Bringing up Arab Nationalism and ignoring religion is like bringing up Nazism and ignoring white supremacy.
Don't you see? That's a problem for everyone. It's not because she was a Muslim.
That's the way you quantify what you see in the everyday world in 2015 - through comment streams, social media etc. There's no point using anecdotes taken from the workplace/street/university since on their own they're largely meaningless.
Do you believe it (white and/or male privilege) doesn't exist?"The pilot also apologized for everything that happened and said that as a white male he recognized his privilege and said he didn't know what it must feel like to be a minority and go through something hateful like this."
In a world where affirmative action is considered an acceptable method to increase the number of minorities at a workplace, of course. Not to mention, I can hardly feel privileged when in this country, alleged hate crimes by white people are more likely to result in a punishment than if the perpetrator is from an ethnic minority.
I know what you're angling for - and I also know that you are the least-qualified person here to be making sure that those "rash decisions are not made". You accuse other people of jumping to Islamophobia too quickly, but I suppose that you would know it when you see it, given your obvious discomfort around anyone who isn't you.
It's not directed to to you in general but take it as some advice. But on Ms. Ahmad's topic, this Islamaphobia seems a bit too high, don't you think? So say I walk into a store with my shalwar kameez on and then someone yells TERRORIST! that'd be Islamaphobia not the flight attendant getting scared of her wearing a hijab while she's yelling at her that she wants Coke Zero and not Diet.
Have you ever worked or been to a university with affirmative action? What it means is that white people end up being the only ones taken at face value because people don't assume you got in on a policy. Anyone non white has to prove they belong, with white people it's just assumed.
Not really. If "Islamophobia" was made illegal, that flight attendant may have been arrested. Is that the type of country you would want to live in?
I never said it was the whole planet. I could talk about how since I'm white nobody thinks twice about me in France even though I'm a foreigner who doesn't speak the language very well. That's a pretty distinct privilege of being white, I can go basically anywhere in western Europe and people don't look twice at me in public even though I'm just as foreign as someone from Syria and don't speak any language other than English or an intermediate level of French.
My suggestion wasn't racist. I talked about a specific act of violence perpetrated by non-white muslims. I'm not suggesting anything, all I'm saying is that we don't give the benefit of the doubt to people who aren't white in the same way. I personally think the attack was motivated by people taking offense to the cartoonists, which to me is a pretty mentally ill way of responding to cartoons. The point is that a white guy flew a passenger jet into a mountain and we talked about depression, mental health, and airline security policies. We distanced the individual from the action.
