As a Black Muslim man in any given room, I am a candidate for racism and Islamophobia.
While one is understood as prejudice and discrimination, the other is defined as an intense and irrational fear that, ironically, terrifies me.
It’s 2017, I’ve just come home from 5th-grade English, turned on the television just in time to hear the words “Islamophobic Attack,” words used to describe the now nationally remembered Quebec City mosque shooting. Six people are dead and 19 injured, all while trying to simply practice their religion—a religion that I share. It's a horrible tragedy that will be repeated on the news all week, “the Islamophobic attack.”
The Cambridge dictionary defines the term Islamophobia as an “unreasonable dislike or fear of, and prejudice against, Muslims or Islam.” As such, according to every report and headline that week, Alexandre Bissonnette had ended the lives of six people because he had an unreasonable dislike or fear.
The use of phobia in this word did not make sense to me; my then 11-year-old mind went to Ron Weasley in the Chamber of Secrets, terrified of spiders, dragged into Aragog’s den against his will, and paralyzed with fear. What Alexandre Bissonnette had done was the exact opposite.
However, it was far from the first time I’d hear the contradictory statement. Four years later, the Afzaal family was killed in another “Islamophobic Attack,” and at 15 years old, I still could not wrap my head around this. Again, a man, Nathaniel Veltman, had committed a premeditated and hateful act that killed four people, one that an Ontario Supreme Court Justice deemed as terrorism, but still his actions were deemed and reported as fearful or prejudiced.
It’s become a recurring theme: a man walks into a mosque and opens fire. Another screams slurs on the street before throwing a punch. A woman’s hijab is torn off on the subway. These attacks happen again and again, and every time, the headline reads “Islamophobic attack.” And every time, my fear of the term grows.
Being Black, I understood from a young age what racism and discrimination could and did look like, taught through family, television, and real-world experiences. Which made it all the more confusing when the same kind of hate against my Muslim identity was described in softer, sugarcoated terms
