Why African Americans get attention and Indian Muslims don't? Thread.

1. The world didn't wake up one day and decide to start paying attention to African Americans. They have been organising for well over a decade in response to hundreds or thousands of murders of African Americans. We have not done the same.

2. Over the course of this, they began to dissect and deconstruct the media narratives that are created when an African American is killed. We are only now beginning to do the same.

3. Affirmative action in USA has been successful in getting African Americans into influential positions, and while some of them are shills, many have stood by their communities. IMs have never demanded reservations, preferring to score moral points over SCSTOBCs.

4. AfAms have rejected being spoken for by white americans, while we widely praise everyone from KPs to Chandrashekhar for representing us.

5. Black Americans who have become successful in politics or the entertainment industry, like Ilhan Omar and Colin Kaepernick, have protested in highly visible ways. Bollywood Muslims are worse than useless.

6. While there is a great deal of discussion as to what the boundaries for white allies should be, there *are* white allies who will seriously throw down for, and organise following the lead of, AfAms. Hindus are perfectly unified when it comes to us.

7. Many conversations are led by African American women, and there are (some) efforts made to make those discussions more widely heard by publishing them in books, etc. Hardly anyone has thought that the conversations at the Shaheen Bagh camps are worth publicising.

Muslim men do not listen to Muslim women. Period. Instead what's been important is what Hindus have to say at Shaheen Bagh. Nobody cares to hear what the Muslim women who organised the damn camps have to say.

I think one of the things in our favour right now is the effectiveness with which Muslims can organise enormous protest actions. But that on its own is not enough if the actions and conversations are never generalised and Hindus continue to speak for and over us.

While African Americans have radio hosts, celebrities -- Indian Muslims have us dipshits on Twitter and we're doing a horrible job of amplifying or even listening to the conversations of ground activists. Who livetweeted the protest camps? Name a single person.