Why you should protest Jay Leno?
On January 19, 2012, Jay Leno, the host of NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, showed a picture of Sri Darbar Sahib, also known in the West as The Golden Temple, the holiest places of worship of 30 million Sikhs worldwide, in his poor taste, as a reference to the summer home of Republican Party hopeful, Mitt Romney. Romney, a rich businessman, politician and a presidential contender from the Republican Party, is under fire from American media for amassing wealth and paying lower taxes.
Darbar Sahib is as sacred as Mecca is to a Muslim or as Temple Mount is to a follower of Abrahimic religions. It is the nerve-center of Sikh thought and ideology, a place where everyone is welcome and where more than 30,000 people break bread everyday free of cost in Guru’s kitchens. For a quick insight into Darbar Sahib, check Discovery Channel’s last year’s documentary on youtube.
Darbar Sahib is also the place were many of our martyrs died in the struggle to survive independently and with dignity as a minority under various establishments, and its reference also brings back a flashback of horrible times of survival as recent as 1984. Someone who has ever seen a Holocaust film or has read on American Civil War are more familiar than any about the stories of survival in the reign of a majority oppression. For a Sikh, reference to Darbar Sahib, is no joke.
The Sikhs in both east and west, seem to divided whether there should have been any reaction to a jab made in poor taste by someone who lives and earns from his job as a clown. For many Indian as well as Sikh newspapers, I have a very simple question - Would Jay Leno even in his comedic imbecility, dared to compare Arlington Cemetery as a politician’s Golf club, or Temple Mount or Mecca as a palatial home. Mr Leno, an Emerson graduate is smart enough not to dare such an act - following which every US politician would had slammed him publicly and all the prime-time news channel including NBC would had followed on a condemnation spree. And above all, State Department would have never dared to release a public statement in his favor fearing a public backlash in an election year.
This is not the first time that this show host has targeted Sikhs in his monologue. Previously, in 2007 in a show he called Sikhs ‘diaper heads.’ In 2010, he remarked, falsely so, in his monologue that President Obama could not visit Sri Darbar Sahib because of requirements of wearing a turban (there is no mandate. The only mandate is to cover your head, which Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian PM Stephen Harper, Dalai Lama did during their visits).
With the freedom of speech, comes responsibility - responsibility of being civil when in public or on air waves. You do not say N word on the air on an NBC show without getting beeped!
Last year, I was in Washington DC. While walking through the halls of Senate, I realized that the C-SPAN camera mounted on the floor of the Senate has probably never seen a turban wearing Sikh in the 150 years of Sikh presence in the US. A large part of the American public is either unaware of our existence or simply misinformed due to our appearance and articles of faith. I live through the racial profiling of our articles of faith everyday at the US airports. Living in the US, I experience first hand how difficult it is to even get our legitimate concerns, as important as the safety of Sikh children in the public schools, heard from our representatives.
And when the media, even if it is a clown, misrepresents us by dull-witted remarks on our articles of faith and places of worship - it is the time to stand up. It is the time to ask them to stop being racists - to engage in a dialogue if acted out of ignorance, so that it can be remedied in the future or be ready for the backlash if they continue on the same path. In the wise words of one of my former supervisors “People will keep on giving you bullshit, until you step up and say I’m not taking it anymore.”
And here is a quote I found from Martin Luther King, Jr - the champion of American Civil rights - “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
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