White Comfort Is Not the Priority Over My 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.