To Promote American Diversity, Irshad Manji Says, Resist Labels And Listen
With Meghna Chakrabarti
Public intellectual Irshad Manji has a provocative suggestion for her fellow progressives: To heal American divides, stop shaming, she says, and start listening.
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Guest
Irshad Manji, writer, activist and Founder of the Moral Courage Project at the University of Southern California. Author of “Don’t Label Me: A Conversation for Divided Times.” (@IrshadManji)
From The Reading List
Excerpt from “Don’t Label Me” by Irshad Manji
Excerpted from DON’T LABEL ME: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times by Irshad Manji © 2019 by the author reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
Newsweek: “In ‘Don’t Label Me,’ Irshad Manji Has a Radical Prescription for Fellow Progressives: ‘Stop Shaming and Start Listening’” — “A white man walks into a bar. Perhaps he’s wearing a ‘Make America great again’ cap or a Red Sox T-shirt or a crucifix. Maybe he has a tattoo sleeve or a nose ring or a yarmulke. Whatever the signifiers, you consciously, or subconsciously, have decided he is one of Us or one of Them.
“According to researchers humans are hard-wired for tribalism. Labeling is biological. Minorities have put up with it since America’s founding, of course, but, as Irshad Manji argues in her new book, Don’t Label Me (St. Martin’s), the ‘loathed white guy’ isn’t the only one stuffing others into boxes now. Everyone is at it, even those who, like Manji, champion diversity. “Well before Trump,” says the author, ‘so-called progressives were labeling swaths of Americans as racists and rednecks.’ A lot of those people, she adds, ‘support Trump—as payback.’
Manji is well-situated to argue for what she calls honest diversity. An Oprah award winner and founder of the Moral Courage Project, she has struggled with tagging all her life: a refugee from Africa; a Muslim who happens to be gay; an advocate for liberal Islam and a vocal critic of mainstream interpretations (as in her best-selling book The Trouble With Islam Today ). But three decades of debating people ensconced in rigid identity; of coaching others to exercise moral courage (“doing the right thing in the face of your fears”); of the escalating tribalism exposed by the election of President Trump—all of it made her despair. ‘Wanting a divorce from my species,’ Manji writes in Don’t Label Me, ‘I slumped into pessimism.’
“A blind and aging rescue dog named Lily—Manji’s ‘mentor and tormentor’—offered her a way out. The book is an imaginary conversation between them, resulting in a passionate, playful and persuasive argument for rejecting dishonest diversity—the categorizing that fixates on biology (white, black, male, female, LGBT, straight, etc.)—and its attendant and unforgiving call-out culture ‘where asking the wrong question gets you slammed. If derelict systems will ever evolve,’ she writes, ‘people have to risk giving offense.’ ”
Stefano Kotsonis produced this hour for broadcast.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2019 NPR]
