Tag Archives: race

Knowledge of Self

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) told me where white people come from. We like to think we know who we are, and indeed many things about ourselves we can easily define: male, muslim, American. But I am white and I could not explain to myself what that meant. Any meaning I set was either too narrow, […]

Good News for Mixed Kids

Malaysia never stops changing. Controversial areas like race, religion, native privilege (bumiputera status), and national language are constantly in a state of flux. Most recently, when I registered the birth of my latest child, I discovered that the birth certificate itself had changed (for the second time), and that now the race of the child […]

An Annotated List

Ethnicities, Nationalities and/or Socially Constructed Identities That I’ve Been Mistaken For Put on a kufi and grow a beard and it becomes harder and harder to take advantage of institutionalized white privilege. Middle Eastern I’m sure all the converts have gotten that one before. Turkish The late Mawlana Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani (q) emerged from a […]