It happened again yesterday, in a comment under a post.
It didn't seem like something written in anger, more just as a statement of something everyone had long since accepted and therefore couldn't be contradicted about me - "...your racist hatred of Muslims...".
It has happened so many times by now that I've stopped counting. Or caring about it.
And that's not good.
I'll come back to that.
But I want to admit that for a long time I didn't understand it. Not as something that hurt, but as a maths problem that didn't add up.
Because I'm over fifty years old, and until a few years ago no one had ever called me that. Not in school, not in my free time, not through an entire working life, not in a single discussion, not by anyone who stood far from me or close to me. It only started when I began writing about Islam. Not about people. About Islam.
And racism isn't something that suddenly appears in a Human Being somewhere in the middle of life. It's not an opinion you come to have, it's something that sits in you, and it leaves traces all the way through, in what you say and what you do and the way you are in a room and in the world. Had it sat in me, my life would in all likelihood have been full of that kind of accusation, long before any of us had heard of Islam. And there's nothing there. Fifty years without a single person ever handing me that.
So either something happened to me, very late, very suddenly, and at exactly the moment I took up a specific topic.
Or something happened to the word.
And it took me longer than I care to admit to see that it was the latter. That the word had been fetched, emptied of what it meant, and filled up with something else, but that it was still being carried forward with all the weight it had when it still meant what it actually means.
And then it suddenly made sense.
Racism is about what a Human Being IS. Skin colour, origin, face, blood. Something no one has chosen, no one can change, and no one can walk out of. That's why it's evil in its purest form, because it judges a Human Being for something it never had a finger in, and which it can't free itself from by changing its mind.
A faith, conversely, is about what a human being FOLLOWS. There are Muslims in all colours, from all continents, of all lineages. A Somali, a Bosnian, an Indonesian and a pale red-haired Danish convert stand in the same faith and share everything humans share, except what they look like. In exactly the same way that there are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists and so on in all shades, and none of it is tied to a face or a geographical placement on a map.
There's a simple test for the difference, and it takes two seconds to do.
Can you leave it?
You can't leave your skin colour. Your appearance. Your blood. Or your lineage.
But you can leave a faith. And precisely because of that, a faith is an idea, and ideas are put into the world to be examined, turned, tested, hacked at from all sides, until you know whether they can bear weight. Whether they are good or bad. Whether they are true or false. And what follows from following them.
This isn't something I've made up. It's the entire Western tradition. Our hard-won freedom of speech wasn't won so we could say nice things to each other. It was won for exactly that purpose - that we can approach an idea with the sharpest tool we have, and stand on ground that holds while we do it. It's the exact mechanism that has made it possible to fell the church and the power every single time they transgressed against our own foundation. It's why Nazism and fascism can't rise here again without being shot down in the open the moment they show their demonic face. It's why communism finally had to speak aloud about itself to defend itself, and discovered that it couldn't. And therefore toppled over itself and its half-baked ideas and defective ideological crutches.
Anyone can test how deeply they mean it themselves. In my own case, I will defend exactly the same right for a Muslim to approach Christianity - which is my faith, my texts, my history, what I hold sacred - with the same sharpness. Without reservation. He may say what he wants about what I believe, and I will answer him, and neither of us should look over our shoulder afterwards. This isn't a concession I give reluctantly.
It's the whole point. It's the very construction and architecture we stand in here in the West.
So now to what's actually going on.
When you take a word like racism and lay it over a conversation about ideas, then it's not an argument. It's an interruption. A fence-off. An attempt to close the conversation to further dialogue. It's not something you can answer, because there's nothing to answer, it's an accusation of being a certain kind of human being, and the only thing that can be done about it is to stop talking.
And it works. That's what I've come to understand.
I don't know the number of people walking around in this country thinking something they don't say. I just know I meet them all the time, and they almost whisper regardless of where, as if their concerns and words must not be heard, and that it's often those who don't have the words at hand who are hit hardest. It's not because they lack understanding, but because they've never been given the language to explain what has happened to the words, and therefore they stand without anything to grasp when the accusation comes.
They can feel that it's wrong. They just can't say why. So they fall silent, and go home, and think it through further alone.
A society where people think further alone is not a calm or peaceful society. It's just a quiet one, and the two things are confused all the time.
I'm not writing this to defend myself. Anyone may think exactly what they want about me, I know who I am, and why I write as I do, and I stopped caring about it long ago. I'm writing it because the word does damage, and because that damage doesn't hit me.
Because the word was once heavy for a reason. It was one of the heaviest words we had, and it was that because it was paid for, by people who were sorted by their bodies and had everything taken from them for it. It stood as a protection for those who had nothing else to stand behind.
And precisely because of that, it became worth stealing. A word that can close a conversation is no longer a word, it's a tool or in broader terms a weapon, and both tools and weapons are always picked up by someone.
But a word that can be used on EVERYTHING means NOTHING. And that's where we are. Where the meaning no longer has any weight. Where the word has been misused so many times that we no longer care about it. Can't hear it. Even when there's need for it.
It means that there's a boy standing in a schoolyard somewhere in Denmark one day having something shouted at him for his skin colour, his appearance, his lineage or his blood, and he reaches out for exactly that word, because it's the only protection he has.
And then he discovers that it's used up. That it doesn't work anymore, because it was used on a middle-aged man who wrote about totalitarian systems and dispositions and the books that wish to install and justify these.
I lose nothing by that accusation. I have a page, a keyboard and fifty years behind me that speak for themselves, and people close to me who know what's true.
He only has the word.
And we're in the process of taking it from him, while someone convinces us that we're doing it for his sake.
We're not.
So let's take the words back.
Not for our sake.
For his.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Wednesday, friends ☀️