I said I was going to make a post about charities each week until the election. And look, the election is over! I took a week to think about it, but I don’t really feel like stopping right now. I don’t really feel like now is a time when I feel less like promoting good causes to which you can donate time and money. So I’m going to keep going with weekly charity posts, because that’s the world we’re living in right now.
(You know what? These charities would still have been a good idea if Hillary Clinton had been elected. There is so much more that needs doing in the world than we will ever get done in one lifetime, even if each of us makes exquisite choices every single day from here on out. When you are disappointed, when you are elated: the work of the world will still need doing.)
So let’s talk about civil rights for Muslims in this country.The biggest Muslim civil liberties group, the one you’ve probably already heard of, is CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. They need non-Muslim support in addition to Muslim support right right now–they have for years. (Other groups are increasingly vulnerable, too. By all means recommend charities in case I don’t have your favorite one lined up for another week. Additional positive groups are always, always welcome in the comments.)
If you prefer to keep your charity work closer to home, keep in mind that your local Muslim cultural centers may be facing various problems in times when the US’s treatment of its Muslim citizens and residents is in the news. In Minneapolis area, there is, for example, the Islamic Center of Minnesota, which provides all sorts of community services (listed on webpage) for local Muslims. This sort of group providing a food shelf and burial services is exactly the sort that get targeted when racists decide they want to do bad things. If you’re able-bodied and able to help with counter-demonstrations, clean-up, etc., find the cultural centers in your area and keep them in mind when you read the news. Inter-faith (or interfaced faith-with-lack-of-faith, why not!) outreach shows that we believe in civil rights for everyone, that we cannot be divided so easily.
Here’s how broken our culture is: when I went to google “Minneapolis Muslim cultural center,” Google tried to autocomplete, “Minneapolis Muslim problems.” And for some reason they didn’t seem to think that “getting kid good ice time” and “finding halal Swedish meatballs” were the Minneapolis Muslim problems in question. Some people would like you to think that Minneapolis is a war zone, with our Somali neighbors trying to force their religion on the rest of us. Nothing could be farther from the truth. That’s fear and ignorance talking, not fact. It’s all very well to say “if there’s a registry for Muslims, I’ll register too!”, but if it’s an immigrant registry, that’s not going to help. CAIR and your local Muslim institutions almost certainly have some very concrete ideas about what will help. We’re all in this together. We always have been.