Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • We Are…KPK!

    Jokowi’s young presidency is in the midst of a serious political crisis. Here is Andreas Harsono from Human Rights Watch.

    On Friday, members of Indonesia’s National Police – widely considered one of the country’s most corrupt government institutions – arrested Bambang Widjojanto, deputy chairman of the official Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK. (For the record, Widjojanto was an intern with Human Rights Watch in the 1980s.)

    That arrest was remarkable not just because the National Police have been a long-time target of the KPK’s anti-corruption efforts. The timing also smacked of political revenge, as the arrest occurred just nine days after the KPK declared Commissionaire Gen. Budi Gunawan — President Joko Widodo’s sole candidate for National Police chief – to be a graft suspect.

    In a country rife with official corruption, KPK is one of the very few political institutions that has garnered the public’s trust. That fact has made it a target, as Indonesia’s most powerful people seek to weaken or destroy the institution (on the previous KPK scandal of 2009, see Ehito Kimura, Christian von Luebke, and Simon Butt).

    This post, though, isn’t about this latest KPK crisis. It’s about the headline on the cover of Indonesia’s weekly magazine Tempo: KPK Adalah Kita.
    kpk-adalah-kita

    KPK Adalah Kita literally means “KPK Is Us.” At first glance, this looks like a simple appropriation of Je suis Charlie, another fun little instance of today’s globalized media landscape. But that’s not the right interpretation. KPK Adalah Kita actually harkens back to Indonesia’s presidential campaign in summer 2014. Specifically, to this:

    Jokowi-JK-Adalah-Kita56

    Jokowi adalah kita [= Jokowi is us] reflected the notion that Jokowi represented regular Indonesians, not the elite political classes. Perhaps a more accurate translation would be “Jokowi is one of us.” And the image of the gecko confronting the crocodile, scorpion, snake, and other creepy crawlies on the Tempo cover is harkens back to the last KPK scandal, during which the following image circulated widely.

    Cicak-vs-buaya

    The gecko (cicak) here is next to the crocodile (buaya), and this reads “I am the gecko who bravely battles the crocodile.” A more evocative translation that resonates with English speakers might be “I’m the little guy who bravely fights against the machine.” It’s bad news for Jokowi’s presidency if he is now viewed as part of the machine.

    This is Part 1 of two posts. Tomorrow, in Part 2, I will get into the weeds about translating KPK Adalah Kita as “We are KPK” versus “KPK is us.” Stay tuned…

  • On the “Racism” of Charlie Hebdo

    In the wake of the horrific murders at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, you may find dozens commentaries on free speech, on hate speech, on Islam, on integration, and what the killings tell us about all of that. (There are too many to list here, but this one featuring Claire Adida is notable because she’s a French political scientist who actually studies Muslim integration in France.)

    You should also read commentary that reminds us that Charlie Hebdo’s satire really was difficult. It was, indeed, offensive. Divisive even among non-Muslims in France. You may also read that the way that Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam is racist. Two examples are Jacob Canfield at Hooded Utilitarian, and Richard Seymour at Jacobin.

    This allegation of racism is problematic. It fundamentally misunderstands Islam, the challenges that Muslims face in Europe and elsewhere, and the role that race does play in shaping and supporting the grievances of Muslims in the West.

    It is, of course, obvious that Islam is not a race. As a faith, Islam eschews racial categorization in favor of a humanity divided into believers and unbelievers. In my work on Muslim Southeast Asia, I have found it profitable to think explicitly about the ways in which perceptions of racial distinction shape interethnic relations. Doing so brings into relief the role of Islam in bridging these perceived racial differences. (Nowhere is this clearer than in Malaysia, where the fundamental prerequisite for becoming Malay [masuk Melayu] is to become Muslim.) At the same time, racism has long existed within the Muslim world based on place of origin, phenotype, or perceived descent.

    But this point is almost too obvious. I imagine Canfield, Seymour, and others reading these words and rolling their eyes. “Of course Islam isn’t a race, but the way in which Islam is portrayed is racist.”

    This reply also fails. We know from recent research that Muslims face conditions of discrimination that transcend their perceived race. More to the point, though, Charlie Hebdo’s mockery of Islam targets not the Muslim as a person, but a set of beliefs held by a subset of Muslims. That mockery has power because it forces readers, Muslim and non-Muslim, to examine the essence of religious belief. These cartoons play on the contested foundations of a spiritual identity. And those foundations are indeed contested, they are political, within Islam. That is how to “get” the cartoons, even if you find them offensive and inappropriate.

    Eliding anti-Islam rhetoric with racism also obscures racism qua racism. It won’t do to label every instance of “whites punching down” as racism, because it prevents us from seeing that the mechanisms that produced hierarchies of race, class, and privilege really are different for Muslims and racial and ethnic minorities. They may be interrelated, of course. Nigerian Muslims in the United States are not merely Muslim, they are also Black. But my point is this: the narratives of the dangerous convert, the sleeper, the invisible cancer, all of which characterize the contemporary condition of Muslims in the West, none of those has a clear analogue in race. When racists imagine the problem of integration, they imagine a condition that stems from birth, a destiny inherited biologically. When Islamophobes imagine the problem of integration, they imagine a struggle of ideas, one in which all are vulnerable, in which the most frightening threat is the convert. (This is why commentary about Islamic radicals is so obsessed with pointing out that radicals, say, used to smoke marijuana or visit prostitutes. Even a “bad” Muslim is a dangerous one.)

    The analogue for this kind of panic about Islam is not race. It’s communism. And the mockery of Islam by Charlie Hebdo is biting precisely because it targets a belief held sacred, not because it portrays all Muslims as having inherent, immutable attributes.

    Note that I am not arguing that there is nothing racial about anti-Muslim attitudes, or the larger problem of Islam in Europe. There surely is. But the term that describes this phenomenon is the racialization of Islam in the West. The Tsarnaev brothers offer a compelling example from the U.S. But the racialization of Islam is an example of a broader racialization of poverty, of violence, of class. (A vivid example of these is Vinz, Vincent Cassel’s character in La Haine.)

    Thinking through the racialization of Islam in France, and in the West in general, is obviously good, in a way that Edward Said (enlisted by Seymour as his first line of defense) would approve of. But understanding exactly how Charlie Hebdo’s mockery of Islam is not racist is the first step in taking the challenges of Charlie Hebdo seriously.