Welcome to Trailblazers! I’m Simi Shah, the founder of Trailblazers and the author of this newsletter. We bring you trailblazing by and for South Asians here every other Tuesday and on our website, IG, LinkedIn, and archives.
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Hot off the Pod 🔥🎙️ Rabia Chaudry: Attorney, Advocate, Author
Listen to our latest episode, my conversation with Rabia Chaudry — attorney, advocate, and author of the New York Times bestselling book "Adnan's Story.”
Her book follows the story of Adnan Syed, a very close friend of Rabia’s who was convicted for murder in 2000. His case, told through the world-renowned podcast, Serial, garnered national attention in 2015. But what many people don’t know was that it was Rabia who first brought the case to host, Sarah Koenig. In many ways, I consider Rabia to have set the tone for the power of the podcasting medium.
Rabia herself is the co-host of 3 podcasts, one of which, Undisclosed, has accumulated 360 million+ downloads with its focus on wrongful convictions and that has led to the exoneration of nearly a dozen defendants. She previously practiced immigration and civil rights law for over a decade before moving into the CVE (countering violent extremism) policy sphere.
In 2011 Rabia founded the Safe Nation Collaborative, a CVE training firm, providing cultural competency training to law enforcement officials and providing CVE training to Muslim communities. She has worked closely with the US Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and several other prominent and internationally-recognized policy-driven institutions. Rabia is a frequent public speaker and writer on criminal justice, civil rights, and media advocacy.
Read on for excerpts from the podcast!
There's been a whirlwind of efforts to appeal Adnan Syed’s conviction for the last 20 years. How do you continue to maintain hope in the face of I'm sure what you perceive to be as injustice and a wrongful conviction?
First, I think it's important to mention that I didn't do work and wrongful conviction or innocence work formally. To me, Adnan Syed was a personal quest. Yes, in the last five, six years, I have been doing innocence work with a team of lawyers. And we've covered 20 odd cases. And what I've come to realize is that in every such case, it takes literally 25 to 30 years to exonerate somebody — that’s an average of how long it takes because the state will fight it. You can win an appeal, they'll appeal. That's what happened with Adnan. He went to appeals; his conviction was overturned twice, and then the state appealed it to the next highest court. They use our taxpayer dollars; they can just keep spending, whereas we have to raise money. And then finally, we lost the last appeal by one vote, so we have to start over. And we will because this is actually how it goes with all of these cases. The state just fights it and fights it. One single appeal can take three to five years. And then you will appeal it up higher and higher. So I've learned that this is just how the court systems are. But also I can't say to Adnan, ‘Well, I tried. I'm done. Good luck.’ You can't just walk away from a human being — I won't. And I'm not the only one there. Thousands of amazing advocates across the country are doing the same kind of work.
You founded Safe Nation Collaborative, a countering violent extremism (CVE) training firm to provide cultural competency training to law enforcement, correctional, and homeland security officials. Given what you’ve mentioned about some government institutions perpetrating harm toward Muslim communities in the past, what has that interaction been like?
Yeah, it led directly to it. In the Bush era, the position of federal law enforcement towards Muslim communities was through this lens of counterterrorism. Of course, there was a lot of pushback from Muslim leaders and civil rights organizations. When the Obama administration came to power, they created a new framework called countering violent extremism (CVE). And the problem is this framework is really difficult to understand. It's more of an idea: how do we help local communities protect their most vulnerable people from being recruited? And this was like 2009 - 2012 when unfortunately, it was happening. Organizations like Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda, and others were really heavily recruiting online. And there were parents who would say, ‘I think my kid is communicating with somebody who they shouldn't be communicating with on their smartphone, what do I do?’ And if that parent picks up a phone and calls the FBI, that kid was going to get arrested. And so CVE became this framework to prevent this through community-based interventions. So I got interested in all of this first through the lens of law enforcement training because at the same time, there were articles coming out about the anti-Muslim training that the Pentagon and Homeland Security wwere getting. I thought, well who's doing proper training on Muslim communities and Muslim history in America? And there wasn't a single organization I found. It was really these like cottage industries of Islamophobes who were had to stepped into this vacuum, and were making millions by doing this. So that's why I founded Safe Nation because on one hand, I want to train local law enforcement, but I didn't really want to work with feds. I wanted them to have a relationship with local Muslim communities and understand who they are and how long they've been here and all these things. And I also wanted Muslim communities to understand how to interact with law enforcement while protecting themselves.
Catching Fire 🚀 what we’re following 👀
📱On Socials
Rihanna goes from respected to reviled. Twitter suspended accounts of activists and media orgs at the behest of the Indian government, then reversed the decision.
📺 On Screen
Indian weddings find their new heyday in The Big Day, a new Netflix show. Never Have I Ever starMaitreyi Ramakrishnan makes the TIME100.
🌎 Scenes from South Asia
23-year-old Indian climate activist, Disha Ravi, is arrested. The scales of justice tip in favor of journalist Priya Ramani — and #MeTooIndia — who won a case against an Indian minister.
Shop South Asian 🛍️ Spotlight: Hindi by Reena
This week, check out Hindi by Reena, a company that creates modern online courses, books, and products for children around the world to learn Hindi. It was co-founded by Reena Bhansali in 2017. For more businesses, visit @shopsouthasian, where we’re connecting you to South Asian businesses around the globe.
