by Negin Farsad
Guilt Is Worthless
If you’re white, screw white guilt and then go punch liberal guilt in the gut. Don’t feel guilt that you were born into some kind of privilege. Guilt is worthless, guilt doesn’t do anyone any good. Turn that guilt into action. I’m happy that you were born into privilege—maybe I can ride your coattails, maybe some of your good fortune will rub off on me. Mama needs a new pair of espadrilles.
Immigrants, Minorities, Third Things: Stop Getting Mad When People Ask Questions
Do people ask where you’re from? That’s great! Let ’em know. Don’t assume that they’re otherizing you. Just let them know: “I grew up in Tallahassee but I’m Indonesian.” Why are you upset that someone wants to place you? They’ve just never seen someone who looks like you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re un-American. Plus, they should know where you’re from, because in that moment you are the PR for your ethnic group. Yeah, it’s unfair; yeah, it’s a lot of pressure. But unless you’re a real fuckball, why wouldn’t your essential you-ness be at least adequate publicity for that group?
And forget publicity; you’re a teacher. Yeah, I know, you didn’t sign up to be a teacher. But that person didn’t sign up to meet a guy named Bojan from Serbia. He’s got questions. This might be the only time in his entire life that he can learn about what it’s like to be a dude from Serbia. And don’t act like you didn’t meet a guy from Somaliland last week and have a ton of your own questions for him, too. Questions like, “Where is Somaliland?” Yeah, that’s right because even though you’re ethnic, you haven’t memorized the remapping of the North African Nile Valley. So why are you upset when someone asks you “Where is Serbia?” or “What is Serbia like?” We all want to understand a thing so we can feel comfortable around it. Be a good member of your community and tell that hypothetical guy what Serbia is like!
Work to Make the News Media Stop Doing the Thing It Does
In early 2015, the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked by terrorists, leaving twelve dead. It was horrific. It was one of those events where you realized why people had to invent the word horrific in the first place. Once the news broke, my phone started ringing immediately. News outlets like to get the Muslims on—even if the Muslims they have on are actually experts in other subjects—and they bring them on to make some Muslim sense out of the situation.
In my gut, I thought, Don’t take any of these calls. These things do not go well; people are too riled up to think sensibly about what they’re asking or saying. But then I thought, If I’m not the voice of a reasonable Middle Eastern–American or Muslim American or Ethnically-Ambiguous-American, will there be others to fill in? We need to have a voice out there, even when being that voice sucks. So I go on a TV show and I was asked if I could terror-splain why the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had motivated the attack. I grew up in Southern California, I don’t know any terrorists, I’m likely to know more about the history of Capri pants than I am about what a terrorist is thinking. How could any reasonable person explain what an enema of a terrorist nutjob is thinking? (That’s basically how I answered without using the word enema.)
The show host then asked me this: “Your comic documentary The Muslims Are Coming!—how do you feel about it now? Is it the right thing to do?” Um, yeah! Building a bridge between American Muslims and the mainstream? Of course it was the right thing to do. Absolutely. Totally. Completely. Either the host didn’t know the purpose of my work or he just had a knee-jerk reaction. A knee-jerk reaction that said, “Anything that shows Muslims in a positive light is insensitive to victims of terrorism.” And yet, most people would agree that the vast majority of Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism, so we should be able to show them in a positive light because we should be able to show regular people in a positive light. So why did I get a question like that? Why do I have to do so much terror-splaining?
So, can the media stop doing this type of thing? Can you bring Muslims on even when there’s no terrorist activity? Can you stop asking us to explain or defend the actions of a few?
In fact, it’s not just that we need to stop asking people to defend their communities against the actions of a few, it’s that we also need to stop… covering the actions of a few. Research from Prof. Christopher Bail at the University of Michigan took all the press releases about Muslim stuff from 2001 to 2008, tracked them through all of the Internet, and figured out that “organizations with negative messages about Muslims captivated the mass media.”3 He found that journalists were far more likely to run a story that was fringe and negative than one that was more representative of the population and positive. The corresponding “fringe effect,” as Bail calls it, elevates fringe voices to something that is later considered mainstream.
We’ve seen this time and again. In 2010 the Reverend Terry Jones pledged to burn Korans in Gainesville, Florida. He ultimately abandoned the burning but in the interim he got ridiculously saturated media attention the likes of which would have made a reality TV star salivate. And yet, Jones was a very fringe character with a flock of only thirty people and patchy support. His church was in dire straits. Eventually they moved because attendance wasn’t so hot. Covering Jones like he’s the leader of a legitimate movement makes it seem like burning the Koran is a thing. Everyone in the United States wants to do it! It makes Muslims feel shitty because they’re like “Uh, we didn’t know you guys hated us that much.” It sends a message to the rest of the world like “Yo, Americans be crazy, they’re just out there burning shit!” This whole thing fans the flames of a perceived conflict where there was none. Except now, as the fringe effect suggests, it seems like there is one. We willed it into being by covering it so maniacally. What good does that do?
Work to Make Hollywood Stop Doing the Thing It Does
I use the term Hollywood here for all fictionalized film and television. A few months after I first started auditioning in New York, I auditioned to play the part of a woman clapping in the background at a casino table. I got a callback for that audition because, not to brag, but I’m really good at standing in the background and clapping. At the callback the casting director said “Negin, I think you’re really great but you’re too ethnic for this part. And if we went that way, you’re not ethnic enough.” Read: I’m not white enough, I’m not brown enough. I told her that I had some bronzer in my purse, I could come back in more convincing brown-face if that would do the trick.
I’ve lost out on jobs because “we already have an Arab in the cast.” They say that, even when the Arab person and I aren’t even from the same continent. It’s like saying, “Oh, sorry, we can’t have another Canadian in the cast because we already have someone from Bolivia.”
I sometimes ask, how would me being Iranian-American and that other person being Arab-American have anything to do with your casting decision? And they say, “Well, you know.” And I do know. There’s some weird unwritten rule that you can’t have more than one brown person per show. There’s also an unwritten rule that you can’t have more than one “other” in the cast. Like there’s either one Korean-American or one Indian-American; we can’t handle both. (Unless one of them is passing for white.)
So, let’s change those rules! Abolish them immediately!
Is Hollywood worried that if there’s one too many Third Thing–Americans in the cast, the audience will just lose its mind? In the latest Hollywood Diversity report they found that only 11 percent of lead roles went to minorities.4 Would all of television break if that number were closer to 40 percent? Would there just be busted sets all over America if we changed that? The clear answer is no. In fact, another study found that “more viewers were drawn to shows with ethnically diverse lead cast members and writers, while shows reflecting less diversity in their credits attracted smaller audiences.”5 You could be earning more money if you had a more diverse cast. So, abolish the weird unwritten rules!!
The T-Word
This one goes out to the media, the gov
ernment, organizations, and any individuals out there who have found themselves using the word terrorism. Terrorism has become synonymous with Muslims. It’s generally defined as an ideologically motivated attack on a civilian target. We have so many acts of domestic terror that are not conducted by Muslims, and yet they have all the telltale signs of terrorism. Take Jerad and Amanda Miller, for example—they killed a couple of police officers in Nevada, draping them in swastikas and the Tea Party’s “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.6 They then went to a Walmart and killed another lady. This sounds terrorizing, they clearly left symbols of political motivation, and yet the crime? Yeah, it wasn’t called terrorism. (And their religion was not disclosed in most of the reporting.)
However, when a man by the name of Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez brutally shot four marines in Chattanooga in 2015, it was immediately declared a possible terrorist attack (and, yes, his religion was disclosed).
Either all politically motivated violent acts are called terrorism or none of them are. It is hands-down the strangest form of white privilege for mass murderers who are white not to get the “terrorist” label. The strangest. We’re so committed to maintaining white privilege that even murderers have a better go of it.
So if you or anyone you know uses the word terrorism, then let’s just dole that out equally. We need to break that linkage between Muslims and terrorism, and maybe this is one way to do it. The T-word doesn’t address all my hyphenated peeps, but remember, turn the dial one degree, and this could be the Jewish people or the Zoroastrians or any number of groups.
Create Something
Throughout this book you have heard me talk about various projects. Well, now I’m asking you to get on that train! Making stuff is fun. Taking people to task can also be fun.
If you see a bigoted billboard, don’t get mad. Don’t wave your fist in the air. Don’t knock your head against the steering wheel. Instead, take a billboard out yourself correcting that billboard in a delightful way. Sure it’s hard to raise money, sure it’s not going to be easy, but it’s better than gnashing your teeth and whizzing by on your moped. Put on plays, write a song, make a crossword, make balloon animals, answer questions in glitter, make art, make jokes, make papier-mâché symbols of community. The opportunities are endless, and it beats sitting home, alone and angry.
If you’re not so artsy, how about: Don’t vote for racist people, put immigrant-welcoming signs in your window, tutor underprivileged kids, e-mail every major studio and ask for shows and films with more diversity in their programming, listen to your neighbors, then listen to the neighbors across town, set up an “Exchange Your Confederate Flag–Themed Accessories for Cupcakes” stand in your city, travel, learn, hug people, give them the benefit of the doubt, give them your patience.
Expose Yourself (Come On, Not Like That) (A Little Like That)
When kids are born, their eyeballs open to reveal a fuzzy world of hues and confusion. There are no races or sects, divisions or hierarchies, affiliations or classes, there are only vague blotches. How do we go back to the uniformity of those vague blotches?
Exposure is the Triple Crown winningest gold-standard trophy of the cross-cultural games. Exposure means that instead of hating the thing you don’t know, you can meet the thing you were supposed to hate. It means information, it means an alternate view, it means a willingness for nuance, it means an emphasis on specificity, it means there is a way to turn things around.
I saw this up close and personal with my own parents. As I’ve mentioned, they’ve had a funny way of embracing multiculturalism. They are the multiculturalism in many settings, and yet they couldn’t quite build a bridge with other minority groups—and they are not the only immigrants with this problem. Minorities love to hate on each other—it’s the divide and conquer of the lesser classes that has kept the status quo churning.
So here are these people, my parents, both loving, both dedicated to serving their families. My father saves multiple lives a day, and he’s really, really good at it, better than McDreamy and McSteamy. My mother is an outsized unit of support, a caregiver that has been the reason why so many friends and family have succeeded in life! But, for how wonderful they both are, they were always a little weird about Jewish peeps. Dumb, right? Totally counterproductive, right? One day a really warmhearted Jewish couple moved into a house a few doors down from my parents in Palm Springs, California. They showed up at my parents’ door with a rum cake. Was the rum cake delicious? Yes! Was it made from the blood of Christian babies? I never did get the recipe. But the effect it had was so thoroughly softening that by the following week my parents were besties with them. My mom was calling me to say things like “Did you know that Jewish family is very much like Iranian family?” Yes, lady! Every family is like every family! “Did you know that Jews are very funny? Did you know they have very delicious soup? Did you know they don’t eat pork just like we don’t eat pork?” Yes, lady, yes. Gah! They fell so hard, they had me marrying a Jew and making a bunch of half-Jewish, half-Muz babies.
And I thought, Holy shit, all they needed to turn this thing around was a good rum cake? Yes. That was all they needed. They needed to meet the neighbor instead of quietly seething about a neighbor they never talked to. Thanks to the effort of those new neighbors, the tough job of leaving your comfort zone, baking a cake, and knocking on a door—not realizing what you were going to find on the other side—made all the difference.
So basically, always bring pastries. They soften people just like laughs (and they also slightly fatten people). Clearly our international diplomats haven’t been offering enough pastries.
I don’t even have to look that far to find another example. When I was in high school, like everyone around me, I dutifully bowed to peer pressure and adopted a homophobic stance. I would tell people “Don’t be gay,” or an object could be “oh my God, so gay,” or you would hear me respond with clever retorts like “Duh, of course, I watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, what am I, gay?” Friends and I would have seemingly endless “liberal” views, and then it would come to homosexuality and we would immediately be like “Ew! Gross!”
And then I went to college. One of my first most meaningful comedy colleagues was a gay man. One of my first most meaningful college buddies was a gay man. Dave in comedy land and Jeff in dormland de-homophobicized me to an unrecognizable degree. Together we had so much fun! We got so drunk! We shared expert sing-alongs, endlessly ridiculous examinations of pop culture, curly fries at the student union, and love. I became a double major in theatre (and government) and more members of the gay community came flooding my way. These were my people, I thought. I was a fruitfly and I didn’t even know it!
I came out on the other side because of exposure. The tough thing about the U.S. of A. is that our geography is based on cars and distance. We treasure space and privacy. We want big lawns and open vistas. We want the fierce independence of the early settlers and we don’t need no help! But human beings need human beings. So our open spaces and our suburban sprawl make it so much harder to make those connections. To expose yourself (as in nudity but also as in) to the people and places that will make you an open person.
The Europeans have it easy. Their cities are like a jillion years old and they’re built around how far people could hobble on their broken ankles carrying a vat of water they got from a creek. Basically, things are close and more clustered. New York City has that advantage, too; whether you like it or not, you’re going to hear umpteen languages and see diversity like it’s the front page of a college brochure. And that’s just on your way to work. It’s easier to run into someone you wouldn’t normally meet in places like this.
But for the rest of us, the meet-up is harder. It requires more effort. But one thing a good social justice comedian does is make that effort. It’s hard, it triggers some social anxiety, and it makes my palms sweat and my face fire up. But it’s a chance to turn things around.
With the spread of American cities, the “freedom” we g
et with our devices, and the competitive hours of seemingly endless labor, we have all but forgotten our neighbors, our bowling teams, our card games, and our creative salons. There’s no more dinner at Ma’s house once a week, so the kids can see their Nana because Nana now lives in California and you’re in Detroit. The kindly neighbor Phyllis next door can’t watch the kids if you guys go out, because Phyllis is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the paradigm has changed.
In this new paradigm we learn that “this kinda world don’t care if you’re home so you better get some.” Did I just quote a 311 lyric? Hell yes I did. And I’ll quote them or the Butthole Surfers whenever I want! A simple, stupid lyric that swirled around in my head and reminded me always that I can’t expect the world to do something, I have to go get it, and more importantly, I have to go change it. I can’t complain and kvetch, gripe and grumble. I got to go and get some. Granted, 311 was probably talking about sex, though I’ve based my existence on this other reading.
In college, I titled an essay, “The Revolution Will Be Served with French Fries.” I’m not sure what that essay was about, but somehow the sentiment holds today. There are no blood and guts in my revolution. It will be served with French fries and your choice of dipping sauces—because it’s more of a Belgian frites situation—and you will enjoy its greasy goodness!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go out and serve these fries. If the big actions are too much—like petitioning places that always call security or going on stage and telling jokes for which some nutjob will threaten to kill you—then simply meeting people is the microrevolution that is your mission.
