It’s worth reading my previous post for context
My hands have just stopped shaking after hearing Jack Gantos talk to my students today about his cancelled book A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library. I prepared students well and they had some sharp and critical questions. Before the question session, I promised myself not to intervene as I wasn’t the person formally running the session. However, I did interject with two important fact-checks.
First, Gantos claimed that there was a First Amendment issue at stake when Abrams decided to cancel his book. Later, he then compared his case to cases where books have been banned.
When I challenged Gantos on the facts, the told me that “I can be right if I want to be,” implying that my interpretation of the First Amendment was just a matter of opinion. Yet, this framing of the issue - his first amendment rights have been violated and his book banned - would make him a cause for an organization like Amnesty International to take up. He actually said that he thought having the original short story published by Amnesty was a kind of protection that winded up being ‘Swiss Cheese.’ In reality, his publisher as a private corporation deciding not to publish the book is part of how consumer markets work - it’s not a constitutional issue.
In his recap of what led to his book getting cancelled, Gantos said that he was “shouted down” by an “online mob”, and now that he has been told to “stay in his lane”, he would “retreat” to his “white boy dog house.” There was so much that I wanted to say about this, but didn’t. Students had some very insightful follow-up questions.
But here I will express my concerns (and will let my students know tomorrow). When groups like the Asian Author Alliance pointed out their concerns about how the book would do real harm, an idea Gantos dismissed, this was a chance to step back and think about other perspectives. To then dismiss that criticism as a ‘mob attack’ - while ironically championing free speech - doubles down on the harm to Muslims. The whole point of the critique of the book was how Muslims are grouped together into a violent mob stereotype. If stories have power as Gantos claims, then why not listen closely to the stories of people who speak about the harm this book does to them?
As for the genesis of the story, in the Author’s Note at the end of the book, Gantos tells us that Amnesty International commissioned a short story, and he went to his usual spot in the Boston Public Library:
“I recalled the period in US history when it was a crime to teach and African American slave how to read and his this forced ignorance only strengthened the iron chains of slave-owner domination. Just then a boy’s cell phone went off. I turned and looked at him. He was wearing a red jacket. He was not holding a book. Instead, he reached into his pocked and pulled out a cell phone. He held it to his ear and did not speak. He nodded his head in agreement, then he stood up and quickly left the room through the doorway where overhead a paining of the Muse of Inspiration holds lightening bolts in his hands. One of these bolts struck me and I put my head down and wrote ‘A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library.’”
It’s possible Gantos could have thought a white child was being summoned by his white friend to commit the school shooting they had planned. I honestly don’t know what Gantos saw in this child that made him think he could be a Muslim suicide bomber instead of boy who promised his mother he would wait somewhere warm until she called him with a list of groceries to bring home after school. The book itself seems to be born of a damaging stereotype.
Gantos continues to explain his main message:
“At the heart of this book is my belief that literacy and freedom of expression create a shared culture that liberates us from violence and connects us through the power of stories.”
A fact check that I conducted with my students before Gantos arrived: illiteracy is not a cause of violence. Anders Behring Breivik wrote a 1,500 page manifesto about how Muslims were a plague on Europe before he bombed the Norwegian Parliament and dressed as a police officer to then massacre the children of left-wing politicians at a summer camp. You can probably think of other quite literate people who were violent. And many uneducated people who aren’t. As Riz Ahmed says, it’s important for people to be represented in our culture’s wider stories, to be able to see themselves as heroes in a national story. So I agree with Gantos that stories have power - which means that sometimes it’s worth reconsidering the effect of the stories we choose to tell.
As a last thought, when I woke up this morning, I read the news about another Christmas Market attack in Europe, where I happen to live. I knew I had to address this with my students because as the news was shaping up, it appears that a person who is Muslim and radicalized in European jails committed the attack.
My first move was to show students how white shooters are humanized in the headlines:
“Parkland shooter had a friend. She was 13 and lived across the country.”
“Nikolas Cruz’s birth mom had a violent, criminal past.”
“The tortured mind, abject isolation, and sinister worldview of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza.”
“Las Vegas shooting: gunman was on losing streak and ‘germophobic’, police say”
My point is that beyond expressing solidarity with victims in the form of #IAM hashtags, Muslims are expected to apologize for a religion of 1.7 billion people.
To bring this point home, we read some Amani Al-Katahtbeh (h/t to Julie Fellmayer for this source) who recounts how someone online told her that Muslims should expect to get searched more at airports: He responded, “No one else is killing innocent people like Muslims!”
She replied:
“It’s easy to think that way,” I Snapchatted him back. “What happens is that whenever Muslims do something wrong, they are always in the news and identified as their religion. When people of other faiths commit horrible acts, we are never told what religion they are because it’s deemed irrelevant, and they get to enjoy the privilege of being held accountable as individuals for their actions rather than having their background be collectively held accountable or blamed on their behalf. “The term ‘terrorism’ is only ever applied to Muslims, but never when it’s people of other faiths. Like the KKK, Christian conservatives that bomb abortion clinics, etc.,”
She goes on to talk about the costs of this narrative about Muslims:
Under microscopic scrutiny for terrorism and the collective expectation for us to constantly denounce, apologize, and take responsibility for the individual actions of extremists, we have severely internalized the public perception—empowered by media misrepresentation—of our communities as being made up of violent and crazy outsiders. As a result, we inadvertently prioritized shifting our image in the eyes of others rather than turning inward and cultivating our survival in this new trek we were forced to embark upon. I don’t blame our community for this. I feel that the horrible scapegoating we’ve had to endure has forced us into a corner of defensiveness, dissipating our energy in this endless game of pushing back against the misconceptions that ultimately victimize us.
Imperialism behaves in this way not only out of sheer contempt for peoples different than its own, but also in a deliberate effort to prevent these groups from building themselves up. It makes me sad to think about all the resources the Muslim American community has been forced to waste for the past decade on campaigns, events, and media efforts to prove that we, too, are American; that we, too, are human, begging and pleading the public to not believe the racist rhetoric being spewed about us.
As educators, what is at stake is whether or not our students will be the kind of people who hear criticism and recognize the people behind it, or perceive criticism as a mob attack. At stake is whether or not our Muslim students see us - and their fellow students - as affirming that they belong just as they are and without apology.
A primer on the First Amendment:
An overview by CNN in consultation with a law professor states: “Bottom line: It protects you from the government punishing or censoring or oppressing your speech.”
Or in the case of the NFL:
“The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting free speech. As a private company, the NFL is not subject to the same standard. If the NFL required players to sign contracts that restricted their free speech, and the players violated their contract, they could be fired with little legal recourse. However, Peter Shane, law professor at Ohio State University, points out that government pressure to fire the players would be against the law.”