The Sound of White Christian Privilege.

I don’t usually disagree with someone so much that I feel compelled to go toe-to-toe with them over Tumblr, but I just came across this “brief take on the mosque controversy in New York,” and it made me wanna freestyle. Because I cringed all the way through his argument, and I realized that this was the discourse of privilege in action:

As I see it, the World Trade Center was taken down by a fundamentalist Islamic group, in the name [of] Islam, and that’s the key. To put a mosque in the place of (or relatively near) what was the focal point of a religious attack in the name of that religion is almost like rewarding the attackers.  (And don’t you think that the Taliban, and Al-Quada would be celebrating this fact — “We took down their World Trade Center and get a mosque in its place.” Is there a better invitation to encourage further attacks?)

The first thing I want to talk about this line where he says the construction of a Ground Zero Mosque, as they call it, is like “rewarding the attackers.” The word “reward” is significant because it depicts a position of power: Only a person with money, for example, can reward a person without money. So when this writer — and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich — use similar rhetoric to campaign against this mosque, they are also implying that they have the power to “reward” someone with something that is already guaranteed by the Constitution. In their minds, they can.

We saw this position of power at work with Proposition 8, where one class of people’s “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” was put up to a popular vote. The oblivious nature of privilege means that there are thousands of people who could not understand why this was problematic — largely because their rights would never be put up to a popular vote. That’s the privilege.

Of course, there is also a discourse of fear being wielded in this argument — “Is there a better invitation to encourage further attacks?” — and that’s because fear is historically how the hegemony gets its way. It’s a note that would have only seemed odd in its omission.

There are hundreds and hundreds of places in New York City to build a mosque and a cultural center.  Is there any necessity to its placement near the WTC site? Of course not. And wouldn’t that placement be akin to building a booth for selling Confederate flags, and paraphenalia from the Confederacy at the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated? Doesn’t that involve the same kind of sensitivities?

The next brilliant ploy of privilege is group consensus. When you are in the majority, there are certain things you take for granted. Like, for example, how a Muslim place of worship becomes somehow analogous to the pro-slavery Confederate because we said so. But to answer his question, this does not involve “the same kind of sensitivities” at all. By even having this conversation, we are immediately Othering the Muslim victims of 9/11, and telling their families that their religion itself is beyond the pale of decency — according to so-called sensitive peace-loving and overwhelmingly white Christians everywhere.

The privilege of group consensus means that one group of people in America is able to tell another group of people that my ancient myth is better than your ancient myth with a self-imposed authority that allows them to decide what “decency” and “sensitivity” means in the first place.

The point of this post is to lift the veil and get to the heart of the matter, because no one is really saying it: The Ground Zero mosque debate is not about “sensitivity” as much as it is about the exertion of white Christian supremacy in America.