March 9th, 2019
It was probably 4 pm and I was hastily dressing up for an event. It was Spring break and I finally had a reason to stop watching Netflix; Bryn Mawr’s MSA got us some tickets to go to a banquet for free that night. It was the CAIR banquet- CAIR stands for Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is a Muslim civil rights advocacy group. Since I had nothing better to do, I decided I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go out with my friends, eat fancy food, and check out an event in Philly.
Honestly, I was not expecting much – I knew there would be speeches and food, but I had no real information about the event (I know it’s not very nice or responsible of me, but I was still buzzing from midterms.) While registering at the event, my friends and I realized we were scattered all over the place, as in, we were not sitting at the same table. To me, that felt like the first nail in the coffin for the night because I am not usually “sympatico” with the idea of socializing with complete strangers on my own. Nevertheless, I went ahead and sat at table 87, waiting for the night to fall apart right in front of me.
I was completely wrong and I am truly glad that I was! After sitting there for a while, a woman joined me at the table. To my surprise, she was a BMC graduate, class of 2015. She had majored in Biology and minored in Political Science. We talked about Bryn Mawr, our lives etc. Eventually, she started to introduce me as her friend to everyone who came by to greet her and, she knew almost everyone there! We talked a bit more and had dinner together. By then, the event was officially starting.
That’s when I realized what the event was about; It was a fundraising event for CAIR’s various programs like those related to education and also research on current Muslim conditions in the U.S. Each year the event has a theme, and this year, it was all about family and friends. The first part of the event featured a panel of female speakers. The women shared their stories with us – each of them had gone through so much to get to this point in their lives. I was lost in every word that they said because I related to them, I didn’t know then exactly why or how because I definitely have not gone through as much as they have.
Anyway, the next part was a speech by Shaun King, a civil rights activist. His words were truly enlightening. I don’t remember his exact words, but he said something like: it is important to bring people together for a movement but it is more important to have the resources or the means to see it through. Next, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill was given the Malcolm X Justice and Freedom Award. I remember one statement from his speech which was something about how we should tell the truth irrespective of what might happen. The night ended with some stand-up comedy from Jeremy McLellan. It was the loudest I had laughed in a while, and when you laugh with at least a hundred people around you, laughing really feels liberating.
On the car ride back to campus, I did something I always do. I replayed everything that happened at the event in my mind. That’s when I realized about something I had said earlier here, why I related to the words of those women at the event; it is because grief is grief. Even if we don’t know the person who is going through it or even if we haven’t experienced that pain firsthand; we know how pain feels. We know it hurts. I properly realized for the first time that even if the pain is not ours, we should try to help actively as much as we can, even if we don’t fully understand it. I learned a lot from the CAIR event. As today’s youth, we should aim to try and educate ourselves outside the classroom because we all have something we are passionate about, be it education, equal rights, maternal health, etc., and Bryn Mawr gives more and more opportunities for doing just that.
