I just discovered a series of blogs written on Rolling Ruminations re. White Muslims and the interactions of religion, nationality and race. This ain’t my own writing, but damn this is fascinating!
http://sheerfluency.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/the-carnival-is-here-white-privilege-and-the-ummah/
Privilege. A funny thing, one hell of a loaded word.
Interestingly enough, it’s one of those things that you don’t realize you have till you’ve lost it. Like much in life, to invoke that cliche.
My family was privileged in pre-Independence India. They were members of the Muslim aristocracy. The aristocrats of Hyderabad, my family’s hometown, had land, money, and power. The Nawabi class (as they were called) were not unlike the lords and ladies of the British nobility.
Well, that was until a little thing called Partition came along in 1947.
Almost overnight, our ancestral lands were seized by the new Indian government, bank accounts frozen, and a complete reversal of power had taken place. In the years that came after, my grandparents’ generation had to rebuild from what they had lost. But the memories and bearing of privilege remained–as well as the damning realization that privilege is a flimsy and fleeting thing. As easily as it is bestowed, it is taken away.
That bitter knowledge was transmitted to the next generation–my parents, and eventually on to me. And now it comes full circle, as I attend school replete with the children of wealthy American aristocracy, “legacies” and the like who have lived so fully and blindly within their inherited money and privilege that they hardly even realize that its there.
It’s all sardonically entertaining to me, as I grew up on the opposite end of the stick–public school, state college, and little money–inherited or otherwise. But I did grow up knowing full well that my family HAD been uniquely privileged once.
But having seen two sides of the coin, I find myself in a unique place: To view aristocracy, privilege, power remotely and see it for what it truly is. That elitism is as much pageantry as it is actual power, that it is fully constructed and ultimately transitory, and how social status is an tool of economic and political advantage like no other.
Privilege is power, power is privilege. And unless you’ve had it taken away, little do you know how key it is to your success.
DAM performing
Straight from the mouth of Tamer, one of the founding members of the Palestinian hip hop trio DAM.
I had the incredible opportunity of hanging with the aforementioned Tamer, one of the most famous hip hop artists in the Arab world. We got to talking about the significance of this music outside Palestine. I told him about my background, as an Indian Muslim and about the violent oppression and subjugation of my people. The second largest Muslim population the world, the largest Muslim minority by far, treated like shit.
“Same shit, different country, man….Oppressed people are oppressed everywhere.”
No joke. But it brings home an interesting point. When we look at the up-and coming hip hop artists with a decidedly political bent: MIA, K’Naan, Blue Scholars, Sons of Hagar, Narcicyst, Brother Ali, DAM to name a few–we see what is shared: the conception of art as a form of explicit political resistance. Art as a conceptualization of defiance in the face of unchecked, brutal domination. I’d like to see any of the lame-as-shit, sell out Fitty Cent imitators in this country measure to that standard.
I might not be Palestinian or Sri Lankan, but when I hear DAM’s “Born Here” or MIA’s “Paper Planes” (which, by the way, is actually a political song with a sly subtext) I feel camaraderie and inspiration, that we are all brothers and sisters of the same cause. To stand up and put into words and music what is unspeakable: genocide, oppression, violence, and every now and then: hope.
It’s entertaining, yeah–but art is pretty damn powerful when you see the message behind those beats and rhymes.
