#my father said if i decided to become a muslim he’d shoot me

[islanddboyy]

i don’t wanna make generalisations but why is it that only white people use slurs against me. like how do i explain it. everyone regardless of country and culture has the ability to be bigoted. and i also only know the slurs in english form. but like come on. istg anytime someone has called me a fag, tranny, lesbian and gay (all in the derogatory manner) they’ve been white kids or people heavily influenced by the west. like the kid who’s british that called me a tranny i get, he’s british. but the kid who called me a lesbian for years did so because of his obsession with the inbetweeners. again, don’t wanna make generalisations because everyone can be bigoted, but like what is up with the west and being massive dickheads.

[bestofthemoth]

Bearing Witness

D. Parvaz

In the summer of 2013 I was in Cairo, Egypt. I was on assignment for Al-Jazeera and I was covering a major political upheaval. The president at the time, a guy named Mohammad Morsi who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood party, had been deposed and jailed in what his supporters said was an illeigmiate military coup. So in protest they set up these sit-ins, two of them in the city. And it was this hot, crazy summer, really tense, and by the middle of August the government finally did what it had threatened to do, which was clear the sit-ins. But they did so with unabated violence. They started shooting at people in the sit-ins and in the surrounding neighborhoods around 7 in the morning and didn’t stop until well into the night, until pretty much everybody was either dead or arrested. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a massacre in broad daylight in a capital city of roughly 20 million. 

So the next day, along with a producer who worked in the local bureau and could translate Arabic for me, I went to a mosque where maybe 200 of these bodies were kept. A lot of them were also burned really badly and there were blocks of ice on top of them. And there were these family members going in and out of this mosque to identify their loved ones. It was intensely chaotic and emotional. So my colleague and I walk outside and we start talking to this woman. And she says her husband is among the dead and she’s shaking and in shock. She’s describing her last phone conversation with her husband when the shooting started. And she describes him as an engineer who was unarmed, and he was the father of her 4 children. And my colleague is translating and I’m not even looking, I’m in my notebook, furiously not wanting to miss a detail. And then he stops translating while she’s still talking and I look up at him finally, which is what he was waiting for, and the look on my face is like “Dude, what?” And he leans in and whispers, “Now would be a good time for you to put an arm around her. And this makes my little reporters brain totally short circuit. I am not a touchy-feely person. I don’t hug you for you to tell me your story. But the look on his face was just clear: get over yourself, be human now, and put your arm around her. 

So I really robotically lift my arm to put around her shoulder, and the second my hand touches her she collapses into my chest. And she’s a very very tiny woman, very petite. But she just sinks into me and starts sobbing as she’s holding onto me, and I’ve got my pen and paper and it  hits me really hard that this woman doesnt care what kind of reporter I am, or what my stupid little rules are. She wants me to register what is happening to her on the worst day of her life. She wants me to bear witness to what’s happening to her. And I should have known better, and in fact I did know better.

A few years prior to that in the spring of 2011 was the start of the uprising in Syria, what is now the civil war. And I was sitting in the newsroom, in Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, watching this grainy YouTube footage of civilians being mowed down by the Syrian military. And at the same time we had a government spokesperson on our airwaves claiming that this wasn’t really happening, that it was a distortion of the truth, there was a conspiracy. And we couldn’t confirm any of this because they’d already closed down our bureau in Damascus and they weren’t issuing journalists visas, so what to do? Well. I’m a multinational, I have an Iranian passport. So my boss agreed to deploy me to Syria, where I wouldn’t need a visa to enter, just to see what’s going on.

So I fly into Damascus and unfortunately for me at this point the Syrian authorities have already become super paranoid. So they go through my luggage and they find a satellite phone, which is not a big deal. If you travel in that part of the world you know that outside of major cities you don’t have cell phone coverage. You can buy a satellite phone at any shopping mall, it’s not spy gear. But this was enough for them to get really suspicious, so they strip searched me and found my American passport in the pocket of my jeans. And in this passport was a stamp from Al-Jazeera, my sponsored visa, for Qatar, it’s what I needed to reenter the country. And this escalated things. So they took me into an office. They sat me between these two guys on this couch. There’s all these other guys in the office chain smoking, banging out some kind of report on their computer about me. And when that report was done the two guys sitting on either side of me got up, and they strapped on a bunch of guns, and they peeled me from the couch, and they led me to the parking garage under the airport. And they sat me between them in the back seat, with another armed man in the front seat, and drove off into the night. 

We pulled into a compound, there were 3-4 checkpoints to get into this compound, so I assumed it was some sort of government building, where they pulled me out of the car by my hair and threw me in front of a desk in this dimly lit office. And there were all these men yelling at me and I looked down and saw that I was standing in a considerable amount of somebody else's blood. So they processed me for some kind of arrest, blind folded me, handcuffed me, and ended up taking me to an interrogation with a man who told me to call him Ferras. And nothing I said was accepted by Ferras. That I was a reporter, that I wasn’t part of some kind of conspiracy… he didn’t even believe that I didn’t speak Arabic. So I realized very quickly that truth had no currency there. They threw me into a cell that was absolutely covered in blood. Like, so much that I didn’t know where to stand or lean. So I squatted in this corner and tried to sort of wrap my head around the hell that I was in. 

Maybe an hour or two later a guy comes to the door. He blindfolds me and handcuffs me and I thought I was being taken to another interrogation, but he took me outside into a courtyard and slammed me up against the wall. And I could hear people being tortured a few feet away from me. And I could hear the guards joking, and laughing, and I could smell their cigarettes, they were just acting like regular employees on a coffee break. And I sat against that wall and I thought to myself, they’re going to kill me. And worse than that though, believe it or not, worse than dying, was the thought of dying like that. Which is to say, alone. Because I was alone. I couldn’t locate the humanity in the people around me. And I knew that I was going to be an anonymous body. If I was lucky they would throw me in a ditch, maybe. And my father would never have any peace, he’d never know what happened to me. And I’ve never been so alone in my life. 

After about 20 minutes shivering against this wall, and waiting to be shot in the head, I get pulled off and taken back inside. And I keep thinking, well they didn’t kill me, they didn’t kill me now, but they’re going to kill me, because why, why, why would they not allow a reporter to cover a street protest but see in here all of this, and live? Of course I’m going to write about it, why would they do this? I’m gonna die. They’re going to kill me. I’m gonna die. And this was on a pretty tight loop in my head as they threw me back in a cell. And I can hear people being tortured inside this compound, outside this compound, the voices kind of echo and come and go and blend in and then there’s this one voice that stands out. And I can’t exactly figure out why except that he sounded extremely young, he sounded like a teenager, a boy. And I could tell that there was more than one person hurting him, and he was just howling. He was swearing he didn’t know things, swearing to God he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was calling out to God, calling out to his mother, and I couldn’t take it anymore. It was brutal. And so I put my hands up to my ears to just try to block it out. And the second I did that I felt such shame. Because I realized that this kid was in his own, far worse version of the wall -- that's where he was. He was alone. He was dying alone. That’s what was happening. And so I pulled my hands down, just to do what I could, which was to hear him. I couldn’t call out to him to say, “I hear you're not alone,” couldn't identify him, I didn’t know his name, couldn’t contact his family, couldn’t do anything. All I had was the ability to bear witness in that fashion. The kid was choking on his own blood, in his own country, and nobody was going to know. I felt that it was the least I could do. So I listened to him for a while, and every scream was excruciating. It was like a hole being cut inside me with every one of them. And then rather abruptly, his voice just stopped. 

So a couple of days later the Syrians decided that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for them to permanently disappear an Iranian citizen because they have a good relationship with the Iranian government. So they sent me to Iran via extraordinary rendition for additional questioning for another couple of weeks at another prison there. And much to my surprise the Iranain authorities freed me and sent me back to my family. Which was great, I needed the time off for a little bit, but I didn’t want to not be working. I didn’t need to go to a spa and to breathe alpine air. What I needed was to get back to work. Because not being busy and not working meant the wall was always there. I could feel it. And I wanted to push back against that feeling. I couldn’t wait to get back to work, so I did. The second I could I flung myself back into my job. Every assignment if they didn't give me the assignment I would fight for it. Egypt, Libya, nuclear meltdown in Japan, didn’t matter, I was doing it. And I succeeded. A little too well, in pushing back against that wall and that feeling. And what I did in doing so was I also built a distance between myself and the things that I was reporting on, the people I was reporting on. 

But when that woman in Egypt fell into my chest and started crying in the second that it took her to fall into me and cry she destroyed that distance. Entirely eradicated it. And I was back at the wall, and the boy’s voices in my head. And as painful as it is, I realized that it was necessary to bear witness, fully, to what’s happening to someone beyond the couple of paragraphs they might actually get in the story. And as much as some stories will leave a mark, sometimes that’s just what it takes.

Live at The Moth

[theconservativebrief]

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas has been on the New York Times’s best-seller list for 66 weeks now, and for most of those weeks, it’s been at No. 1. (Occasionally it slips down to No. 2 for a bit.) It’s a bona fide sensation of a book, and with good reason: It’s a YA novel that handles the problems of police shooting unarmed black men with thoughtfulness, warmth, and profound empathy.

The central character in The Hate U Give is Starr, a 16-year-old black girl who has become a master of code-switching as she travels back and forth between her white private school and her black home neighborhood. Starr is the only witness to the police shooting of her childhood friend Khalil, and over the course of the book, she becomes the center of the ensuing fallout.

The Hate U Give is now being adapted into a movie, slated for release this fall, directed by George Tillman Jr. and starring The Hunger Games’ Amandla Stenberg. At New York City’s BookCon last week, author Angie Thomas joined Tillman and Stenberg for a panel discussion, along with Girl Meets World’s Sabrina Carpenter, who plays Starr’s controlling white friend Hailey. Fielding questions from Cori Murray, the entertainment director of Essence magazine, the four talked about the empathy-building power of books, the difficulty of code-switching, and what “the hate u give” really means.

Following are highlights from the panel conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Angie Thomas

I first got the idea to write the story when I was a senior in college. I was a lot like Starr at that time. I lived in these two very different words: my neighborhood, which was mostly black, and my school, which was a mostly white, private, upper-class Christian college in conservative Mississippi. My classmates were basically those Trump voters who say that they love Jesus but don’t want anyone to have any rights.

When I was in school, I had to be two different people. I tell people all the time, I would leave my house playing Tupac, but by the time I got to the school, I was playing Jonas Brothers. (Don’t judge me.)

While I was in school, there was a young man by the name of Oscar Grant who lost his life in Oakland, California. And although that was thousands of miles away, it affected conversations right there in Jackson, Mississippi. In my neighborhood, Oscar was one of us. He was an ex-con. I knew guys just like him who were trying to turn their lives around. In my school, my classmates were like, “Maybe he deserved it. He was an ex-con. Why are people so upset? He should just have done what they told him to do.”

Now, if you know anything about Oscar Grant, his death was caught on tape, and it showed him laying flat on his stomach as the cops shot him in the back. There was nothing he could have done at that moment.

I was angry, I was hurt, I was frustrated, and I felt like I had two options. I could either a) burn down that entire school campus, or I could b) use those emotions and do something productive with them. I didn’t burn the school down. It’s sitting pretty over in Jackson, Mississippi, and they even gave me an award for alumni of the year. I decided to write.

I wrote this short story about a boy named Khalil who was a lot like Oscar, and this girl named Starr who lived in these two different worlds, a lot like I did. And that’s essentially how The Hate U Give was born.

Angie Thomas

I’ve had several people come up to me this week and say that the last few pages made them cry, where Starr gives off the names [of the victims of police shootings]. I wrote that the same week that both Philando Castile and Alton Sterling lost their lives. And if you remember anything about that week, those videos of their deaths were played over and over and over again. And I remember having this moment where I was like, “What’s the point of writing this book? It is not going to change anything.” I felt so hopeless.

My mom told me, “No, that’s why you have to write it.” She said, “You don’t know who’s going to pick this up one day and what they’re going to do one day.”

That’s what kept me going. Because I truly believe that books create empathy, and empathy is more powerful than sympathy. And I have to believe that if some of our current political leaders read books about black kids as kids, we wouldn’t have to say, “Black lives matter.” If they read books about Muslim children, we wouldn’t have to fight against bans. If they read books about LGBTQA youth, we wouldn’t have to fight for rights. If they read books about Latino children, they’d talk about building bridges instead of walls.

When I thought about that, that’s what pushed me forward, what made me decide to keep going with the book even as we see these things happening. What made me keep going was the idea that some kid picks it up today; he’ll later be a politician with a Twitter account.

Sabrina Carpenter

I didn’t want to approach [Hailey] like the mean girl or the character that everyone obviously hates, because I think there’s a lot of these people in our lives that we don’t hate.

I think she really is one of those people that isn’t seeing all of her actions as racist. It’s kind of uncomfortable for her to talk about, and that’s why her relationship with Starr is so unhealthy. Because they really do just brush over everything, and that’s kind of how their friendship always has been, I think. They never really get to the point of what they need to discuss; they never tackle their obstacles. They really just kind of get through it and get by.

George Tillman Jr.

As an African American, I always had that conversation, but it came from many different places. It came from my uncles; it came from my father. How do you act around a police officer? What if you’re approached? What if you did something wrong, or what if you get pulled over? All of that is just to save your kid, to get them to the next level, to go to college, be able to do things differently, to change racism. There are a lot of things at stake.

We put that conversation at a really early age, when Starr is 8 or 9 years old. So the two young kids that played that scene, I didn’t give them any context as to what that scene was about. Just, “Sit down, sit down at that table, just listen, that’s the most important thing.” So that scene that you see, that’s just them taking in all this information.

Amandla Stenberg

My experience growing up was the same as Starr’s. I lived in a black community, but I went to a white private school. I think that gave me some superpowers in some ways that I think a lot of black girls have to gain, which is the ability to navigate different environments and code-switch between them, and know how your mannerisms and the way that you speak are going to affect the way people interpret you, and therefore how you succeed or don’t in certain atmospheres.

At my school, I learned very early on how to navigate white institutions, being around a culture of wealth and a culture of whiteness. And that gave me some really important skills when it comes to navigating Hollywood as well, and navigating the environment in industries that are dominated by white men.

But I think it’s something that we have to figure out how to do, and sometimes it can feel confusing. It feels like maybe certain parts of you can feel more valid than others, or you have to hide different parts of yourself, or you’re having to put yourself into smaller boxes.

I think what’s really special about Starr’s narrative when it comes to the code switch of her identity is that at the end of the film, she learns how to feel cohesive in herself, and realizes that she doesn’t need to choose one side of herself. She doesn’t need to hide aspects of herself. She can be however she wants to be in her environment without being afraid of being called ratchet or being afraid of seeming angry or of seeming over the top. She learns how to break free of those burdens, and also realizes that those two sides of herself don’t need to be warring sides but can coexist in a really beautiful, harmonious way to make her the person that she is.

Angie Thomas

Tupac had that THUG LIFE tattoo across his abdomen, but a lot of people don’t know it was an acronym for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fs Everybody.” He explained that as meaning that what society feeds into you has a way of affecting us all.

He said this in 1992 in reference to the Los Angeles riots. A lot of people associate those riots with the beating of Rodney King, but it was also in response to the shooting death of a 15-year-old girl named Latasha Harlins. As a matter of fact, “Keep Ya Head Up” was dedicated to Latasha.

Latasha was in a store, and the store owner accused her of stealing a bottle of juice. Latasha put the money on the counter, and footage shows her walking away when the store owner shot her in the head. She only received probation.

Tupac said the hate that was given to that little infant Latasha affected the entire city of Los Angeles. We’re talking millions of dollars in damages. The hate that was given to Trayvon Martin affected the entire city of Sanford, Florida. That hate that was given to Tamir Rice affected the entire city of Cleveland, Ohio. The hate that was given to Michael Brown affected the entire city of Ferguson, [Missouri]. So if Pac were here, he’d say that’s THUG LIFE.

Original Source -> The Hate U Give’s creative team talks turning the best-seller into a movie

via The Conservative Brief