As articles continue to pop up in every major and minor publication, and people are still struggling to piece together meaningful reactions, I am at a loss. With the rapid influx of information, questions, and political analyses continuously adding to the conversation, all I can think to do is to compile some of the most nuanced, critical, thought-provoking thoughts and reflections I have seen thus far, in an attempt to get through yet another senseless tragedy for which an entire religious group will undoubtedly be blamed.

As I write this, one suspect in the shooting that left twelve staff members and two police officers dead at the office of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo is in custody while the other two remain at large. CNN is doing that thing where it devotes its entire news cycle to a single event, despite the plethora of other newsworthy incidents – namely, the bombing of the NAACP office in Colorado Springs.

Though my Facebook and Twitter feeds were initially full of #jesuischarlie declarations of support, a handful of friends made a point to add #NAACPBombing to the conversation, since the mainstream media was failing to do so. Many wondered why this incident of domestic terrorism in the United States was being ignored in favor of one abroad; Twitter user @Russian_Starr wrote, “American media evokes fear over Islamic extremism but downplays white supremacist violence. This is all by design. #NAACPBombing.”

While several publications offered grief-stricken support as the only acceptable response, others insisted that tragedy should not preclude criticism of the newspaper’s controversial content. That Charlie Hebdo published xenophobic material targeting a deeply marginalized religious minority is significant because it is bigotry directed from the top down – that of a powerful, predominantly white institution against a community that has been on the receiving end of police violence, segregation, surveillance, incarceration, unemployment, and poverty.

So does satire’s true worth depend upon how it is used and against whom? Perhaps there is no single agreed-upon definition of what makes for good satire, or what rules it must follow. But this explanation, offered by British satirist Will Self, is worth mulling over:

Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons [of Muhammad] I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from H. L. Mencken’s definition of good journalism: It should ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’ The trouble with a lot of so-called ‘satire’ directed against religiously motivated extremists is that it’s not clear who it’s afflicting, or who it’s comforting. This is in no way to condone the shooting of the journalists, which is evil, pure and simple, but our society makes a fetish of ‘the right to free speech’ without ever questioning what sort of responsibilities are implied by this right.

Publications the world over are being urged to republish the offensive cartoons as a gesture of solidarity and defense of free speech. Mic’s Mark Kogan writes that media outlets have “a moral and ethical obligation” to “stand forcefully against those who seek to silence criticism or expression through violence and terror.” But according to Arthur Goldhammer, in Al-Jazeera, this response may be misguided:

There is an old Parisian tradition of cheeky humor that respects nothing and no one. The French even have a word for it: “gouaille.”.. It’s an anarchic populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect itself as venerable, sacred or powerful… While not apolitical (attacks on Marie-Antoinette surely had a political valence), gouaille does not seek to stake out a political position or mock one political party to the benefit of another. It is directed, rather, against authority in general, against hierarchy and against the presumption that any individual or group has exclusive possession of the truth.

The satire that Charlie Hebdo exemplified was more blasphemous than political, and its roots lie deep in European history, dating from a time when in order to challenge authority, one had to confront divinity itself. In that one respect, the fanatics are not wrong: Charlie Hebdo was out to undermine the sacred as such.

In the wake of the tragedy, many publications across the West have rushed to print reproductions of Charlie Hebdo covers as proof that terrorist violence cannot dampen free expression. Such homage to the magazine in its agony is in one sense fitting and proper, but in another sense it is the precise opposite of what the living Charlie was about.

Reproducing the imagery created by the murdered artists tends to sacralize them as embodiments of some abstract ideal of free speech. But many of the publications that today honor the dead as martyrs would yesterday have rejected their work as tasteless and obscene, as indeed it often was. The whole point of Charlie’s satire was to be tasteless and obscene, to respect no proprieties, to make its point by being untameable and incorrigible and therefore unpublishable anywhere else. The speech it exemplified was not free to express itself anywhere but in its pages. Its spirit was insurrectionist and anti-idealist, and its creators would be dumbfounded to find themselves memorialized as exemplars of a freedom that they always insisted was perpetually in danger and in need of a defense that only offensiveness could provide.

One Canadian outlet, CBC News, shared this view, , “We wouldn’t have published these images before today — not out of fear, but out of respect for the beliefs and sensibilities of the mass of Muslim believers. Why would the actions of a gang of violent thugs force us to change that position?”

Ultimately, it is this “mass of Muslim believers” who will bear the brunt of the Charlie Hebdo aftermath. In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, Muslims are once again being asked to condemn violence and prove their “moderateness” in hopes of being viewed as the “good guys.”

We are frantically attempting to articulate positions, gather evidence, provide explanations, and answer, in the words of Fredrik deBoer, “dead moral questions” like “Is murder justified?” And in the midst of all the chaotic, panicked, scrambling to wade through insurmountable double standards, we realize, as Maan News editor Alex Shams so eloquently puts it, that we are stripped of our ability to mourn:

I hate that every time something awful happens, I read the news and want to be able to mourn and reflect on the senseless tragedy, but instead a plea in the back of my head forms and just keeps hitting me in the face over and over: “Please don’t let them be Muslim, please don’t let them be Muslim, please God don’t let them be Muslim…”

And I end up skipping over the details of the tragedy, the names and places that seem to run together, rushing down to take a look at the names of the perpetrators or the vague references to possible motives or the appearance of the word “Muhammad,” just trying to figure out what the reaction will be, how much I have to brace myself, how many apologies they will expect from all of us for something carried out by one of the 1.6 billion other people who happen to have a Quran in their house…

Will they invade somewhere new this time? Block immigration from this country or that, or perhaps pull funding for programs that rescue migrants from sinking boats in the Mediterranean? Launch drone strikes on a new city in Syria, maybe Yemen or Afghanistan or perhaps Somalia or Iraq? Who will come out this time and say multiculturalism doesn’t work, and people like me shouldn’t have been allowed to exist in the first place because we embody some clash of civilizations apparently manifested in some random angry dude shooting something up?

Will I have to go find that list of white Christian people who blew things up and start shoving it down everyone’s throat just so I can feel a little less scared that “it’s not just us”? The wikipedia page of all those mass shootings and attacks on kindergartens that didn’t trigger any national conversation about whether white people should even be in our country to begin with?

And after reading through the reactions, trying to anticipate which angle I’m supposed to take this time, which imperial war or racist policy or drone bombing I should mention “not to justify, but…,” when I finally have a moment where my mind stops racing… I realize how fucked up it is that I cannot just mourn, that my body — exhausted from years of explaining and sharing and trying to make people see other sides, years at school of getting bullied and called “Osama” and a million other Muslim names from places I had never been to — cannot allow me just to read and pause, to cry, to see the dead as human beings and not as potential pawns in a political game being waged by those on high, thirsty for any excuse to promote their bigotry.

I can’t just be sad, not even once, because I have to have my list of “Muslim leaders who condemned ISIS” on the ready, just in case. And all I can do is mourn the fact that I seem to have lost my ability to mourn…