I was at lunch with the co-host of my "Little Ethnic Girls" podcast, Maria Shehata, when we first learned of the Boston Marathon bombings. The TV in the restaurant had just switched to breaking news and our Twitter feeds were lighting up with jagged, piecemeal reports. It's a sad reflection of our times that we looked at each other and joked "Well, it's either your people or mine!" With all the recent war-drum-thumping from North Korea and the constant barrage of bad news from the Middle East, we made the same assumptive leap that everybody else was making: it must be terrorists, and they ain't white.
The problem is that I'm Korean-American and Maria is Egyptian-American. And while we were making those same racist assumptions, we were desperately praying that we were wrong. Culturally the two of us are as American as you can get: we grew up here our entire lives and went to public schools in Massachusetts and Ohio, respectively. For crying out loud, we're standup comedians who joke about drunk one-night stands and the horrors of dating on OKCupid. But both sets of our parents have thick foreign accents and we've both felt the sting of racism and ignorance. Hateful attitudes aimed at Arabs and Asians "over there" have sometimes felt a little too close to "over here." Heinous acts of terror are always conducted by a small handful of sick individuals, but we too easily lump entire cultures together as "those people." I have never even met a North Korean, but if it turns out the bombings originated from there, do I have to start watching my back? Arab-Americans who are loyal law-abiding citizens of this country have suffered all manners of racism and xenophobia since 9/11. It's irrational, it's not fair and it ultimately does more harm than good.
Being comedians who mostly follow comedians, we're barraged by the frontlines of commentary about evvverything. Michael Ian Black put his finger right on the nose while sharing a sarcastic sentiment of many comics just hours after the bombings: "Looking forward to making blanket condemnations of whatever race/religion/ethnicity/political affiliations the bomber has."
I read another tweet which initially felt "right" but then "wrong" after I thought about it: "Really hope this isn't exactly what we know it is. #Boston." Stop. Please just stop. We don't really know. It's messed up that we think we know. It's the assumption that we know that is leading reputable news organizations to falsely report there are suspects in the case when there are none. It's fear of what we think we know that leads me to sit at lunch with a very close Arab-American friend secretly hoping "the terrorists" were Middle Eastern and not North Korean, while she was thinking the same in reverse. Because until we know for sure, we don't know anything. We're just waving the gun of suspicion around at innocent people. We thought we knew that Richard Jewell set off a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics only to learn three months later that he was innocent. We didn't know about the Unabomber for decades. We didn't know exactly what happened on 9/11 until days later. So please, let's just stop with the collective racial profiling, the knee-jerk assumptions, the rumor-mongering. BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT HELPING. Until there are actual facts, we don't know anything so let's stop guessing.
This post was originally published on hsquared.