My name is Khan touches on many triggering and emotional subjects which take the viewer on a tragic and inspirational roller coaster. (Or, in other words, I cried throughout the entire thing.) This movie brings awareness to the everyday ignorance and insensitivity of able-bodied privilege. For instance, yesterday when I was browsing Tumblr I came across this post, where the writer states that they are autistic and explains why autoplay music (music that starts upon opening the page) is startling and triggering. It’s something I have never considered before despite being an advocate of trigger warning labels, but immediately reblogged it and thought it an important accommodation. We see however, that those accommodations are not always seen as “necessary” which is apparent in the first scene where the TSA harass Khan (assuming the harassment is driven by racism) but we see his boarding pass includes some sort of pass which indicates he has autism.
It is the relationship between being a person of color and a person with Asperger’s that also makes this film both heartbreaking and beautiful. The amount of negative attention so often given to men of color (and especially when this movie is set, post 9/11 for Muslim men of color) and the bombardment of dangerous stereotypes was put in the spotlight with this film. Last academic year I spent three quarters taking American Sign Language. Part of the class was not only to learn the language, but to learn about the very distinct culture. Because of the discrimination that deaf/ hard-of-hearing people have faced their groups have become protective and mostly exclusive from hearing people. While watching this movie I thought of the cases where deaf individuals have been stereotyped by those who perceive their signing as gang signs. Google prompted many results when trying to find examples, but I’ve only chosen one to share. Lashonn White, a women of color from Tacoma, called police to report an assault and upon greeting (which she used sign) was then tased and held in jail without an interpreter.
Like we saw in the movie, the insensitive, ignorant, and clearly indecent treatment of people of color with disabilities is not just unjust, but it is incredibly dangerous for them and can be fatal. For an Indian American Muslim man to be viewed immediately as a dangerous criminal (“terrorist”) is to then completely ignore any other part of his existence. To see him as only an individual capable of harm is to then perceive all of his actions or words as one that will bring harm. Like the instance of White in Tacoma, it did not matter that she called to report an assault, but instead that she is a Black women and therefore her signs were perceived as “aggressive”.
***It’s important to note that in ASL, your own space is important. When signing with another person I would never touch them or grab them. Even when indicating that something is really, really big, I would use my tension in my face or repetitive motions to indicate that and I would not extend my arms fully.