Start treating all victims with the same respect
Say his name:
Muhammad Anwar.
Paint his face on a mural, carry his memory through the streets as you march for restorative justice, raise your voices in anger at his murder.
This was the 66-year-old Pakistani American, an immigrant who sought a better life, whose life instead was truncated and terminated by two teenage girls.
They were Black, and he was a Muslim, and so the canon of hate that we refer to when we try and capitalize on these horrors doesn’t fit. Two Black girls killed a non-white man, a Muslim was murdered by, likely, two Christians or two atheists or two girls who never even considered what God thought of them and their atrophied hearts.
The pity is that this death is as horrific as the death of the man whose killer is currently being tried in Minnesota. George Floyd should not have died on that May day last year, regardless of who he was or the type of life he’d led up to the moment of death. He should not be dead.
And the people who were angry at his death were right to protest injustice and filter their outrage in movies and songs and speeches and interviews. Up to a point.
Floyd was a man who stole some cigarettes, and should not have paid for them with his life. Period. If we ennoble his life to make a point about social justice, then we need to do the same with Mohammed Anwar.
Let’s try.
This man, a father, a grandfather, a husband, a brother, a friend, was working when two nihilistic creatures who likely don’t even know the meaning of that word decided to steal his car, his means of livelihood. One was born when he was 52, another when he was 53. He could not have known in those years, years when he was likely working just as hard to support his family, that his killers had been conceived and birthed. None of us can know when the agents of our destruction are placed on this earth.
Muhammad Anwar was like so many of the Pakistani men I have met in my professional life. Many are applicants for asylum, fleeing persecution in their native country. Others come alone, leaving behind the families that love them so they can find jobs, earn their green cards, set up stores or food carts, serve the communities they live in, obey the laws and then, through those laws, bring their families here. It’s a process that is followed over and over again, a painful and complicated one, an expensive and sometimes depressing one.
I did not know Muhammad Anwar, but in a way, I did. I looked at his picture and saw the same humility, resilience and ingenuity I see in the eyes of my clients, every day.
To know that he worked as hard as he did, only to end up bleeding on the streets of D.C. because some heartless creatures decided that they deserved something they could not purchase is beyond heartbreaking. And yet, it happens every day, in D.C. and Philadelphia and New York and every city, large and small, in this country.
Can we have a mural painted in Muhammad Anwar’s honor? Can we burn his image into that street where he took his last breath, a permanent memorial to the cruelty of life and the random barbarism that crushes it? Since there is no race angle, could we simply make it about the “human” race, reminding everyone that we are our brothers’ keepers, whether that brother be a Black Minnesotan or a brown immigrant?
Can we march in Muhammad Anwar’s name, screaming it out at the top of our lungs to remind everyone that Immigrant Lives Matter? How about Pakistani lives? How about American lives? How about the Lives of Fathers, the Lives of Uncles, the Lives of Husbands?
Can we treat his killers, minors who deserve to be walled off from society until they grow souls and consciences, the same way that we are treating Derek Chauvin? Is it possible to set them up, these girls, as symbols of the same hatred that allegedly lives in the heart of a Minneapolis police officer, or the white shooter in Georgia (but not, suspiciously enough, the Syrian American shooter in Boulder)? Can we do that, without being called racist ourselves?
Society has a tendency to pick and choose among the deaths that matter. We focus on the events that advance our preferred narrative, the narrative we think must be told, and we ignore the uncomfortable details that get in the way. In fact, the mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, used this horrific incident not to mourn the loss of a man’s life, but to tweet about the way people should be more careful so they wouldn’t be victims of carjacking.
Muhammad Anwar deserved more. He mattered. He still matters. Say his name. For that matter, let’s say the names of his underage killers, ripping away the protective anonymity that is supposed to attach to juvenile offenders. The people killed by those juveniles are just as dead as those killed by adults.
Muhammad Anwar dead as George Floyd.
So, let’s start treating all victims with the same respect, and all victimizers with the same level of righteous anger.
And let’s keep saying his name.
is just as