—Zareena Grewal
On Tuesday February 10, 2015, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, was charged with first-degree murder of three Arab, Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Hicks’ neighbors, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and Yusor Mohammad, 21, were newlyweds—and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, was visiting her older sister and brother-in-law at the time of the execution-style killing. After the mainstream US media’s initial silence, the homicide is now referred to as “a shooting,” sparking worldwide Twitter hashtag campaigns such as #CallItTerrorism and #MuslimLivesMatter with many speculating on how the crime might have been framed had the perpetrator been Muslim and the victims white.
The motives of Hicks, who turned himself in to police, are the source of heated debate and speculation. According to his Facebook profile, Hicks describes himself as an anti-theist, a fan of the controversial film American Sniper and atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins, and a proud gun-owner. The Chapel Hill Police Department described the crime as motivated by an on-going dispute between the neighbors over parking, while the father of the two young women insists it was a “hate-crime.” Chief Chris Blue recognizes and continues to investigate “the possibility that this was hate-motivated.”
Such language suggests that while Hicks’ violence is exceptional and excessive, his motivations could have been ordinary and benign: maybe he was there first, maybe he had dibs on that parking spot, maybe he had a bad day or a bad life and so he had a mental breakdown with a gun in hand. After all, while this murder is devastating to the family and friends of the victims, for many of us, it is not shocking. We know and expect “lone shooters” to be white, heterosexual men; we know and expect their victims to be men of color, women, youth.
But it is American Muslim leaders who will gather in DC for the Obama administration’s “Countering Violent Extremism Summit” in a few days.
Individualizing the violence of white American men into “lone wolves” conceals the regularity of such violence and the state’s inability to prevent it, to make us “secure,” even to name it. This is one of the searing lessons of the #BlackLivesMatter movement; George Zimmerman’s sense of insecurity was used to justify his murder of an unarmed, black teenager, Trayvon Martin. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement demonstrates, Zimmerman was part and parcel of a larger phenomenon of racial, homicidal violence against unarmed blacks enacted in tandem by ordinary white citizens “standing their ground” and militarized police forces.
A significant number of blacks in the US are also Muslim and, therefore, vulnerable to being brutalized and murdered simply because they are black. Despite the fact that black youth are more than four times likely than any other group to be gunned down by police, critics of #BlackLivesMatter continue to ignore this harsh reality, insisting that #AllLivesMatter.
Clearly, all lives do not matter to everyone. The #BlackLivesMatter movement brings our attention to the fact that violence in the name of white supremacy only horrifies and terrifies some of us.
Disingenuous claims about how all lives matter or how parking is frustrating hide the insidious influence of racism. In my book, Islam is a Foreign Country, I explore how American Muslim communities grapple with the pervasive, racial hatred of their religion. This morning a Pakistani friend asked whether she will now have to explain to her young children that some people hate them just for being Muslim. African American Muslims know all too well that the question is not whether but when to teach their children that they are vulnerable. Hicks’ victim knew it too; she saw it in his eyes, telling her father, “He hates us for what we are and how we look.”
Zareena Grewal is Associate Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (NYU Press, 2015).
