A couple of days ago, I saw two young
girls, wearing the traditional “hijab” at Wal-Mart. For those of you who don’t
know what a hijab is, it refers to both the head covering traditionally worn by
Muslim women and modest Muslim styles of dress in general.
As
they were shopping, they got many stares; most of them, being bad. I heard a
couple remarks which upset me. Many of the Wal-Mart shoppers were saying
comments referring to the 9-11 attacks. What upset me was that, these were
little girls, about the age or 12 and 10 maybe. So, as I was shopping I saw
these girls repeatedly, shopping just like anyone else. When, a lady caught my
attention, she began to talk to someone by her that they were in danger because
of these girls.
So I began to think to myself, why
are these two innocent girls being so wrongly talked about just because they are
wearing hijabs? If two American girls dressed in the clothes they typically
dressed in and people, let’s say Mexicans, started to talk about them. If any
other person heard them say anything bad they would stick up for the two American
girls, but they question is, why? Because
we live in a society where if someone doesn’t look, dress or talk like us, it’s
okay to talk about them. Yet there is a
lot of talk about ending racism, ironic right?
If
we truly wanted racism to end, we wouldn’t care what a person wears, how the
talk and look. We wouldn’t judge them at all. We would look at them with our
hearts. We would ignore the visible attributes and would look at the attributes
that really matter.
If we could all just learn to ignore the color
of our skin, and our clothes, this world would be a much better place.
-Nelly.
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