Media Appearances

‘Marvel’s Voices’: Hussein Rashid Discovers Layers of Identity Through ‘Ms. Marvel’ Comics | Marvel

Hussein September 15, 2021

‘Marvel’s Voices’: Hussein Rashid Discovers Layers of Identity Through ‘Ms. Marvel’ Comics | Marvel.

In the context of the US population, I am a statistic. I fill a whole bunch of categories if you want to play human bingo. My parents migrated from Tanzania, in East Africa, and I’m ethnically South Asian. I get to be even more specific, because I’m an Isma’ili Shi’ah Muslim. That means I’m a religious minority, in a religious minority, in a religious minority. 

Born in Manhattan, and growing up in Queens, New York, I wasn’t different. Everyone was different to everyone else. That was the norm. Then we moved to Long Island, and it was a different beast. Suddenly, my status as a “statistic” was glaring. In our new home, you needed to fit into categories, and people didn’t know or understand my categories. Thankfully, I found my escape in the world of speculative fiction that comics offered me.  When I first picked up comics in the 80s, I wasn’t thinking about representation. I was more focused on learning how to be like the Super Heroes I loved, different. Like most folks then, looking for something similar, I found the X-Men. Cyclops is still my man, and the fact that Jay Edidin recently made him canonically neuroatypical makes him even more dear to me, especially as someone who was diagnosed with ADD as an adult.

From Wrongful Arrest to Anti-Prison Activist: Bryonn Bain’s Road to ‘Lyrics From Lockdown’ – Columbia Daily Spectator

Hussein April 19, 2021

From Wrongful Arrest to Anti-Prison Activist: Bryonn Bain’s Road to ‘Lyrics From Lockdown’ – Columbia Daily Spectator.

“Navigating [these politics] came through people like Bryonn who walked me through that racial consciousness and turned that into something very practical,” New School professor Hussein Rashid, who graduated from Columbia College in 1996, recalls. “We had a lot of agency coming into this protest tradition at Columbia.”
As campus activists, Bain and his peers in various campus affinity organizations not only challenged institutional injustice at the administrative level but also at the student level. He and others who fought alongside him on issues related to race and racism on campus publicly criticized Spectator’s perceived complicity in upholding structural racism at the University. “Their reporting was very deferential to authority,” Rashid—who wrote several pieces critical of the paper’s treatment of Black and Latinx voices and concerns—says. “There is so much talk about racial justice and equity in these spaces coming from ‘changing the narrative.’ What we really need is a movement that changes the narrators,” Bain adds.

Hollywood is slowly working to rectify decades of Muslim misrepresentation – CNET

Hussein March 8, 2021

Hollywood is slowly working to rectify decades of Muslim misrepresentation – CNET.

Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Disney Plus, hungry for content in a competitive space, offer more opportunities for diverse stories to be told, says Hussein Rashid, an academic whose research focuses on Muslims and American popular culture.

As Ismailis, We Should all Care about Climate Change. | IsmailisRiseUp

Hussein October 15, 2020

As Ismailis, We Should all Care about Climate Change. | IsmailisRiseUp.

Our generation is faced with a daunting task: stop climate change. But how? Dr. Rashid, who has witnessed his home city of New York transition from a sub-temperate to a sub-tropical climate in his lifetime, explains that it is more than just individual responsibility. There are individual choices that we can make but ultimately when a handful of corporations are responsible for over 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is hard to place responsibility on individuals. That does not mean, however, that we as individuals do not have power. Dr. Rashid says, 

Those companies are all regulated by our governments. They are not governments in and of themselves and we can see the ways in which these companies are leveraging governments to not pay any taxes in the context of the United States, to have environmental regulations lifted for them, to get waivers for themselves. They don’t actually vote anybody in. They simply use the money we give them to then buy policies and politicians that create policies that are harmful to us. So essentially, we are paying for our own destruction. And so for me as an individual, I think about the individual things I can do to protect the environment, and I can make an individual decision as to where I am going to do my business.

Columbia Take 5

Hussein July 20, 2020

A fun little interview I did for Columbia College Today.

What, if anything, about your College experience would you do over?

I tried to go to as many talks as I could on campus, because we had so many great speakers. I always left feeling inspired and interested. I was generally pretty bad at reading further and really getting to know the issues some of these people were speaking about. I vividly remember talks by [civil rights activist] Yuri Kochiyama and [Muslim leader] Warith Deen Mohammed, but really only getting into their work after I left Columbia. We only stand on the shoulders of giants if we make the effort to climb.

Ms. Marvel’s America: Looking toward a superhero in challenging times | Goshen College

Hussein March 30, 2020

Ms. Marvel’s America: Looking toward a superhero in challenging times | Goshen College.

“Superheroes, of course, can’t swoop in and save us in times of crisis. But they can demonstrate ways for us to help each other with the tools we do have at hand,” says Goshen College Professor of English Jessica Baldanzi. 

A new book edited by Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid, a religious studies scholar, professor and interfaith activist, aims to combat the notion of a “stereotypical” superhero. “Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal” features essays about being Muslim and female in the Marvel Universe.