Gwen Zoharah Simmons on Race and Violence in the USA

From: Aishah Shahidah Simmons <afrolez@gmail.com>
Subject: Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons' response to the Muslim Public Affairs Council's "When a Culture of Hate Turns to Violence"
To: "AfroLez Productions" <afrolez@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, August 10, 2012, 5:34 PM

In her response to the Muslim Public Affairs Council's "When a Culture of Hate Turns to Violence," statement, African-American (US) Civil Rights Veteran, Feminist Islamic Scholar and Muslim Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons contextualizes the vicious and virulent her/history of violence in Ameri-KKK-a, which dates back to its' founding days ground in both the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples of this land and the enslavement of millions of African people. 

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From: Simmons,Gwendolyn Delores <zoharah@ufl.edu>
Date: Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 2:04 PM
Subject: Response to your very good statement on the recent shooting & killings at the Sikh Temple
To: "hoda@mpac.org" <hoda@mpac.org>

Dear Hoda,

My name is Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons. I teach Religion and African American studies at the University of Florida. I am also a Muslim and am African American.

I greatly appreciate what you wrote and understand that this is the seeming response from Non-African American Muslims to the recent spate of violence directed at Muslim mosques and the recent killings at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin.  Your obvious aim is to remind Americans ( understood to be mainly white Americans) of the founding principles of equality and justice for all upon which the U.S. was supposed to be grounded. I think this is a good strategy as long as you understand that the U.S. has rarely operated from those principles. I was a foot soldier in the Civil Rights Movement as a college age student. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And I was a field secretary in SNCC ( the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). I was jailed and beaten in Atlanta, Georgia and in Mississippi in the efforts to tear down this country's form of apartheid called Jim Cow and to secure the right to vote for all people in this country. I worked as a full time volunteer for several years in this great movement which enabled many of the non African American Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhist and other non- white people to immigrate to this country and prosper as a result of the legal changes the Civil Rights Movement brought about.

If you become a student of this country's  "true" history you will see that the blood letting against people considered "others" has been rife here from the country's earliest beginnings. Beginning with the Ethnic Cleansing of this land mass's Native People to the most brutal form of enslavement of African Americans and the attendant torture, rapes, mutilations that were daily occurrences. If you look at the long history of communal lynchings of African Americans you will see that often throngs of white men, women and children held picnics at these gruesome and macabre events as they watched black men, women and even children burned at the stake, hung from trees and had their appendages cut off and sold as souvenirs to the grinning white throngs. There are numerous photos of these Sunday Picnic Lynchings where law officials did little to nothing to stop these brutal community sanctioned rituals ( they often were leading the lynching parties) and the judicial system did very little to bring any of these whites to trial. This went on for over 100 years. ( If you would like me to send you titles of books on these annals of our country's history, please let me know )

Unfortunately, The U.S. educational system rarely teaches students about these horrible realities, preferring to sweep these sordid histories under the rug ( or push them deep into the collective psyche) where they fester and erupt from time to time in these "lone wolf" acts of violence by angry white men against people who they perceive as "OTHER."

I urge Muslim Americans and others to please study this sordid "true" American history as a part of your efforts to understand this land that many of you and/ or your family members have emigrated to and now call home.  Racially motivated violence is as American as Apple Pie.

As Salaam Alaikum,

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons

Zoharah@ufl.edu

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in Religion with a primary focus on Islamic Studies and African American Studies at the University of Florida. In addition to her academic studies of Islam, Simmons spent seventeen years as a student of the contemporary Sufi Master, M. R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen, and is a founding member of the Bawa Muhaiyadeen Fellowship and Mosque. Simmons spent her early years as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, working for several years as a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinting Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, primarily in Georgia and Mississippi.