White Comfort Is Not the Priority Over My Experience
By: Foundation For Liberating Minds
Tags: Global Solidarity, Whiteness, Palestine, Lived Experience

Written by Dana Mahmoud

This article is part of a series by the Global Vision Team of the Foundation for Liberating Minds titled “How to be a Global Citizen”.

As we rack up life points and learn more about ourselves and the world around us, we tend to grow stronger attachments to things that make us feel like us. With the invention of the internet and our constant access to instant information, we’re able to read, learn, and interpret this information any time, anywhere; be it factual or not. This tool allows us to learn more about the people around us, too. More often than not, this instant access makes people feel like experts in something after only several minutes spent and a few paragraphs read. These “Armchair Experts’’ end up doing more harm to the people who have personal experiences in the topic of conversation. They believe their unbiased view of an issue will ultimately lead to the best solution. However, human beings are inherently biased, as we all experience and interpret things differently. And yet, whether it’s a petty comment section fight on Facebook or a round table conversation at a university, people dismiss any trace of a personal experience as being too biased to have any validity. The experiences people have enrich conversations about issues in the world.

I’ve experienced this plenty of times. I’m proud to be a Palestinian-American. I’ve grown up experiencing this rich culture full of traditional clothing, dances, folktales, and history (yes, history extending past the Palestinian-Israeli conflict). Being a second-generation child of the diaspora, it’s always overwhelming to have to fight for the right to freely talk about my identity around new people. There’s still so much about the conflict I don’t fully understand yet that I feel like I’m on the defensive every time the words “I’m Palestinian” come out of my mouth. Many of the people I meet immediately speak about conflict as if that’s all Palestine has to offer. Once I speak on the issue, people are bewildered that my take is pro-Palestine. People tend to speak over me about an issue that has affected my family for generations. Some even get angry that I can’t seem to have a “professional discussion” about the conflict with an “unbiased view.” Of course I can’t be unbiased. You can’t exactly be unbiased when news of the second Intifada, protests met with military violence, was playing as background noise in your home as a child.

An example of Palestinian participation in NYT articles about Palestine (credit to +972 Magazine)

People should be able to speak about their experiences and identities freely. This freedom includes academic spaces as well. Professionalism is a component of the collective shushed voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Merriam-Webster defines professionalism as the conduct, aims, or qualities that characterize or mark a profession or a professional person. We have unknowingly agreed that a part of professional conduct is to let a conversation in an academic space be completely devoid of personal experiences. It is in this way that professionalism is institutionalized centering around white comfort. There are no feelings attached to facts. However, there are strong feelings attached to the experiences people face. When these experiences stem as consequences of the Western nations’ actions caused against nations of the world, it makes sense that White people don’t want to hear it. It’s easier to write it off as unprofessional to speak from a place of lived experience than to hear the affects your nation’s actions have caused for others. When we don’t let BIPOC speak about the experiences they face as a consequence of a world event, then the narrative continues to be about what feels comfortable.

As experiences continue to be removed from the conversation, White people in academic circles can continue to talk about world events as “experts” because they speak factually. The people who have faced adversity due to an event are deemed less credible than those who only know the textbook definition. It’s removing the power of navigating the narrative from those who faced oppression into the hands of those who have oppressed. Someone once told me that it “feels like being an animal in a zoo.” You just sit there as others stare at you and spit facts they think they know about you. BIPOC should be the people to amplify the story that is told about any world event. They have first-hand experience in the issues we talk about but society discredits them because the consequences that came have emotional baggage. Think about it, if you had something happen and your friend jumped in to talk over you every time you opened up about the situation, wouldn’t it feel belittling? They tell you that they do it because you can’t have an objective view over the situation. They don’t want the story to be twisted because you’re just too close to it. Having someone cut you off minimizes the role you play in your own story. Freely conducting the narrative based on your truth is empowering. We owe it to BIPOC to feel the strength of conducting the narrative.

Destruction of Mosul, Iraq (credit to The New Arab)

One of the key points the incessant factualists seem to miss is that real-life events always affect real-life people. By not giving them a seat at the table, we are missing the opportunity to come up with solutions that genuinely help the communities involved. A solution based on “just the facts” may not be practical in reality. The only way to know if a solution is good for a community is to hear them out, to center them. That includes listening to the ugly truths of the adversities they faced. You can’t help people without understanding what it is they need help with. That’s not to say that every solution will be completely fact-less, we would just be causing more problems. However, knowing the facts and understanding the consequences people had to face will give a better picture as to how to solve the problem.

Sometimes, it’s not even about solving the problem. It’s about giving BIPOC the space to just talk about who they are and their experiences in the world. In my case, there were many times where I was casually talking about my identity when I was shot down with facts when I didn’t need them. Palestine is so heavily politicized that even talking about being Palestinian needs to be factual. It’s exhausting. How could you be a good global citizen when you’re not listening to others? Whether it’s in academic spaces or otherwise, BIPOC deserve the freedom to casually speak about the aspects that make them feel like them.