Suhaib Webb – Ramadn Reflections Part 2 Agitations, Privilege, Faith and Commitments
AI: Summary ©
The speaker describes their experience with Malcolm X, a book that inspired their desire to be a blonde and whitened man. They explain their journey to address their origins and how they found their way to the truth through their experiences with Rodney King. They also share their own experience with the concept of white privilege and how it inspired their desire to be a blonde and whitened man.
AI: Summary ©
At the age of 14,
I was given this assignment by an English
teacher
to do a book report. So I went
to the library, and I found this book
called Malcolm x. And I thought I had
no idea who Malcolm x was. This is
way before the movie and the whole kind
of iconic rebirth of Malcolm
took place.
You know, when I started reading Malcolm,
that was the first time that I've ever
had to negotiate my whiteness.
I thought it was a cool name because
it rhymed.
Malcolm x,
you know,
rocking the deck, cashing checks, breaking necks, fools
I wreck. You know? It was like
an infinite number of potential rhymes you could
do with that name, so I chose that
book. I remember reading him and thinking, man,
this dude is crazy, man.
Like how the heck is he going to
call someone a white devil, and you know,
the the way he talked about white people
was something I had never seen before, or
heard before.
That, for me, was an awakening in my
life
about white and whiteness, the meaning of whiteness,
white male privilege, even though I was young.
And it wasn't easy. Like, Malcolm and I
would spar, you know,
and eventually I found myself
really moved by his story. And
I would say that really I had left,
Christianity
probably when I was around that age,
because I found a number of
what I felt were unanswered questions and then
contradictions
within that that tradition.
And I would say really in in the
shadow of Malcolm, even though I'm a blonde
haired, blue eyed white guy, I think
we are moved by people who are so
committed
to universal causes
that they have a universal outcome and a
universal impact.
March 3, 1991
is really what caused me to start to
look for the truth. That's the day
where
Rodney King
was brutalized,
and the collective
conscious of America for the first time was
exposed
to
firsthand treatment
of black America at the hands of a
power structure. People heard about
it up until that time, and people
had maybe read about it.
But to actually see those agitating moments,
that make us uncomfortable, we have
really 2 ways to go. Either we're going
to conform to
the easy way,
or we're going to stand up and address
ourselves and be honest with ourselves.
I was
motivated by Malcolm,
pushed,
I would say head first by what happened
with Rodney King.
And I was reading the Quran at that
time in the restroom
of my home, scared that my mother would
find it.
And I found that in Islam. I mean,
the first or second verse
of the first chapter says, praise be to
Allah, the lord of all things.
You know? And god is not white or
black or any color.
And then in the back of the Quran,
the last chapter is, say I seek refuge
in the lord of humanity.
So the source of removing
oppression
was the lord of all things, of all
human beings.
I never did hate anybody hard. I do
know that when I wrote that letter saying
that there were white people in Mecca, it
shook up a lot of Muslims because
most of the Muslims who follow mister Muhammad
absolutely believed that it was impossible,
physically impossible, I should say, divinely impossible for
a white person to go to Mecca.
And my trip there,
shattered that image or that this concept.