Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  We spent countless hours discussing nomenclature: black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native American or Indigenous Person? We argued to the point of blows over the nature of various oppressions. Were black women more oppressed based on their race or their gender? Who was more marginalized, African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans? The Asian Americans, feeling a bit left out, invited a radical Asian American speaker to campus who gave a talk called “Where Are the Asian American Malcolm Xs”?

  “The personal is political” was our battle cry. Selective individual actions were immediately refracted into large-scale truths. It wasn’t just four white cops who beat Rodney King; it was every white person oppressing every person of color on earth.

  In high school history class, America had been presented as the land of opportunity and freedom. I had been told almost nothing about its dark side. But now I couldn’t get enough. I read Howard Zinn’s account of Columbus’s voyage and was sickened that the man we celebrate as “discovering” America made plans to exploit the indigenous people here as soon as he laid eyes on them. I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, was probably based on a lie. President Lyndon Johnson had sent waves of poor and minority Americans to destroy a country because of his ego. Power will always oppress people, one of my professors said.

  The evidence for that was right in front of me. Champaign-Urbana wasn’t much of a city, but it had many more social problems than Glen Ellyn. All you had to do was open your eyes to see Vietnam vets on the street drinking mouthwash for the alcohol and black kids in the poor part of town going to schools far inferior to the tony University High where the professors sent their children.

  I began to see the world through the framework of my radicalizing political consciousness. As I watched drunk white frat boys mock homeless people on Green Street on Friday nights, I saw corporate fat cats eating caviar while poor Americans starved during the Great Depression. When the crowds of Fighting Illini fans streamed by on their way to a basketball game wearing T-shirts and hats displaying the university’s demeaning mascot, Chief Illiniwek, I saw the spirit of Christopher Columbus crushing the natives.

  My response was to rage. I remember shouting down my fellow students in sociology classes at the University of Illinois for suggesting that welfare should be reformed so that poor people took more personal responsibility, angrily protesting against conservative speakers who came to campus, calling anybody who applied for a corporate job a sellout. “America is bent on imperialism” was the first thought I had every morning and the last thought I had every night.

  I was guided mostly by 1960s-era radical black thought—H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, early Malcolm X. The key lesson I took from this material was that progress was a myth. It was revolution or nothing. I quoted Malcolm X to the mealy-mouthed liberals who cited the victories of the civil rights movement: “You can’t stick a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call that progress.” I found myself increasingly enamored of the occasional references to the value of violence. “Every time a cop murders somebody in Harlem” I read in one volume, “we will retaliate by murdering someone in midtown.” “By any means necessary” was Malcolm X’s famous line. It made infinite sense to me. If the American system’s primary tool of engagement was violence, then those of us who sought to change it would have to become fluent in that language.

  I found myself pushing the envelope more. I started calling liberals “house niggers” a term I learned from reading Malcolm X, meaning they were too domesticated and comfortable to take the necessary actions to bring down the system. My father, growing increasingly frustrated by my stridency, told me to stop talking about politics when I visited home. “You’re too bourgeois to see what’s really happening in this world,” I responded. He exploded in anger, saying something about how his “bourgeois” ways were paying my college tuition. I took his anger as evidence that I was on the right path. Every radical had been rejected, even mocked, when he first spoke truth to power. My father’s frustration was confirmation that I had gained entry into the tradition of righteous revolutionaries.

  I searched for models of people who had tried to block the machinery of American imperialism. One of the campus radicals said to me, “Have you ever heard of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn? They started an outfit in the 1960s called the Weather Underground that did strategic bombing here in the U.S. You should check them out.”

  I filed that away in the back of my head. I was sure the reference would come in handy someday.

  Gone were my high school dreams of a perfect LSAT score and a prime corporate law job in LA. I had liberated myself from the capitalist framework that provides comfort for some and poverty for most. I had left the known world and entered the universe of myth.

  The one thing that connected me to my past was volunteering. Something about my YMCA experiences and my parents’ insistence that service was essential stuck with me. Also, I needed the human connection. My head was swimming with radical theories and my spirit was bursting with anger. The moments I spent trying to concretely improve somebody’s life kept me from falling over the edge. Every Sunday morning, I went to a nursing home and played my guitar for the residents. On alternate Monday nights, I helped cook dinner and clean the kitchen at the women’s shelter. Thursdays I picked up cakes and cookies from a local bakery and delivered them to the Salvation Army. The leaders of local social service agencies became some of my closest mentors in Champaign.

  But my intellectual and activist friends were cool toward such activities. They thought that social services were part of the “system” and that by volunteering I was helping perpetuate the injustices inherent in capitalism. The litmus test they used for any initiative was whether it was “radical,” by which they meant, will this activity ultimately destroy the current system? I stopped telling them about the new programs I had started as president of the Allen Hall Volunteer Group because they would inevitably dismiss them with a wave of a clove cigarette and a single line: “That sounds like just another middle-class liberal program.”

  No doubt there was something superficial about a good deal of the volunteering that took place when I was a student. The other students I worked with at homeless shelters and tutoring programs took their volunteer activities seriously, but when I tried to start discussions on the causes of homelessness or educational inequality, they didn’t want to hear it. “Volunteering at the Salvation Army for two hours on Thursday night makes me feel like I am giving back,” one of them told me. “Then I don’t feel bad when I go out and have fun on Friday night.”

  “Yeah, but those guys you play cards with on Thursday night are still at the Salvation Army on Friday while you are out partying,” I thought. If the primary purpose of volunteering is to help other people, not to assuage our own guilt, shouldn’t we spend some time thinking about how to improve the situation of homeless people in a more permanent way?

  But I was also aware of a more creative movement bubbling up. It had volunteering at its core, but its broader mission was social change. Organizations such as Teach for America, City Year, and Habitat for Humanity combined the concrete activities of typical volunteer programs with an exciting vision of large-scale transformation. If you volunteered with a Habitat for Humanity project, you weren’t just building houses; you were ending poverty housing. If you joined Teach for America, you weren’t just helping 30 fourth graders; you were transforming American education. At City Year, you weren’t just doing jumping jacks in the park wearing a bright red jacket; you were showing the world that young people were idealistic change makers, not self-absorbed cynics.

  Moreover, these organizations took diversity seriously. They realized that service was an ideal place to bring together people from different racial, ethnic, class, and geographic backgrounds. People built a special relationship with one another when they passed bricks at a Habitat for Humanity site or planned lessons for c
hildren at an inner-city school. The common purpose gave them a common bond. Furthermore, because these people came from different backgrounds, they inevitably brought different perspectives to the various challenges that emerged in their service projects. In other words, a diverse team made for better service.

  As my angry activist friends bemoaned the lack of participation in our political meetings, I watched thousands of people, from economics majors to English majors, flock to Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, and City Year. These organizations had managed to create an aura around themselves. They were far larger than the particular programs; they had become ideas in the culture. President Bill Clinton recognized this and created AmeriCorps to build on that energy. The New York Times and other major publications took notice and wrote articles extolling these groups. I realized that Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, Vanessa Kirsch of Public Allies, and Alan Khazei and Michael Brown of City Year were not much older than I was. They had founded their organizations when they were recent college graduates. I had been made to believe that our only heroes were martyrs of the 1960s. I was proud to know that my generation had produced leaders, too.

  The dorm I lived in, Allen Hall, was a temple of radical politics and cultural creativity. It was the University of Illinois’s first Living-Learning Community, meaning that academic courses were offered in the dorm itself, with the intention of cultivating a liberal arts college–type intellectual atmosphere. “Freaks and geeks” was what the rest of the campus called it.

  One of the first people I met at Allen Hall was a tall, lanky senior named Jeff Pinzino. He embodied Allen Hall perfectly. When I came back from class in the afternoon, he was inevitably on the porch, playing Hacky Sack and harmonica with the hippie types. He was into things like ethnomusicology and Alan Watts, and had organized theater troupes, writing groups, and political discussion circles in the hall. Jeff had an almost perfect grade point average, but nobody had ever seen him study. The only time I ever saw him in the library, he was listening to Delta blues musicians in the music archive. I once saw him reading a brochure for the Maharishi University in Iowa. When I asked him about it, he told me it was one of the graduate programs he was considering, along with Stanford and the University of Chicago.

  I loved Jeff’s offbeat interests, but even more I loved his ability to make things happen. “Why do you spend so much time starting little groups?” I once asked him.

  “Because the most important thing you can learn is how to turn an idea into reality,” he responded. I wrote that phrase down in my journal and underlined it three times.

  The director of Allen Hall, Howie Schein, was an aging hippie who had received his PhD from Berkeley during its political heyday. Committed to social justice and student empowerment in his own low-key way, Howie attracted the campus’s most politically radical and student-centered faculty to teach courses at Allen. Allen’s section of Introduction to Political Science was famously taught by a Marxist who had played a prominent role in the organization of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Howie also had music rooms and art studios built in the hall, found funding for students to create political and cultural programs, and started one of the nation’s first guest in residence programs, which brought writers, artists, and political agitators to live in the hall and interact with students for one to two weeks. The purpose, he once told me, was to show students that accounting, law, engineering, and medicine were not the only life paths available.

  It was a guest in residence at Allen Hall who nudged me toward my second serious relationship. Emily Shihadeh, a Palestinian American playwright, performed her one-woman play about growing up in Ramallah and inventing her own destiny in San Francisco to a rapt audience at Allen Hall. I loved her. She had my mother’s strength of will and my father’s sense of humor. She wanted to see Champaign, so I took her to all the places I volunteered: the nursing home where I played music, the homeless shelter where I served dinner, the elementary school where I taught peace games to children. Driving back to Allen Hall after one of these excursions, she turned to me and said, “I can see what you are doing. You are trying to give all of your love away through these different service activities. It is good you are helping people, but you will never get full from it. This kind of love you have has to be given to one person, a special person.”

  I told her about Sarah. We had met at a student leadership conference and been friends ever since. The activist circle at Illinois was small, so we ran into each other a lot. Earlier that year, we had founded a program that took residents of one of the homeless shelters for social outings once a week. We were often the only two students who showed up, and after we took the residents back to the shelter, we would go to Zorbas for a sandwich and some late-night blues. One night, after we dropped the guys off, Sarah looked up at the sky and said, “Tonight is a perfect night for star spinning.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You’ve never been star spinning?” she asked in mock surprise. And so we drove to a field a few miles from campus, crossed our wrists, grabbed each other’s hands, and spun around looking skyward. We fell down, arms sprawled out, laughing hysterically.

  If I hadn’t felt so dizzy, I might have reached for her, I told Emily. “Oh, habibi,” she said to me, using an Arabic term of affection. “You go to this beautiful girl before she concludes you are too stupid and looks for someone else.”

  Being Jewish was central to Sarah’s identity. She had been raised in Jewish youth programs; had twice been on the March of the Living, where young Jews visit the sites of concentration camps in Europe; and had served on the international board of B’nai B’rith’s youth organization. When we met, she was studying Hebrew in preparation for a semester in Israel.

  Whereas Lisa’s religiosity was based on notions of truth, Sarah’s was based on commitment to peoplehood and social justice. She did not strictly keep Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, but she lit candles every Friday evening in honor of its arrival. “My great-grandmother lit candles, my grandmother lit candles, my mother lights candles, so I will light candles,” she explained to me. Her parents had escaped Romania’s brutal dictator Ceausescu in the early 1970s and moved to Israel. They had left Israel for the United States, then returned when war broke out in 1973. Sarah would joke, “Most people leave countries when wars happen. My parents moved back.” But I understood the seriousness behind what she was saying. Her people had been willing to fight for Jewishness, and Sarah felt it was her honor and responsibility to be a part of the tradition and community that others had fought and died for.

  Sarah spoke often about tikkun olam and tzedakah, the Hebrew terms for repairing the world and doing charity. These were the most important principles of Judaism to her, and in her eyes they commanded Jews to help all humanity, especially those who are suffering. I remember going with Sarah to Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois to hear a Holocaust survivor speak about his experiences. Sarah wept throughout the talk. She had visited the concentration camp this man had been in. When the speech was done, Sarah asked the first question: “I have been involved in Holocaust education since I was twelve. I lived by the motto ‘Never again.’ But it is happening again, now, before our eyes, in Bosnia. What will make it stop?”

  A hush fell over the audience. The man onstage mumbled something weak, congratulating Sarah for caring. The Q and A continued, but Sarah’s question hung in the room for the remainder of the event. She and I left. I was quieter than usual. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing really,” I told her. “It’s just that the only other person I’ve heard talk about what’s happening in Bosnia is my dad. He’s so angry that it’s Muslims being massacred there. He’s convinced that if it was Christians or Jews, the rest of the world would try to stop it.”

  “I just think it’s horrible, all those people being killed,” Sarah said. “I didn’t even know they were Muslims. But whoever they are, the world should come to their aid.”

  Som
ething occurred to me. In all the sociology courses on identity I had taken, in all the late-night conversations we had at Allen Hall on the subject, the issue of religion rarely came up. We were always talking about freedom for women or Latinos or lesbians. Identity was always defined as race, class, gender, or, occasionally, sexual orientation. When I became a resident adviser, half of my training focused on dealing with issues around those particular identities. The service learning movement took diversity seriously, but it was always about blacks and whites, poor folks and rich folks, urbanites and suburbanites; never about Muslims, Christians, and Jews. I had been to many programs at the Office of Minority Student Affairs, and they also had always focused on the same things. We talked about the limited roles for black actors, the discrimination that kept gay politicians in the closet, the burden of the second shift for women, the cultural capital that accrued to middle-class kids because of the circumstances of their birth. We extolled bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua for their ability to write about these various identities in an integrated way, and filled hours debating whether the oppressions associated with each identity added together or multiplied together. But right now, as we griped about Denzel Washington getting passed over for the Oscar for Malcolm X, a religious war was raging in the Balkans, tens of thousands of people were dying, and faith was nowhere to be found in the diversity discussion.

  What I didn’t tell Sarah at that time, what I had told few people actually because I didn’t know how to make sense of it myself, was that I had recently discovered religion.

  I had come across a copy of Robert Coles’s The Call of Service and was drawn to one of the people he wrote about: Dorothy Day. He spoke of her with absolute awe, as if she was a force of nature. In her thirties, during the Great Depression, Day had started something called the Catholic Worker movement, which combined radical politics, direct service, and community living. For nearly half a century, Day had given up her own middle-class privilege to live with those who went without in what was called a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality. The original House of Hospitality was on the Lower East Side of New York City, but it inspired more than a hundred others across the nation.