Most people reading this are probably fortunate enough to feel part of mainstream Australia by having pronounceable names, white skin and few religious dietary restrictions. By spending your teenage years kissing people of the same or opposite sex,attending parties and avoiding the worst of bullying in the playground. You won't turn onthe TV or radio and see or hear stories of people that share your ancestral strangeness committing awful deeds.
Even before 9/11 and 7/7, brown-skinned South Asians who identified as not-as-Christian-as-everyone else werethe subject of vilification. Largely this was for racial reasons. In the UK Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims etc. were collectively identified as 'Paki'. While in Australia, we were called 'curry munchers', 'Abbos', 'wogs' and other terms of endearment.
Majoritarian politicians love to use any opportunity to remind minorities to integrate. Or to assimilate. It's all the same, really. Minority kids by and large resent these calls. Why? Because these kids are almost always desperate to integrate. South Asian kids like myself and British journalist Sarfraz Manzoor are among those wishing to be Australian or British. I wrote about my integration journey in Once Were Radicals. Manzoor's memoir Greetings From Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock 'n' Roll - on which the 2019 film Blinded by the Light has been based - spoke about his experiences as a British
growing up in a working class Pakistani family.
An essential part of the self-integration process was living the lyrics. We both took our music seriously. We both regarded the words of songs from our favourite artists as gospel. For Manzoor, it was the morose voice of New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen. For me, it was the boom of North Sea waves emerging from Glasgow band Simple Minds.
Springsteen meant everything to the young high school kid from Luton. It wasn't merely a case of shallow mimicking of dress and hairstyle. Manzoor the young writer was drawing literary inspiration from Springsteen's lyrics, even as Manzoor's father (at least in the film) wanted his son to throw out his literary passions and focus on studying economics.
Manzoor's father had good reasons, having experienced the nasty and often humiliating work of a factory labourer. 'Writing is for English people. You are a Pakistani,' he would lecture his son. The road to integration was paved with pounds and dollars. Too often I was told by my South Asian uncles the same message. 'Stop writing letters to the newspaper. Don't alienate this or that lobby. Just get good grades, rise to the top and then do what you wish.'
The problem, as I saw it, was that the uncles who reached the top never did anything to speak truth to power. They never saw it fit to rock the boat, even if the same boat was sinking. Instead, their idea was not to challenge power but to have their photos taken with politicians.
The identity struggles Manzoor and I experienced might be described by detractors as identity politics. But our identity politics were not built around religious or political violence. We didn't resent mainstream culture. We didn't want to separate from the mainstream. We wanted to be the mainstream. Our idols were Bruce Springsteen and Jim Kerr, not Abu Bakr Baghdadi or Osama bin Ladin.
And yet the gatekeepers of the mainstream kept pushing us away. They called us extremists yet never did anything about their own extremists. In Thatcher's England, the British National Front openly marched through the streets, its members attacking anyone deemed not visibly British enough. In Australia, an opposition leader named John Howard openly echoed the sentiments of the far-right by saying that Asian migrants had some sort of trouble with Australian culture.
Later, with the launch of the war on terror and other pronouns, the identity struggles of second and third generation western kids who barely identified as Muslim become a lucrative obsession for a cabal of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, pundits, counterterrorism academics and politicians.
Now, with German cities in lockdown over neo-Nazism, with terrorist attacks by far-right groups on mosques and synagogues across the western world and with a resurgent violent far-right being declared the biggest threat facing many western countries, that same obsession with youth identities of far-right and white supremacist kids is almost completely absent.
We aren't speculating about what is being taught in their schools and places of worship. We aren't speaking of radicalisation on social media. We aren't using tranches of draconian counterterrorism legislation to carry out heavily publicised raids and arrest people and house them in Supermax prisons as they await trial.
'My' terrorists are allegedly not integrated. But the 'white' 'Christian' non-Muslim western terrorists are very integrated. So integrated that their violent tendencies - whether attacking houses of worship or murdering their wives or partners - are somehow less serious than a bored confused kid attending the lecture of a 'radical' imam.
Or perhaps we should just recognise that most young adults, regardless of faith and culture and colour, just want to fit in and be accepted. They just want to belong. And chances are they will use mainstream culture - including American or Scottish rock'n' roll - to find that sense of belonging.
(Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney based lawyer and blogger. First published in Eureka Street on 1 December 2019)
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