Color Coded Crime

Eid & Noruz Mubarak to everyone finding a way to celebrate this year through distance, through grief, through walls that were never meant to hold people. There is something profound about a joy that refuses to wait for better conditions, a faith that does not require comfort to show up. To everyone marking this day in hardship, in solitude, in longing for the people who should be at the table may this day carry the weight of what is hoped for, not only what is.
Eid Mubarak.💌💌🌸🌸💖💖✨✨

What we divide today into East and West once lived within a shared collective consciousness, where empires borrowed from one another and culture travelled freely. A Kufic Qur’an folio from 9th century North Africa echoes in the halo of the Virgin Mary painted 500 years later. Islamic muqarnas ceiling appear in a Norman Christian king’s chapel in Sicily. Islamic carpets became so admired that European painters immortalized them, and we now name those carpet designs after the Western artists who painted them. The divide between west and east was constructed to create an illusion of difference but the more we delve into history, the more we realize we are collectively the same, always have been, always borrowing, always absorbing, always reflecting each other. There is no west and east, and that illusion has never served us.

During these testing times, let’s remember our shared humanity before the lines that try to divide it.

As James Baldwin says ‘The person you are looking at is also you’