'Am I next?'.

Byline: Saba Karim Khan

MY friend recently shared a video of a black employee being publicly reprimanded by her boss, for leaving her office for 40 minutes every day to use the restroom in a neighbouring building; there were no toilets for black people in her building.

Watching this colour-coded toilet segregation conjured in my head, George Floyd's final moments, gasping for breath, face wedged between a street surface and a policeman's knee. His tragic plea, 'I can't breathe', wasn't mere supplication; there was something real, relatable about it.

Both instances drove home an inconvenient truth: our world is structured through a human pyramid; some colours, religions and sexualities occupy a higher lattice on this pyramid. Floyd's plea became a metaphor for the choking condition of minorities on the lowest rungs.

The primal fear his tragedy evokes outstrips previous protests. It's not just minorities flailing to convince the majority that black lives matter. This feels exigent, epochal. Without drawing attention away from systemic American anti-blackness or conflating racial profiling with religious pigeonholing, this crescendo resonates with millions outside the status quo, making them question when they surrendered their right to be human. People of colour, misunderstood religions, marginalised sexualities, dreading: 'Am I next?' Whilst this catastrophe demands allyship towards black lives, it offers an opportunity to recognise other forms of oppression and provides a toolkit to rise against it.

Floyd's plea became a metaphor for the condition of minorities.

At various junctures, people have felt suffocated. For centuries, Muslims have comprised one such slurred category. Then 9/11 happened, time-stamping and popularising a term for it: Islamophobia. Terror, trepidation, torture; suspicion of all things Islamic; awaiting verdicts at visa centres and immigration; hoping a Muslim-sounding name doesn't appear after a terrorist attack; discarding symbols sketching a threatening zealot: beards, veils, birth-names like tattoos; aligning with 'cool', 'modern' opinion to isolate from the 'fundamentalists'.

Such expediently marshalled stigma rests on carefully carved tropes, relegating Muslims to a homogenous community: one fanatical Muslim, one violent brand of faith, united by a totalitarian impulse. This Muslim 'agenda' is seen as threatening a creeping Sharia, conspiring to convert the West into an omnipotent Muslim landscape; a scenario to...

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