Houston, we have contact

While I am sure that after our last speaker everyone will be blogging about Contact Hypothesis, I have been thinking about this topic in a rather personal way, and while I have been trying to link it to things I have seen, the most pressing example seems to revolve around my own experience. I am White, this I will admit or as our lecturer today referred to us as “Whities”. I was born to British and Afrikaner mixed family, and I am quite the stereotype of a classic “Caucasian”, I am blond haired and blue eyed and incredibly fair skinned. There is just one thing standing between me and a stereotypical Whitie: after submitting myself to Islam I now wear a hijab. This departs me from the classic view of a White person and lands me in a whole new category to which I have never belonged: minority status.
While I admit that it is unlikely I am equated to other minority statuses such as Black or Indian, I must also say that after I put on the hijab my whole perspective changed. Suddenly I became a part of another and different group, and I found that slowly but surely, my friend circle shifted and changed. In a religious sense I found myself hanging around a lot more Muslims, however racially I found myself in the company, almost exclusively I might add, of Arabs. This remains true to this day, almost all of my friends are Arabs, and while I have been in this country I have often times missed the company Middle Easterners, the sound of Arabic and lengthy discussions surrounding Islam. It dawned on me today, that I had d experienced the Contact Hypothesis in all its glory after my transition to Islam. Without my really being aware, I completely changed who I was hanging out with to be in a more similar and comfortable group.
I might add, that all the while I and my friends were complaining about American’s perspective of Islam. Now I realize that if I had really wanted to shift Americans’ view of Islam, the best way to do so would have been to retain my previous friend circle. While this may be the case, throughout our recent discussions surrounding the Contact Hypothesis, I now understand that I am probably doing a service to many if not all of the students in this group, as from my understanding not many have them have had extensive, if any, experiences with Muslims or Islam. This was similar of my experience, really, until my conversion. I had no idea that really I was doing nothing to alleviate the American perception of the Muslim minority by gravitating to hang out with other Arabs and Muslims.
I had also conditioned myself to find comfort, safety and security amongst Arabs. I really have found myself missing Arabs since I’ve been here, and this has raised another interesting point. Without knowingly doing so, I had conditioned myself using the very same Contact Hypothesis discussed thus far in this class. I have been in such high contact with Arabs throughout the past year that I have found this group to be my main go-to for socializing and intermingling. This has been the most interesting point in my opinion, that I have successfully and completely implemented the Contact Hypothesis and proved its existence.
Knowing this now, I will make it a point to attempt to rekindle some of my old friendships with friends I perhaps went to high school with, or knew before my conversion. I know that I was relatively ignorant about Islam before I converted, so it would probably do many Americans a relative amount of good to come into close contact with me, a Muslim, to dispose of some of the prejudice, distrust and fear surrounding this particular group. I know that my newfound identity has opened up my family thus far to new perceptions of Islam, and this new perception could quite easily be carried over to positively influence other American views as well.