it disrupt just the ecosystem
there.
And individuals who are purely there for the
sake of saying, we have to stand up
for what's right because it's the right thing
to do. And I think,
to me, it just indicated what real balance
is and how the relationship between rightness and
wrongness necessitates us not just following up
our wrong actions with good actions, but understanding
when someone else interjects
inequity and oppression into the world, we as
Muslims should also be countering their wrongness with
that much more rightness.
You know, I took my kids there and
my students there
so that they could understand
it doesn't take that much to give up
to actually go and be with people. And,
you know, they went, they chopped wood,
they helped separate donations and clothing,
but their role is just to serve the
people that were there.
My daughter's 3a half. My son is 1.
He's not gonna know, you know, we took
him there.
But when they're older,
you know, I could tell them that we
didn't just talk about it. Like, we actually
took you there. Yeah. I don't know why
this is making me emotional.
But I think a lot of the times,
we fail to recognize
how it's important for us to live mercy
and to live hope and live compassion,
and to not be so distracted by the
world
that we think so much about what we'll
lose,
but really
what we're giving up on in terms of
our hearts when we don't move when we
have the ability to. Yeah. I think you
shared a very powerful message about the importance
of thinking beyond us as Muslims and thinking
for the broader humanity. Right? Black lives matter,
indigenous issues. So just wrapping up on that
note, what advice do you have for
every human being given the political and social
climate that we're living in, not just in
the United States, but I would go as
far as to say even in Canada.
Look, I would tell people who are Muslim
in specific
that
you have to just be yourself.
I mean, if we retreat into the boxes
that society seeks to put us in, And
we're gonna see a regurgitated
reality
over and over. I'm not God. I can't
tell you why things happen the way that
they do. But Muslims are in a place
where we dealt with the reality and are
dealing with the reality of individuals who speak
in the name of our faith that do
not really embody the teachings of compassion, love,
and mercy in our faith.
And it put us in a place where
we didn't know what to do. How do
we respond to the realities of ISIS? How
do we deal with the fact that they're
killing more Muslims than anybody else? There's not
gonna be anything worse than this than we
experience.
And then sometime later, like, Donald Trump got
elected. And everybody said, this is the worst
thing that's ever happened to Muslims. And what
are we gonna do? And it's gonna ruin
our world and set us back however many
decades and centuries.
God is gonna keep putting challenges in front
of us until we recognize our ability and
potential to meet those challenges.
I'm not gonna live in reaction to somebody
else's perspectives on who it is I'm supposed
to be and to embody a set of
attitudes and principles
that only make me accepted when I turn
into something that I'm not. And so to
be Muslim
is to just go out and be Muslim.
And And I would say that to any
minority population at this point that where you
have salient frames to your identity,
embrace yourself and love yourself and go out
and be the best version of you. And
when somebody tells you that you need to
be in a box, let yourself understand that
if you allow for yourself to be in
that box, then you're just giving them victory.
And we need each one of us right
now
to move forward at a place that we're
comfortable with,
and to just offer people a different reason
to have hope in this world and never
a reason to really dread it. Thank you
for a very hopeful message, Imam Khalid. Really
appreciate it. Thank you.
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