Re: Yom Kippur and diversity in groups
From: Catherine Harper (tylikeskimo.com)
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 14:56:07 -0600 (MDT)

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Racheli Gai wrote:

> Does anyone out there know when Muslim holidays happen?
> Does anyone take care not to schedule then?
> I doubt it!  I haven't belonged to one group as yet which took notice of
> other minorities, but whenever anyone forgets when a Jewish holidy takes
> place, recriminations start flying in no time.
>
> WHY???

It does depend on the group of people, doesn't it?  I studied for some
years in a department that was roughtly half Muslim, half Jewish, and I
lived for a while in Turkey, so I'm rather more aware of Muslim holidays
than most.  Muslim holidays may or may not play a major role in the
scheduling of any partiuclar public event, because "public" doesn't mean
some random sampling of people off the street, and it is pragmatic to
weight consideration of different schedule constraints in terms of what
people are interested in participating in the first place.  (For instance,
while I would hesitate to project this beyond the people I know, I'm
fairly certain that none of my Muslim friends are interested in nude
hottubbing -- well, okay, at least among the people I've kept in touch
with, I can think of at least one exception.)  It's a flawed system, and
one that needs to be carefully considered, but wht do you do?

I don't expect, say, a mycology conference to give any particular
consideration to pagan holidays.  I'd be surprised, though, if events
dealing with the local poly community did not, as pagans are a large and
visable part of that population.  And don't even start me ranting on
visability, stereotyping and Islam...

At my job before last, the largest single ethic group (and I'm very much
including WASPs) was Hindi, and no group had a majority.  Most people did
vaguely get an idea of who was likely to clear out early on Fridays, who
wasn't eating during daylight hours this month, or whatever.  And no one
ever gave me any crap if I said "sorry, I really can't make it that day,
that's a religious holiday for me" or to anyone who said "gee, let's not
go to the BBQ place this time, please, I'm not eating meat today".
(Though they tried to talk me in coming back early from my honeymoon.)

                                Catherine

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