This week I had the opportunity to return to the campus of Johns Hopkins University, where I completed my MA/MBA years ago, to kick off the Bloomberg School of Public Health's incredibly important new "Understanding American Muslims" seminar.
If you're in the area, I urge you to support this timely new endeavor. If you're not, don't worry – they livestreamed Wednesday's event, so you can watch this seminar series from anywhere.
You can read more about it here:
Mansoor Shams, a Muslim American veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, invited his audience Wednesday to call out whatever stereotypes came to mind just by looking at him.
When, inevitably, no one did, Shams supplied them himself: "The terrorist. The Bin Laden. The ISIS guy."
Shams, speaking at a Johns Hopkins seminar on American Muslims, challenged everyone to grapple directly with those kind of thoughts rather than flicking them away to the subconscious.
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