My Prejudices

My feelings and prejudices about the Middle East are as mixed now as they have ever been - if not more so. Since I am not from this culture, and I have never spent time there, I do not feel that I have a right to judge them. I have spent my college career specializing on women’s rights, so when I hear of honor killings and prisons full of women whose charges are mere rumors or doing things that I take for granted my heart breaks.

I have never been a person to hate, but to seek out understanding, so in this issue I am doing the same. I want to understand what leads to such actions and if education, as we are taught in the West, is the key to "enlightenment". If women are given choices will they choose tradition, or an easier path for their lives? Will they be able to withstand the scorn of their communities for this choice? Are there men who would stand behind those decisions with them? … These questions and many others continue to swirl through my head and I wonder how many are based in my own biases and prejudices and how many are legitimate questions.

I work on my campus with Amnesty International and the Sierra Club’s population division, so I am constantly reminded of every person’s shared humanity. I know there are fundamentalists that seek to return Islam to what it once was, but I also know that there are the same factions within Christianity and Judaism, as other religions, that express their concern in their own unique and often terribly painful ways.

As with any of my travels my concern is that my knowledge is purely academic in nature and while my work with AI has left my heart torn on the issues of occupied Palestine, all I know is what I have been able to glean from my very biased surroundings. Living in the Midwest those around me have a very stereotypical American idea of the Middle East and it’s people. In their minds each man, woman, and child of Arabic decent is of the same fundamentalist mindset, with no divisions in loyalties, beliefs, or morals.

I take all of these turns of the mind into myself and I wonder what is right- what I should believe. The quality of life of the everyday people is what I care about, so I do not spend my time worrying about terrorism, or other such issues that consume the American frame of mind. In saying then, my prejudice must be against the men of the Middle East. I know that they can’t all view their women through the same lens that demands their death in the name of honor, or others that practice illegal trafficking for a profit, but what of the ones that do? I fear that they are the majority of the men there, and that when I arrive I will be viewed as a being whose value is entirely based on sex. I have this fear that could be a prejudice that maybe; just maybe, women are fine with their lives and do not care to break free of their social bonds. I think I feel this way, because I see it in my own society, where women will not be as socially ridiculed for their choices.