The Timidness of non-White Activism

Shed your timidness, and learn how to decentre the silence of Whiteness

In the name of Allah, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

My grandfather, Rashid ibn Hassan Ali Barakat, may he rest in peace, told me long ago something I hold deep in my heart, and I wish to open this lesson with:

Leave your money underneath you so that it raises you, even if it is a blessing. Never put your money above yourself, because it will crush you into the earth.

خلي المصاري تحت رجلك حتى ولو كانت نعمة، عمرك ما تحط مصاريك فوق رأسك لأنه رح تنزلك تحت التراب

This is something I offer to everyone. When you put the concerns of this life above yourself, it will drive you into your grave, and you will have been a slave to desires that will never be satisfied. Money is necessary in a capitalist society, but if you place your morality at the whim of money, you will find yourself without either. Define your morality and set your boundaries, so you will have a moral compass that cannot be corrupted by momentary whims or greed.

To finalise this point, I will document a very short history of this through my family.

My grandfather on my Lebanese side, born in 1934 and passed away in 2023, always stood for justice and righteousness. When the Jewish terrorist groups (as they were called in the 1940s by the world until they were legitimated much later) terrorised Palestinians and slaughtered thousands, my grandfather did not hesitate to call it for what it was: colonialism. He, who predated the Lebanese independent state, knew from childhood what colonialism was and refused to learn French growing up. He was not alone; his father had fought in the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) against Ottoman rule.

My grandfather is on the left, pictured in the late-1960s-early-1970s with his younger brother, Abdul-Razzaq.

Pictured here is my grandfather’s father, Hassan, with his rifle and bandolier (cropped from a group photo). The date is unknown, and I can only infer that it is from the early 1900s, but the photo has suffered significant deterioration.

For both men, there was no possible notion of being afraid to stand for what was righteous. For my grandfather, not making clear the distinction between right and wrong was symbolic of a person who has misplaced their sense of justice for their continued ‘comfort.’ This comfort would no sooner drive them into the earth in servitude than it would deliver them liberation. To put the money below your feet meant refusing to let yourself be controlled by the pursuit of money. But it also means recognising that your moral compass should not be guided by those who offer you money for the compromise of your activism; do not work where you must be silent about what afflicts you.

This is the source of my resolve; it is to be brave or to be subservient to forces that seek only to further your oppression. Or, as my grandfather was taught by his father, who was taught by his father, and so forth:

‏الذي يستحي لا يغلب

The timid one does not succeed/overcome

This is my mantra and is what drives my moral compass and my activism, as it drove my ancestors. To be brave means to take a moral stand for what is right, regardless of the company you are in. It means that you do not silence yourself to make people comfortable with their injustices, and this is the subject of this article.

The Self-Regulating Power of White Supremacy

In every conversation you have, you are being political. In every action you take and every choice you make, you have taken an action informed by your sense of morality—what you believe to be best.

What afflicts many of our non-White activists is a self-imposed desire to ‘maintain the peace;’ we wish not to bother our White friends, employers, colleagues, and the White public. We have issues that so painfully suffocate us, but let us maintain their peace on their behalf without ever considering why we do so.

In this way, we have become both our regulators and our victims, without ever needing a White person to tell you that they do not care for your issues or that you have bothered them. You do your job pre-emptively and do not even give yourself the chance to breathe. To even choke out the words “I am human, and I have pains that afflict me; how can you not see?”

As Albert Memmi discussed, to accept this role of self-policing means to forget oneself and contribute to your own colonisation:

As long as he tolerates colonization, the only possible alternatives for the colonized are assimilation or petrifaction. Assimilation being refused [to] him, as we shall see, nothing is left for him but to live iso­lated from his age. He is driven back by colonization and, to a certain extent, lives with that situation. Planning and building his future are forbidden. He must therefore limit himself to the present, and even that present is cut off and abstract. We should add that he draws less and less from his past. The colonizer never even recognized that [the colonized] had one; everyone knows that the commoner whose origins are unknown has no history. Let us ask the colonized himself: who are his folk heroes? His great popular leaders? His sages? At most, he may be able to give us a few names, in complete disorder, and fewer and fewer as one goes down the generations. The colonized seems condemned to lose his memory. The memory which is assigned him is certainly not that of his people. The history which is taught him is not his own. He knows who Colbert or Cromwell was, but he learns nothing about Khaz­nadar; he knows about Joan of Arc, but not about El Kahena. Everything seems to have taken place out of his country. He and his land are nonentities or exist only with reference to the Gauls, the Franks or the Marne. In other words, with reference to what he is not.

But what exactly does it mean to practice self-policing? Let me give you an example we can all relate to. Say you are at work discussing with your colleague, and they ask how you are. Although your entire mind, and therefore your soul, is consumed by the misery back home, you answer in pleasantries. When they ask for your opinion, you give them what is ‘easiest,’ or what you assume will help avoid the conversation you are dying not to have because they will judge you. And it is that fear of being judged, of being seen as an equal being politically, that prevents you from speaking. Though your white colleagues are free to express their politics with badges, pins, email signatures, stickers, in small talk, and on their lanyards, you strip yourself of any politics.

You are somehow a body devoid of life. Even if they ask you about what is happening in Palestine, your response is meek; you give them nothing more than the absolute bare minimum. Careful not to face ‘consequences,’ the extent to which you have set for yourself in the anxious fear that they may disagree, you tell them what you assume to be their position, or as close to it as you can get. Can it be that they care more about it than you, or is it that they do not feel the same petrifying fear of being seen? Are you afraid to be known to have political views that vindicate that you are, in fact, human? Was it not politics that displaced you, or do you think they believe you appeared here for no reason? No, and your body gave it away a long time ago.

Why do you do it? Because it is not for your comfort that you do it; these conversations you avoid only further your pain, and every single time they make a harmful statement and you are silent about it, you become complicit in its normalisation. Yes, because then they will use those words against your kin, and when someone finally breaks out of the perfect victimhood they were so certain would bring them on par with Whiteness, your name will be invoked as the guarantor for bigotry. So-and-so was okay with it. But you were not okay with it; you were never okay with it. You only tried to convince yourself that you were because you thought it would go away and that they would eventually give you the coveted prize—a bright medal that so proudly exclaims, “I am one of the good ones.”

For what purpose are you one of the good ones if, in becoming one of the good ones, you only sign off on your own people’s persecution? You have become a tool of oppression. And for the Muslims, I invoke the following verse:

وَأَنفِقُوا۟ فِى سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ وَلَا تُلْقُوا۟ بِأَيْدِيكُمْ إِلَى ٱلتَّهْلُكَةِ ۛ وَأَحْسِنُوٓا۟ ۛ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يُحِبُّ ٱلْمُحْسِنِينَ

Spend in God’s cause: do not contribute to your destruction with your own hands, but do good, for God loves those who do good.

Surah 2, Al-Baqarah, Verse 286

Translated by Abdul Haleem

So, you do it for their comfort. And this is what the power dynamic is in your interactions; it is never apolitical because what you have assumed to be apolitical was merely what made White people comfortable. You sacrifice your comfort to appease others, and that has become the norm, which you then self-police. The norm was never apolitical.

So now that you have become aware of this, what will you do? Will you continue to accept your lot, so that you will one day become a person forgotten by both your people and those whose approval you so desperately sought? Who will tell your tale in a way that glorifies you if you are currently afraid to do so yourself?

I tell you what you must do: you must shed your timidity. You must no longer play the game of pretending to be a person free of afflictions, as though your people do not have a terminal illness that you aid and abet by refusing to mention it. Do you not realise that you have a responsibility to them? They who suffer wish only to be heard in the hope that they may plead their case, and though you have been sent into the heart of the beast to speak, you are silent. This is your responsibility; this is what you owe them.

You are not a person without a community, and you are not a person without people. This is a flaw of the Western nuclear family driven by an individualistic drive inherent to capitalism; it is a curse you must not be beholden to. Do not fall for those who tell you that you act only for yourself and that you owe nothing to anyone when you express your own identity. What? Do you mean to tell me that every Palestinian in the West owes nothing to the Palestinians in Gaza? No, and remove entirely this colonial myth from your mind. This is the very first step to forgetting your identity and shedding your skin so that you become a skinless, cultureless, and soulless person—one who wanders aimlessly in pain but cannot articulate where the pain is. You owe everything to your ancestors, who struggled to exist and who fought to pass their identity down so that their descendants would never forget who they were and who they could be. After all, traditions are not simply the past but rather they are the attributes of our very selves, they are what guide us into the future in a manner that does not require us to be flattened into the earth for a system that was not designed for us.

You, therefore, are a product of this cycle of pain. To be timid about it means to comfort those who care only for their success, which inevitably comes at your expense. To be silent is to, therefore, practice self-policing. Your mask of apathy will soon become welded to you, and you will find it impossible to even see yourself in the mirror without first, subconsciously, thinking about yourself in the White man gaze. You will do the coloniser’s job for free, while they are paid billions by others who are keen to preserve the wealth this exploitative system generates for them. They are paid to devise strategies that incentivise you to self-police yourself. The question “Do you condemn xyz?” is relatively new, and yet the media has weaponised it to offer a financial reward to the short-sighted ones who will happily exploit their own people to profit momentarily. This leg-up on the shoulders of one’s community is a vile ladder that no sooner leads to heaven than it does to alienation.

And alienation from one’s own people is prison, not liberation. You think that the horizons have expanded because you assume that you no longer owe them responsibilities, but all you have done is blind yourself to who you are. You, in your prison cell, have closed your eyes and exclaimed in joy, “There are no walls; I am free!” You are free only in your delusion.

If some of you only knew what your ancestors suffered, you would never rest another day in peace. If you knew only how much they struggled, you would never forgive their oppressors, who have now become your oppressors. If you knew what they stole from you when they colonised you, you would demand every single dollar back, and who could deny you this right they have infringed on? Because the money never left, the wealth they stole from you and invested in every single institution of colonisation compounded into trillions, and the money you lost prevented your people from investing in anything other than what was permitted for you. The greatest lie they told you was that colonisation is over, because so long as the wealth has not been returned, it is not over. Though they have told you that your lands are barren and without wealth, it is Europe that is barren. Europe has nothing except that which it has stolen. Save for the settler-colonies, which have affixed themselves parasitically to the Indigenous wealth, every single European nation is built on top of what it has stolen. It is a race to see who is the greatest thief and, in recent times, who is best able to lie about it. Even the trillions they spend on their armies, which they in turn use against you, came from the wealth they stole from you. So they steal your wealth, then funnel it into institutions and weapons created for the sole purpose of keeping the boot on your neck to continue stealing from you without you being able to object. So your lands have wealth, and yet you do not even see a dollar of it. Why? Is it not yours?

If you do not know about your ancestors, you must learn. You must find any method to learn and memorise, commit their names and their toils to your heart, and then pass it down. You inherited their struggles; why do you wish to not inherit their strength? I tell you why, because the colonisers are petrified of the strength you have and the strength your people have demonstrated. When you diminish yourself and place your head at their feet, they have won. You are your ancestors spokesperson, you are your ancestors keeper, and you must be the embodiment of their strength, which for centuries forced the West to devise these long-term strategies because they knew your ancestors would rather die than placate their oppressors. You are the target; you are the ones the West hopes will be meek enough to forget what was done to them so the West can bury the past.

So you must resist, in whatever manner possible. You must, because you have inherited the struggles of your ancestors. Do not assume that if you do nothing, that the struggle ceases to exist, because when you give up, you simply tell the West, “You have won; I no longer wish to exist.” Your very existence, after all, is resistance. Even something as simple as refusing to adopt a White nickname, which is a horrible practice that severs you from the beauty of your name. If you are named after your ancestors, you owe it to them to embody the name as they did. Names are part of your culture and your traditions; they tell stories. My grandfather’s grandfather was Ahmed, and he resisted his entire life. It is my responsibility to carry on this resistance because I will be asked about it when we meet again.

Speak. You have a mind that reasons and rationalises; use it to speak out against the injustice that suffocates you. Do not pretend to be stupid, because you are not maintaining apoliticality; rather, you are maintaining a White supremacist peace. This White peace you so diligently help upkeep for free, to benefit the comfort of the White consciousness, is legitimised by your surrender, by your willing admission that your concerns and your issues are not as important as theirs. Lift your head and speak; have pride in yourself; do not feel that your issues are not of concern. You are a product of your problems; you cannot exist independently of them. When you ignore that which has molded your very character, you ignore yourself; you set yourself to the side and centre Whiteness.

Speak; this is your responsibility. You were assigned it by your ancestors; there is no shirking from it because, in the avoidance of this task, you willingly contribute to your own oppression. And to rise to this responsibility, you must have pride in who you are and in the cultures and histories that gave birth to you.

إِنَّ شَرَّ ٱلدَّوَآبِّ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلصُّمُّ ٱلْبُكْمُ ٱلَّذِينَ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ

the worst creatures in God’s eyes are those who are [wilfully] deaf and dumb, who do not reason.

Surah 8, Al-Anfal, Verse 22

And Allah knows best.