By Karim Shamsi-Basha
The note was waiting in my gym bag when I came out of the shower at my gym in Vestavia Hills. A swastika, drawn in black ink. Below it: “go back To where you Came From.”
A few days later, my United States senator decided it was worth his time.
Holding the note someone left in my gym bag, August 2019.
“As expected, the President’s disturbing rhetoric has gone mainstream,” then-Sen. Doug Jones wrote on Twitter in August 2019. “In Alabama especially, we know what can happen if we allow this kind of hatred to fester and if we don’t call out racism when we see it. We can all learn something from the grace @arabinalabama showed here.”
I read it three times. Then I sat down.
I wasn’t a donor. I wasn’t anyone he needed that week. I was a Syrian-born writer who’d had a bad day at the gym. He didn’t have to say a word. He spoke up anyway.
Seven years later, that’s still the clearest measure I have of the man. And it’s why, on Nov. 3, I’m voting for Doug Jones for governor of Alabama.
Go back
I knew the words on that note. Everyone in America knew them that summer. A few weeks earlier, President Trump had said four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Three of them were born in the United States.
I came here from Damascus in 1984, at 18. By 2019 I’d been an American citizen for more than 30 years. I’d raised three children in Homewood. I’d photographed this state, written about it and loved it out loud for most of my adult life.
Then someone at my gym wanted me to know I didn’t belong.
The story didn’t stay in my gym bag. WBRC interviewed me, and I told the reporter I didn’t hate whoever wrote the note, and that I’d buy them lunch if they wanted to get to know me. AL.com ran my column about the incident, including the letter I had written to my children the night I found it.
In August 2019, then-Sen. Doug Jones shared journalist Beth Shelburne’s post about the note left in my gym bag.
What I told my children
I almost didn’t show the note to Zade, Dury and Demi. Then I realized they might face something like it one day. So I wrote to them:
“Keep your chin high, be proud of who you are, and where you come from. Ignorant people should be taught and loved, make that your mission, not hatred. Be compassionate, loving. In the long run, that will pay off much more than hatred.”
I posted the note and a few words on Facebook. Beth Shelburne shared it on Twitter, and it spread. That’s how it reached my senator.
The other mail
Not everyone was as gracious as Sen. Jones.
Along with an outpouring of love, I got thousands of hateful messages. “Go back to Syria.” “You should be beheaded.” A few were threats specific enough that I made my Facebook profile private and checked my rearview mirror for a while.
That’s the part people forget. When a public official stands next to you at a moment like that, he isn’t only being kind. He’s telling everyone watching where he stands. For every person who wrote me something vile, there were others reading the senator’s words and learning that this wasn’t acceptable in Alabama.
Why it wasn’t a surprise
Doug Jones’ tweet didn’t surprise people who know his history.
In 1963, Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. For nearly four decades, two of the men responsible walked free. In 2001 and 2002, as U.S. attorney, Doug Jones reopened the case and convicted them both.
Nobody made him do it. The case was old, the witnesses were aging, and the politics were uncomfortable. He did it because four girls deserved justice, and because a state can’t heal a wound it refuses to look at.
That’s the same instinct I saw in his tweet about a scrap of notebook paper. You call hatred what it is, and you do it in public.
In the Senate, he kept at it in quieter ways. He worked across the aisle to end the so-called military widow’s tax, which had cheated surviving spouses of fallen service members out of benefits for years. He helped secure permanent federal funding for historically Black colleges and universities, which matters in a state with more HBCUs than almost any other. He fought to shore up pensions and health care for retired coal miners, nearly 6,000 of them in Alabama. And he won funding to help excavate the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach America, found in the mud near Mobile. None of it was flashy. All of it mattered to Alabama families.
Two years after his tweet, I met former Sen. Doug Jones at the Alabama Booksmith. He remembered the note before I could bring it up.
Why it matters now
Alabama is changing. Our classrooms are full of children whose parents came from Mexico, Guatemala, India, Korea, Nigeria and, yes, Syria. They speak Arabic and Spanish at home and say “y’all” at recess. They will grow up to be our nurses, engineers, coaches and teachers. They need to know that the person in the governor’s mansion sees them as Alabamians, not as people who should “go back.”
One tweet made me feel seen, and I still remember it seven years later. Imagine what four years of a governor who sees every Alabamian could do.
You don’t have to agree with Doug Jones on every issue to recognize character when you see it. I don’t agree with anyone on everything, but I know what he did when nothing was at stake. He spoke up when staying quiet would have been easier. That’s character.
What I’m asking
On Nov. 3, vote. Vote for the kind of Alabama you want your children to inherit.
I’ll be voting for the man who, when someone told me to go back where I came from, reminded the whole state that I was already home.
