Interview: Dr. M. Aziz, Black Scholar and Karate Practitioner
On this episode, Shireen talks with Dr. M. Aziz, a Black scholar and karate practitioner. They discuss Blackness, Queerness and being Muslims in martial arts. They also get into the Cobra Kai series -- what is real and what is not.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Shireen: Hello flamethrowers, Shireen here. I am absolutely thrilled and excited to have Dr. M. Aziz on the show with me today. I’ve been waiting for this interview for a long time, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect, bringing forward into 2021 this beautiful energy. Let me tell you about the superstar that is Dr. M. Aziz. Dr. M. Aziz is at the Richards Civil Africana Research Center post-doctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Aziz received a PhD in American culture from the University of Michigan in 2020. They hold a bachelor of arts in African American studies from Columbia University, and Dr. Aziz’s research asks how folks who practiced unarmed self defense contributed to Black power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation and gender. It also traces how learning of martial arts was facilitated by a US military occupation during the Cold War.
Dr. Aziz’s work was showcased in the 2017-2018 exhibit Black Power! at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, for which Dr. Aziz was a contributing writer and a curator for the sections on popular culture and Blaxploitation film. As a scholar-activist, Dr. Aziz regularly teaches radically inclusive self defense classes in person – and now virtually – using a 17 year background in Japanese and Okinawan martial arts. Dr. A…!
M: Salam! Hello! I’m so excited to be here. I think I messed up my own number of martial arts years, but that doesn’t matter. [laughs]
Shireen: Wa alaykumu s-salam, and secondly, I read your bio. I was like, damn, girl! Mashallah, wow. I just am very excited to talk to you for all the various reasons that you are hype and you are great and your scholarship I’m so excited about, and now that I’m in grad school I actually have access to it, which is even more exciting for me. So, we have many things to talk about. We can get into Cobra Kai, which I do wanna talk to you about. We actually had a discussion, me, Jess and Amira, about Cobra Kai in one of our Patreon episodes. But I’m so excited you’re here to talk about it now, and actually not just talk about the storylines and all those things but actually talk about the beautiful practice. Can you tell me – I have a couple of questions fo you – how you got into that practice, and why was it that specific practice that drew you to it, or you got involved in it?
M: Wow, that’s a great question to start off with. I should say, now that I just had my birthday, because I’m a Capricorn, it’s 18 years in martial arts. So, that’s sort of wild. My father actually reminded me, he was like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s also your birthday, but more importantly…” [laughs] “Did you know you’ve been doing martial arts for almost 20 years?” I was like, uhh… [laughs]
Shireen: Amazing. I love Capricorns. Amazing.
M: You know, we’re out here. Cap gang gang. It’s still our season. [laughs]
Shireen: Slowly getting to Aquarius though!
M: By the time this airs it probably will be Aquarius, which is my rising, so, you know! [laughs]
Shireen: You’re talking to…Like, I’m your fav Aquarius girl. I’m very excited.
M: Oh, no way!
Shireen: Oh yeah.
M: All the energy. All the energy. But actually my father, speaking of him, he signed me up for karate classes, and what drew him to the practice was he thought he wanted me to get into a movement practice and to be able to defend myself and he had done Japanese jiu jitsu. So, he had never done karate, and so it’s funny nowadays or a couple of years ago he would say, “You know, that karate you do, that we signed you up for…It’s okay. When I was doing jiu jitsu in the 70s, you know, they taught us how to do x, y, and z…” Oh my gosh. It’s like talking to your favorite old time martial arts practitioner in your own home. [laughter]
But what I continue to love about karate and specifically Okinawan descended or Japanese descended karate is the fluidity of the strikes. I just love to kick so much, and it’s so popular now to just be like, “I’m gonna kick someone’s you know what,” or as a sign of empowerment. But there really is nothing like kicking across a floor and learning how strong you are, so that really has kept me in the practice. But it’s also just beautiful. I think you mentioned this earlier, just having to learn the amount of control, having to be able to extend your legs forward, hold them out, retract them and do it on repetition and then be able to string together combinations quickly or slowly. There’s really nothing quite like it, and particularly the autonomy of that type of movement practice in sport is just great.
Shireen: That is so lyrical as well. That is absolutely beautiful. There's two things I wish I had done in my formative athletic career: one was martial arts, and one was dance. I really wish, for different reasons, I had done those things. A question for you is, as a practitioner of marital arts, do you find it empowering and meditative as well? Because very much in our faith, when you pray it’s repetitive motions and fluid motions. Did you find a commonality in that as well? From a spiritual level, was karate – and I love your pronunciation of it – was there a spiritual element to this for you as well?
M: Yeah, you know, there is. I think it’s really interesting being Muslim and the ways in which, like you said, movement is kind of…You know, no matter how many times you pray throughout the year there’s just something about spirituality and it being embodied in different Muslim traditions that incorporate that to different levels, whether it be in a dhikr circle or just getting down and praying multiple times a day. But for me there’s something about the meditation of movement, and I like to be in motion, to be spiritually grounded. I actually find it really difficult now to pray in just a singular spot, like, I actually really love being fluid and moving through motions. There’s something about, I don’t know, being grounded in a larger world other than yourself, no matter what your conceptualization of a higher power, I do. I like to be inclusive of folks that don’t necessarily believe in a god maybe like we do, but the idea of something bigger than you is sort of engulfing your body as you move through the air, honestly, it’s one of the only ways that I can remain present. If I don’t do a movement practice in my week I start to get cranky. [laughter] I become a different person, I think.
As I was finishing grad school I noticed I had just stopped doing martial arts as a weekly practice and I just didn't feel firmly rooted to anything, and as soon as I started back up, just my energy could go there, both my positive and my negative energy, and it just made me feel so much better. A lot of what I talk about is really the wellbeing of the art practices of martial arts. For some folks they really are just a self-defense practice, for some folks they’re really focused on the sports aspect, but for me that meditative practice is so important and really it’s the only way I can meditate. One of my martial arts instructors made fun of me once because we had to do the sit in place meditation, and she’s walking around, and I’m the only black belt in the room on this retreat. At the end she was like, “You’re not very good at this!” [laughs]
Shireen: Oh my gosh.
M: Like, don’t call me out! They already gave me the black belt. [laughter] They were like, you really need to work on this part of the practice. So, I had to find the middle ground of being like, what if I meditate in motion? Does that work?
Shireen: That’s something I wanted to ask you, like as a teacher, as a practitioner as well and as an instructor, you have to keep up with what you know. How often do you train, Dr. Aziz?
M: Yeah, so, before the pandemic hit I was training in community maybe 2-3 times a week, and now on my own I try to pick up a movement or pick up an extension of my hand, like a staff or something, and practice once a week. This is quite corny and maybe even feeds into some of the myths of martial artists, but I’ll pick up a handheld item and move that at least once a week. [laughs] So, it’s super important. But over the course of I guess 18 years there were times I was practicing 3-5 times a week in community for multiple hours.
Shireen: I think that’s one of the things that I was gonna ask next, leading into your role not just as an educator but also as someone who…I found this incredibly empowering, when your bio said you are a black belt, mashallah, but an anti-hate crime self-defense instructor. As somebody who, in Canada, we saw a huge rise in gendered Islamophobic attacks in 2015, and there was a sweep across North America, Canada and the US in particular – I’m not sure about the UK, maybe you can speak to that a bit more in Europe – of women really getting involved and learning self-defense techniques. But as somebody who has been very intentional, and this is a type of teaching you will do for racialized women, that just hit me really hard because I think there's not only the tropes that we’re meek or that we can't do it or that…You know, this is also not just a physical thing, but our hijabs are pulled off, we’re pushed, we're isolated, we're intimidated. When did you know…Because I’m sure when you started this you didn’t think that this is necessarily….Did you think this was what you were going to do? And I want you to tell me a little bit about that journey. How did you come to that? How was that born?
M: Yeah, I mean, when I first started lessons I could not have imagined labeling myself as a radically inclusive anti-hate crime self-defense…A, I’m sure little me would have been like, “It’s a little wordy, friend.” [laughs]
Shireen: I love the term radically inclusive. I will be quoting you on that.
M: It’s kind of necessary. It’s wordy but it’s necessary, because it signals to us that’s a different martial arts practice than maybe one we see in different episodes of Cobra Kai. But I mean, I was a child when 9/11 happened, maybe I was 10 or 11, and I remember watching the plane. I think I was actually sleeping when the first plane hit – I was actually homeschooled at this time, so it’s a different trajectory. A lot of people my age were like, “Well, I was in school,” and I was technically in school but my mom homeschooled me at the time. So, the first plane hit and I actually was awake for the second, and the first thing my mom did was try and get in contact with my sister, because my sister is a wonderful human being, a wonderful parent, and she would take my nephew to all of these libraries across southern New Jersey – as a 1 year old, 2 year old! [laughs] Just so that he could be in the reading circles. So, we had to literally rush and get in the car and go pick my sister up.
Shireen: Okay.
M: Because even in those first couple of hours we knew that the type of Islamophobic lashing out was about to happen, even though this is the first day, right? We could not have not necessarily what the hate crime statistics were gonna look like, but we knew given this longer history, particularly as African American Muslims, you know? My parents have been in communities that have been surveilled for the vast majority of the 20th century.
Shireen: Yeah.
M: So, something happens and Muslims, Black and brown folks, are the face, we run. So, I say that to say I had that experience going in as a kid to martial arts, but initially it was very much “I wanna be a badass. It was, “I, M K. Aziz, wanna be a badass!” And it wasn’t until I think the middle or end of college I was actually, like so many of us old school, I was an intern at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations in a former life.
Shireen: Aww! [laughs]
M: Baby M. [laughs]
Shireen: Shoutout to that fam. Aww.
M: Indeed, the former CAIR network. We were there in New York…I don’t know if you remember this, but I think this was around 2011, 2012. It was called the Ground Zero mosque, it was this masjid that was being built maybe a couple of blocks away from where Ground Zero was. They hadn’t finished rebuilding that area, but everybody was like, “This is such an insult to the memory of what happened here.”
Shireen: Yeah, I remember that.
M: Yeah. So, in New York then and in other places, we again saw this moment of people being like, “Actually, we’re worried about Muslims.” For me, it just started me thinking about, well, maybe we’re never out of a moment of sort of hate crimes, maybe we’re just in moments of higher visibility because we have theme moments in which the media is so fixed on what Muslims are doing, and it can increase so drastically given the political moment. But that surveillance has been so continual over the last 20 or so years, that even before 2015, even in that moment in 2011, we’ve started to do self-defense workshops out of CAIR New York. So, by the time that Trump was elected in 2016 I was already thinking about a pedagogy that said, well, I don’t wanna just teach “women’s self-defense” classes. A lot of the pedagogy coming out of those classes assumed that women were experiencing a type of sexualized or gendered violence that was sometimes really divorced from certain types of racialized identities.
So for me, radically inclusive wasn’t just about, “Well, we’re not just going to presuppose the type of violence that women are going to face.” We’re gonna thinking about, well, someone could be attacking you because you’re Muslim woman or a Muslim man or a Muslim non-binary person or someone that wears hijab, and because you’re Black and you're brown, right? It might not just be because it’s this idea of random stranger danger. So, that for me was the big thing that led me to anti-hate crime, and then because of my other identities I said, well, let’s think about all these other categories of people that are actually going to be hurt in this era, right? So, we already know that African Americans and Black folks in different parts of the world are always susceptible to hate crimes – we just don’t always talk about them as hate crimes.
So, this was also this moment we started thinking about the importance of Black trans lives. I was like, well, if we’re not centering trans folks in our classes and the ways in which they’re disproportionately at risk for hate crimes…So, that’s really how my pedagogy came into being.
Shireen: I think considering the radically inclusive, if we talk about Muslim spaces, because your learning and your classes and your teaching are not specific only to Muslim-identifying communities, but just that radically inclusive for queer communities and trans communities and what that looks like, and how many lives you’ve probably saved not just in the physical sense but in that idea of what that can mean. Coming across you has been so important, not just for my own work and research on Muslim women in sport, but just learning from you…Can you tell me, without sort of divulging too much information or anything, but just the ways in which the practical applications of this learning have really affected racialized communities?
M: Yeah, the practical learning. Well, I always start from how does it change your perception of yourself and your immediate safety? I mean, at this point I’ve had hundreds of people in classes, and not everyone that steps into a class is going to be someone that is affected by a hate crime, and you may not even have to use physical self-defense in your lifetime, but everybody who walks into that class is someone that feels unsafe in a larger world, or feels unseen or perceived as week and incapable in a larger world. So, I think practically speaking one of the big things that I hear folks coming back and saying they walked away with was, “Actually, I just felt better in my body,” right? “I went back into the world and I felt a little less afraid to be myself in my hijab or to be in my gender non-conforming body after I left the class. I felt like I was enough.”
I think that’s one of the things that really keeps me going, is when people say, “I felt like enough.” Because I think there is sometimes still a pedagogy of teaching for people’s weaknesses, to say, “Well, you can’t do this, so we’re gonna teach you this type of self-defense or martial art that's for your type of person that only has these capabilities.” Or, “You don’t have very much arm strength, so we’re just gonna show you how to do this, because you could never beat a bigger opponent.” And usually this is everybody that’s not a cis man, is basically we’re teaching from a moment of weakness. [laughs]
Shireen: Right, yeah!
M: And I’m always like, why are we starting from a moment weakness? If we want people to practically walk out of this classroom and feel like they’re moving in the world a little bit differently, in their soul and their body, let’s start from a position of strength and then let’s give them the practical tools, right? Not everyone is gonna do an 18 year journey through the metaphorical mountains of marital arts, right? [laughs] So, I wanna know that if you walk outside and I teach you how to do a forward thrusting kick that you are actually a little bit safer and you feel a little safer, and that’s something that you can repeat and practice with yourself and community, vs if I show you something that might be a complicated hold or grab or sweep or something like that. So, of course, this is really depended upon abilities, and so we have to think about different abilities and disabilities in classes as well.
I don’t want to just say, “If I show you how to do a thrusting forward motion with your cane, how does that make you feel?” A little more emboldened to walk through the world as you are. So, yeah, I think that that's part of that practicalness, is not everyone is going to face an immediate physical danger, or not everyone’s going to face one that is going to escalate into a literal fight. You might face a physical threat where someone’s yelling at your and invading your personal space, but that now we’ve worked on the tools that have boundary set, and we love boundary-setting in 2021. [laughs]
Shireen: We love boundaries.
M: We love boundaries. So, even just that, to be able to say…What’s my go-to word to say, “I’m not okay, I don’t consent to this situation”?
Shireen: This is so important. You're pulling in things and sharing them in such a profound and important and very powerful way. I’m gonna pivot a little bit right now, because I love this conversation but we only have a limited amount of time and there’s so much I wanna talk to you about. I want to dig in…When I first found out that within Cobra Kai that that was the specific type of karate practice that you actually do – what is it called? And what are the origins? Okinawa is a legitimate place.
M: [laughs] No, these are all fantastic questions. So, technically speaking miyagi-do is supposedly based on goju-ryu karate-do.
Shireen: Okay.
M: So, karate as an art form comes out of Okinawa, Ryukyu islands, which, if you talk to people still today, they're still seen as occupied by Japan or having been colonized be Japan. So, technically, depending on who you talk to they are or are not Japanese martial arts. But they start in Okinawa specifically, and goju-ryu translates to the way of hard and soft, and Miyagi is the founder of all of goju. So, Chojun Miyagi – who I actually think the show actually does give you a photo of, I have to actually go back and look. But he’s the original founder. What doesn’t really come across is the fact that A) they don’t necessarily do goju-ryu as miyagi-do. So, some of the techniques are loosely Okinawan karate, but there’s so many different styles of Okinawa karate that there’s sometimes a little bit of a mixing.
Shireen: Okay.
M: Miyagi himself, he could’ve been the grandson of Chosen Miyagi, if we think about it. I think Chojun Miyagi was born in the late 1800s. So, this idea that Miyagi’s ancestors had been doing specifically goju or miyagi-do for hundreds of years, that’s a little bit of a stretch. That's a bit of an ahistorical stretch. I mean, I think modern karate comes out of the turn of the century, and a lot of east Asian descended marital arts as we practice them now are not being practiced in a 400 year tradition, right? They’re coming out of sort of practices or standardizations that have happened maybe in the last hundred years. So, there was a moment where they said, you know, “They’ve been fighting like this as warriors for this amount of time…” and I was actually like, oh, that form, that kata that they do I think when Daniel goes back to Okinawa – we might’ve only been doing that for a hundred years just now in 2021. So, that’s really fascinating and interesting. That’s one part of, I think, this history of goju. But Miyagi’s a real person, that is a real family, and it’s not necessarily an “I pass this on to my son, to my son, to my son, to my son” for the last 600 years.
Shireen: So, a couple of questions coming out of that, and yes, there are spoilers in this. Did women participate in goju karate as well, historically, do you know?
M: Yeah, that’s a great question. Women come into karate…I don’t remember when in the 20th century they start practicing karate in Okinawa and Japan, but I think that a way to answer this question is think about who was it really doing karate originally. I mean, we think that it is this inclusive, like, the farmers were sort of practicing karate in the field. And really, actually, certain forms of marital arts were a wealthy class young men’s art form, as we practice them now.
Shireen: Oh. [groans]
M: So, it wasn't even just “were women there originally,” but it was about “you are the wealthy son of a merchant practicing this art form.” But certainly women get in there as the 20th century progresses on, but originally in goju-ryu I don’t think that we’re gonna see as many women in those original, early 1900s classes. But certainly if we think about the long trajectory of the Cold War, across the world women actually get into martial arts, particularly east Asian martial arts, earlier than we might anticipate.
Shireen: One of the other things I was going to ask you is while we're talking about this Cobra Kai, did you love this series? I got the feeling you loved this series, because our exchanges made me think you did love it.
M: I loved it until I watched this season. [laughs]
Shireen: Okay.
M: This season I actually just kept shaking my head like, really?! Did they do that? Really, by the last episode, which I think I just finished before our interview, I was like, this is utter chaos. I was like, I don’t know which reminiscing of the 80s we’re doing, but I feel like I’m in just a bare-knuckle cafeteria fight in every episode. [laughs]
Shireen: Okay, yeah. There was a lot of that.
M: There was a lot of that. So, I loved the first season. I thought the second season was good, but the third season I found was really weird. But, I will say, I didn’t like Kreese, I never liked Kreese. But I liked that we got into his background, because there's actually a really important intersection of the US military martial arts that never gets talked about. So, I was both glad in a weird way that we got to go back to Okinawa. I think they could’ve done worse in those episodes. I’m glad we got this glimpse into the US military, yeah.
Shireen: Yeah, that’s something specifically that I have a couple of questions for you, not rapid-fire, but one of my questions was: who do you see yourself as as a coach? You’re not Kreese. Are you Daniel or are you Johnny? Which coach are you, Dr. Aziz?
M: Oh god. [laughs] Oh my gosh, I’m outing myself. I think in my early 20s – and don’t ask anybody that I went to college with [laughs] because I was karate club president, I was assistant instructor – I was definitely a little bit of a Johnny, but with better politics, hopefully.
Shireen: [laughs] “Which sensei are you?” I’m actually team Johnny, 100%.
M: Oh my god, team Johnny in general. As an early twenty-something I was team Johnny with the self-defense being closer to what Daniel teaches, and better politics. I just can never be Daniel. I’m starting to agree with the fan myths that Johnny got robbed in the 80s. I’m like, this whole, like, men owning women’s bodies plot side, I’m like Johnny was probably in the right. [laughs] I’m a Jersey kid, so I love to side with Daniel Larusso. [Shireen laughs] But as things have unwound I was like, god darn it!
Also, I’m someone who’s an abolitionist so I’m like, the amount of times that Daniel and Amanda run to, rely on the police…But also, I guess Johnny, I’m just like, there’s certain times in which as martial arts instructors y’all get away with things that a Black or brown martial artist was just rolling around punching people in prison they would also be an incarcerated person. [Shireen laughs] So, I stopped seeing myself in certain parts of them, because I was like, the whiteness is really coming through in these martial arts instructors. But I am team Johnny, but now as an instructor I have more of Daniel’s cool calm collectedness, but none of his wealthy upper middle class white pro-police politics.
Shireen: That’s such a good thing. And even when earlier you just mentioned about Kreese’s backstory, because now my kids are starting up with their shenanigans and saying, well, wait a minute, he was probably just suffering from PTSD. I’m like, no, you don’t get to do that. I mean, yeah, essentially immediately yes, but what? The man is like 75 now! You have a lifetime of time to get some assistance, to get some support there. I can’t! And I’m super, hugely not pro-military, like, totally anti-military, but also understanding how the US military complex also uses brown and Black bodies in there. Just so much of what you write about and so much of what you talk about makes me think. Tell me a bit more about the connection to the military…I know this is what you studied so you can’t do it in like a four minute segment, but tell me about those connections that people like myself wouldn’t automatically know, and why that was important for Kreese’s backstory.
M: Yeah. I mean, that’s a perfect question. I think that when we look at particularly the original Karate Kid we think that Daniel and Mr. Miyagi relationship is how everybody in the US gets martial arts, right? That there is an Asian immigrant instructor who has now taken on to teaching young Americans of the world on how to be more centered, and that’s actually really not the case. A lot of folks, particularly in the US, and I would actually wonder if this is the case in Canada and might also be the case in Britain, but a lot of folks are actually training with people who were in the US military staring at the end of World War II and through the Cold War.
So, there’s a moment where Kreese, he gets recruited into that special ops mission and that sergeant says – or I don’t remember which ranking he was – but he was like, yeah, I trained under this master in tang soo do during the Korean War. I’m like, well, that’s 10/10 real history, from Korean War all the way through Vietnam, different occupations throughout the specific and east Asia actually gave GIs access to different forms of karate, gave them more access to judo, even though judo has a larger history of being a modern sport during the 20th century. So, we’ve seen when they come back home that they set up dojos all across the country. So, more or less Asian immigration, also party facilitated by US military intervention, is part of this story, and certainly there’s so many important Asian marital arts instructors on the vanguard of teaching martial arts in the US. But a lot of it is actually white and also Black GIs who come back and teach marital arts in their local communities and also to police forces across the country.
So, Kreese’s backstory actually to me feels really on the head, right? I think it’s always important to talk about, because if we just think, “Here’s the benevolent Asian immigrant person who is here teaching martial arts,” we sort of erase the US military and the ways in which it structurally said we’re revamping our hand to hand combat curriculum and we’re gonna explore it through all these types of marital arts practices for a while.
Shireen: That’s so amazing, and you're right. This idea that Daniel and Mr. Miyagi had the perfect relationship is very much not how…Like when I think of my children’s experiences for example, they were in taekwondo for a while. That’s not at all… [laughs] There’s definitely military training there from his teacher. This is so fascinating, oh my goodness. We’re so excited you came on the show. I in particular am so excited, and I can’t wait til we have you up to Toronto, because I know we have some mutuals, and would be so so honored to have you. Now, before you go, do tell me about some Cobra Kai stuff that you acquired over the holidays, I heard.
M: Oh, yes! I wish the people at home could see it, but I do a secret santa every year with my friends from college, and you will not believe it but this is what happens when people sort of know you for ten years. I guess after this season I can’t wear it, [Shireen laughs] but my friends got me, speaking of the times, a Cobra Kai face mask! [laughs]
Shireen: Oh! [laughs] That’s amazing.
M: “Strike first, strike hard.” So, I gotta be careful where I wear it though. It does say “no mercy” and I do look like how I look, so… [laughter] I need to think about where I wear it. I’m very excited, so, good prop. Good prop.
Shireen: That’s amazing. Well, I hope sincerely none of us have to wear a mask for much longer. I’m so excited you were on Burn It All Down, you’re clearly invited back whenever. You’re also one of our own Dr. Amira Rose Davis’ favorite people, so I’m so excited that you’re here and we will be absolutely elated to learn more of your scholarship and more of your work, and thank you so much for dropping all this knowledge on Burn It All Down.
M: I’m such a huge fan. I rage-listen to your podcast while I’m driving, I literally just have a playlist [laughs] of back to back to back. And that’s how I catch up on my sports news, I binge you all for hours and hours at a time. So, thank you so much for having me back.
Shireen: This was amazing. Thank you again.