Blog

Last summer a single dad friend of mine reported that his daughter, who is African American, asked him why they didn’t see very many other dads and other “brown kids” at the park. It’s a fair question (though I have to say that most folks wouldn’t object to hanging out with this white mom on a regular basis). Sometimes in this sugar cookie of a state we blonde-haired blue-eyed white people only ever see other blonde-haired blue-eyed white people in the course of our day so if you want to have diversity in your life you need to actively seek it out. It was in this spirit that I took my children to Meet the Muslims in Utah at the Utah Islamic Center in Sandy.

The Utah Islamic Center has opened their doors for visitors in a monthly open house for some time now but a surge in interest in the event caused them to open their doors to visitors every Friday in February and also some Sundays. That’s how I ended up finding out about the opportunity: a friend of mine responded to the Facebook event made by the Islamic Center. My sister and I took our kids (five between us) in the hope that knowing about the Muslims in Utah would give them greater understanding about their community and greater perspective on world events. What actually happened was even better than that.

We had a hard time finding the mosque because it was tucked into a corner of strip mall with nothing to call attention to it beyond an ordinary looking sign that could just as easily have read “CarpetsPlus.” They share an entrance and a grey, Berber carpeted hallway with a couple of other fairly ordinary looking office spaces and don’t even approach what you might imagine a mosque would look like until you are in the sanctuary itself. Unfortunately, because of this we ended up being late and missing the 7:30 prayer (still kicking myself over that!). When we arrived (and removed our shoes), we slipped into an open space on the carpet in the main area of worship with about 90 other people, including a fair amount of children.

I had thought that the entire event was more of an open house format so I began to get nervous when an hour passed and we were still listening to presentations from the Iman and other members of the mosque. I found them fascinating, but I’ve been to enough LDS stake conferences with my children to know what their limits are as far as listening to adults talk about serious things. It’s a pretty low threshold. I imagined that any minute they would start running circles around the sanctuary, much to the horror of our hosts and the mothers of all of the children currently sitting quietly upright on three sides of me. My children were starting to get a little lounge-y as it got later and later in the evening and I questioned the wisdom of what I was attempting. Perhaps the Muslims in Utah wouldn’t be so excited that I had brought along my wiggly LDS kids to disrupt their event!

We ended up staying at least another hour past the speakers, though, because we got caught up talking one-on-one with the members of the mosque. The children busied themselves with looking at the pictures on the wall, reading literature on Islam, interacting with the other children in attendance, and eating all the sweets they could get their hands on. I cautiously approached a woman wearing both a scarf on her head and a veil over her face. The woman who had talked about women’s issues and Islam during the presentation had encouraged us to approach women wearing hijab during the refreshments portion of the evening to talk with them about their personal reasons for choosing to do so and I knew that in regular life I may not have another opportunity. I especially knew that I would not feel comfortable approaching a woman wearing such an extreme form of hijab not due to fear but because nothing says “stay away” as much as covering everything but your eyes.

The woman, whose name she taught me how to pronounce but which I have no idea how to spell, was vivacious and bubbly—not at all what you would imagine from a woman conservative enough to cover her face almost entirely on a regular basis. She was passionate about her choice to wear hijab but said that the reasons were so personal and intimate that she didn’t want to be one of the presenters even though her husband encouraged her to do so. She said she did not grow up in a very strict, religious household but had a religious awakening in college and began to cover her hair in the hijab as a way to find more religious focus. When just covering her hair did not give her entirely the focus she wanted, she started covering her face too. She doesn’t wear it all the time (she understands some may find it intimidating) but she did note that when she was dating her husband he never saw her face until they were engaged. We had a great conversation about her experience wearing the hijab and the experience of non-Muslims encountering Muslims in Utah. First and foremost, my concern would be to not make such a woman feel uncomfortable. Since I was not familiar with the religious context of veiling the face, I would hesitate to approach simply because I wouldn’t want to offend. I assured her that as an LDS woman, I felt empathy with the struggles that Muslims in Utah might face. We certainly have our own history of the general population misunderstanding and demonizing our religion.

We also had a lovely chat with an older man named Sam, who explained more about the mosque (all 150 of the children meet in that same sanctuary in different corners for their religious instruction! Imagine holding all Sunday School classes in the gym of the church) and told us about his experience immigrating to the U.S.  I was in and out of this conversation as I was tracking my youngest in her circular path through the crowd, balancing books on her head. Yes, seriously. Books on her head. Eventually we parted, wishing we could stay longer. I asked my children what they thought of the evening and they were similarly engaged, citing things in even the more presentational (read: traditionally boring for kids) part of the evening. We talked all the way home in the car about what we had learned and what our impressions were.

As I thought about it, I realized that beyond gaining a greater understanding for Islam and for Muslims in Utah the event was also an opportunity to strengthen community ties and stand up with a potentially vulnerable group in our country. The members of the mosque were very genuinely happy we were there and we were very genuinely happy to be there. They wanted to be part of us and we wanted to be part of them. Rather than being separate groups with different cultural practices, we were all Utahns seeking to spread love and understanding. It made me feel really good to be able to do something proactive to show my support for Muslims in Utah and it was extremely gratifying to have those positive feelings reflected back. The evening was full of hope. While negative aspects of the national conversation about Muslims were acknowledged, the underlying assumption was that we were here because we all wanted to have a positive relationship. No one was guarded. No one was angry. It was just lovely. It was exactly as the world should be.

Originally published in the Southern Utah Independent on February 25, 2017: Meet the Muslims in Utah

A food staple when I was growing up in Arizona was a Mexican-ish dish with lots of beans and spices. We called it Wetback Special. Because this term was never used in any other context in my family, I was at least 17 before I realized it was a derogatory term for illegal immigrants (who were generally from Mexico). In fact, many of the adults in the extended family didn’t realize this either. My family, like the families of most voters, did not teach me to hate people because they were different. We were schooled in equality, love, and inclusion. But we also ate Wetback Special. As I struggle to understand why people I love and respect voted for a candidate who embraces discriminatory language, practices, and political groups I keep coming back to that story. And as I hear everyone talking about being ok or not being ok (now or in the future) I wonder how many of my smart, thoughtful Republican voter friends are currently eating Wetback Special for dinner?

When I reached out to people I respect to talk with them about their vote (try it! It’s fun to talk respectfully with people you disagree with), I found that much of their reasoning focused more on the idea of a Republican administration and less on the candidate himself. In fact, one Republican voter said that the Access Hollywood tapes were nearly a deal breaker for her, until she thought about what she hoped to be the effects of a Republican administration. I approached it from an entirely opposite angle: more about the candidate and less about the Republican/Democrat divide. The reason for this was threefold: 1) the sky has not fallen in these years with Democrats in the White House (speaking, of course, from my own limited perspective) 2) party affiliation, in and of itself, does not qualify a person to govern 3) the Republican candidate did not/does not represent what I would call Republican values. It wasn’t a choice between Republican or Democrat for me. It was a choice between a person espousing inflammatory policies and empowering the worst impulses of our society and a person who, to put it succinctly, knows how to behave in polite society.

The interesting thing I found in my research was that every Republican voter I talked with agreed that the Republican candidate’s behavior was poor. Nobody defended him, personally. One Republican voter even went so far as to say “he is me from 10 years ago so I know he can change.” He felt that this was a person who could change for the better in office. The Democrat? Not so much. I noted that those were some pretty ambitious therapy goals for a guy with a very busy schedule and, from all appearances, zero desire to change, but this Republican voter remained convinced that the mantle of the presidency would be enough to expunge the excesses of the campaign. One voter dismissed troubling behavior by noting that it was just another example of the bad parts of our society that were already there and accepted (which seems about as good of reasoning as choosing to eat dirt because Pica exists).

I didn’t go around asking people who they voted for (my research was with self-identified Republican voters) but I suspect that the people running around on November 9^th talking about being ok were this sort of voter. That’s how they could talk themselves into voting for someone so personally offensive. They felt it would be ok in the end. I can’t fault them for that entirely. Isn’t that how a lifelong Republican voter talks herself into voting for a Democrat? Where we differ is what things we felt were insurmountable.

And to make sense of that, I go back to the Wetback Special. The immediate universe I lived in as a child was a place where people didn’t call each other offensive names so I didn’t have personal knowledge of why that is harmful (though I certainly knew the concept in general terms). Is it possible that people could dismiss sexist and racist rhetoric not because their core beliefs are sexist and racist but because they do not viscerally understand the impact of what they know, generally, to be wrong? Are they so insulated from the effects of authoritarian men, sexual predators, and just plain crazy folks that it doesn’t seem like a big deal?

Even as I listened to my friends soften their candidate’s extreme positions and talk about the troubles they have seen with the Democratic administration, though, all I could think of was how these people that I love and trust listened to a man defend himself against rape allegations by saying the woman wasn’t pretty enough to rape and, by their actions in the voting booth, just shrugged their shoulders. That wasn’t media spin. That wasn’t 10 years ago. That wasn’t “out of context.” That was straight from his own lips. And the thought of people I trust being ok (in any way) with casual approval of sexual assault makes me feel unsafe. I don’t know how long it will be until that feeling subsides (or if it will). One Republican voter kept begging me to tell him what he could do to make me feel safe and (since he couldn’t—and probably wouldn’t—go back in time and change his vote) I had nothing for him. It’s like turning on the blender and then saying “How can I make this smoothie into a piece of fruit for you?” Maybe stop letting stuff like this go. Recognize that words have impact. And recognize the small and large ways that we do this stuff too (and then stop it).

Some time ago, and with a bit of the necessary family drama, we stopped eating Wetback Special. We call it Mexican Haystacks now (due to its vague resemblance to another family favorite–a dish called Hawaiian Haystacks). And while it is still the same beans, spices, and corn chips, it tastes so much better. We can’t change the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. We can’t make the smoothie a piece of fruit again. But maybe we can stop eating Wetback Special.

[This opinion column was first published in The Southern Utah Independent on December 3, 2016: The Republican Voter and Being OK (or not)]