Nancy Smith

Today, I watched the reaction to Haley Stevens’s interview with Anderson Cooper. Before the interview, after it, across Twitter and Facebook, people were expressing deep concern for her. Debbie Dingell reminded people that Stevens is human. Scott Jennings said she had been mistreated. Stevens herself described Abdul El-Sayed as mean and unkind. I don’t disagree that she is human. I don’t take pleasure in seeing someone struggle in public. But as I read those posts, I kept wondering where this tenderness had been when Abdul and his family were being attacked. Where was this empathy when his wife, mother, and father-in-law were pulled into the ugliness? Where was it when a brown Muslim Arab man was described as the aggressor, by a white woman who has vociferously defended the Genocide of the Palestinians, for refusing to give up his moral position on Palestine? Where was it when the attacks on him and his campaign were, in my view, racist and dehumanizing? The contrast was hard to miss. Stevens was treated as a person deserving concern. Abdul was still trying to bring the conversation back to Michiganders. I also kept thinking about the people now presenting Stevens as one of the country’s best Democrats, while barely reckoning with the choices she made… including the way her campaign attacked Abdul, and the support she gave to Mike Rogers. Many people online seem more concerned with her distress in this moment than with the harm inflicted on Abdul, his family, his supporters, and the people who saw themselves reflected in his campaign. And beneath all of it is a deeper disagreement: Abdul would not join the demand to dehumanize Palestinians. He would not treat their lives as disposable so that everyone else could move comfortably through the conversation. That refusal has carried a cost for him and for his family. Part of me feels sad watching Stevens struggle. Another part of me is exhausted by the familiar pattern: Muslim and Arab people are treated as threats, our anger is called aggression, and our pain is made invisible… until someone else’s pain becomes the story. I cannot imagine what Abdul and his family are carrying right now. I know what many of us have watched them endure. And I know that what Muslims in America are feeling, painful as it is, cannot compare with the devastation Palestinians have experienced. Still, the scale of that suffering makes it all the more disturbing to see how easily the world turns away from it. I also cannot ignore the reproductive-rights consequences of Stevens’s choices. Many of the same people now expressing concern for her seem unwilling to face the possibility that her endorsement of Mike Rogers helped put women’s health and rights at greater risk. Concern for one person should not require silence about the consequences of her political decisions. I want this election cycle to end. I want Abdul to win. And I hope that, when it is over, we will be willing to face what this campaign has revealed about whose pain is recognized, whose dignity is defended, and who is still asked to beg for the right to belong as an American. I am deeply grateful to the Jewish, Christian, and Black community who have spoken against this dehumanization and stood in solidarity. I hope we continue to show up for one another when either of our communities is under attack. As we inch closer to D-day, I hope American can relearn that there is no victory in stepping over someone else’s grief. Neither here, nor in a foreign land.