“Chapel
Hill”. The first time I heard it used like that: not Chapel Hill student shootings, just Chapel Hill, as an immediately recognizable reference in the media, like ‘Ferguson’ or ‘Waco,’
as a byword- the first time I heard this it came as a shock. Particularly when
I’m overseas, I tend to idealize Chapel Hill as the ‘Southern part of Heaven’, that
uniquely liberal and diverse enclave in conservative North Carolina, the town
with more PH.D.’s per capita than Cambridge, MA, situated as it is at the
crossroads of three great universities: UNC, Duke, and NC State.
And now
this. Around the world, the name Chapel Hill coupled with the senseless triple
murders of three local college students, promising and optimistic young people
who also happened to be openly Muslim American. I never met them or their
families, but I know them: the model minority, a little more driven than your
average student, from immigrant, educated Middle East families with high
expectations for achievement, surrounded by a strong, supportive faith
community.
In most ways, all-American. Deah Barakat was basketball mad and copied
his idol Stephen Curry’s pose in a photograph, but he was also a serious young
man dedicated to service who used his UNC Dental School training to help
underprivileged people in this country and abroad. He looked up to his older
sister Suzanne, a San Francisco physician. His wife Yusor and her sister Razan,
daughters of a Clayton psychiatrist, were an aspiring dentist and architect, respectively;
ambitious, bright young women who could have been Amal Alamuddin Clooney in an Islamic
veil, if they had lived.
I was never
‘that sort of Muslim,’ as someone I knew once put it: the easily identifiable sort
who wore a headscarf and sent their children to Islamic Sunday school. But I
knew many of them, and like the Barakat and the Abu-Salha children, they felt confident
that they belonged in Raleigh or Chapel Hill. If they had anything to prove,
they believed their achievements would speak well for their community.
Like many
religious minorities, they made a conscious effort to reach out and to represent
their community among society at large. According
to Rabbi Greyber of Beth El in a letter to his congregation, his colleague Rabbi
Solomon of Beth Meyer in Raleigh knew Deah, Yusor and Razan quite well. “All three
were very active in inter-religious affairs including an interfaith Habitat for
Humanity, and Farris Barakat, the older brother of Deah Barakat, attended Beth
Meyer Synagogue services and, with the Barakat family, recently opened his home
to Beth Meyer congregants to share the breaking of the Ramadan fast.”
These three
young people were the best and brightest of their community. What a waste. And
why? This is not the place to discuss whether the murders were motivated by a
parking dispute or bigotry, or a toxic mixture of both. Deah Barakat’s
articulate, poised sister, Dr. Suzanne Barakat, points to the role of a media
culture that relentlessly portrays all Muslims as violent terrorists, and cites
as an example films like American Sniper.
What that film refuses to show is
that Chris Kyle, the real-life sniper of the story, was not killed by an Iraqi
or Muslim but by a fellow white American veteran at a shooting range near Chalk
Mountain, Texas. Eddie Ray Routh, a former marine, is accused of turning on Kyle
and another friend and shooting them dead. His motive? According to one witness,
Routh shot them ‘because they wouldn’t talk to him.’ Think about that for a
moment. Then think about this. Craig Hicks took the lives of three young people
because, according to his wife, he didn’t like them sharing the visitor’s
parking spot with him. Is that all it takes to make an armed white man turn
killer in today’s America? And is that particularly reassuring to those who
would dismiss the Chapel Hill murders as ‘just a parking dispute’ rather than a
hate crime?
The
families of the three student victims, or ‘our three winners’, as they prefer
to call them, in true American style, are understandably seeking to assuage
their unspeakable pain with the hope that some positive legacy might come of this
tragedy, some re-examining of prejudice, some coming together of communities.
And indeed, Stephen Curry, the basketball star whom Deah Barakat idolized, expressed
a desire to honor his murdered fan. Rabbi Solomon of Beth Meyer, whose
congregants Farris Barakat had invited into his home, is setting up a
discretionary fund to help the families of the three victims or the charities
of their choice. At the very least, what photos of the smiling faces of the
three young people seem to be calling for, is the hope that America looks past
the headscarf or the headline and sees Muslims as neighbors, not the eternal
and suspicious Other.
