Donna A. Auston: Parallels can be drawn fairly easily, of course, between Islamophobia and anti-black racism as specific manifestations of a similar impulse, but making the leap to consider them intimate bedfellows may seem like an analytical stretch. In public discourse, we easily link anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination as being nearly one and the same. Yet, in spite of the fact that a full one-third of the U.S. Muslim population is black, we rarely tend to think of issues of anti-black racism, poverty, mass incarceration, or police brutality as legitimate “Muslim” issues. This is because we rarely consider black Muslims.
Black Muslims exist right at the intersection of these two forms of racism. Baltimore and Philadelphia are two American cities where the commonly accepted narrative of who American Muslims are, where their concerns lie, and the specific cocktail of intersectional racisms that they live with is radically disrupted. Both cities have long and rich black Muslim histories—and diverse manifestations of Afro-Muslim religious expression that are as much a part of the landscape of their respective cities as crab cakes and water ice. “As salaam ‘alaykum” emanates from the mouths of Muslim and non-Muslim black residents in both places as naturally as any other greeting. Khimars, bow ties, and the iconic red fez are all items in an array of sartorial indicators of particular racial and religious life worlds.
[…] I weave together these seemingly disparate threads to draw attention to the fact that in this historic moment when we are presumably more attentive to the way that marginalization endangers the lives of the invisible, being cognizant of the ways that intersectional identities are easily erased is more important than ever. Just as much of the activism around police brutality has centered the experiences of black men while ignoring the deadly perils that black women also face from law endorcement, assumptions about who “American Muslims” are, and flattened represenations of who constitutes the “black community” place black American Muslim experiences and challenges out of perceptual range.
Dominant narratives—in both media and scholarly literature tend to doubly efface the existence and voices of black American Muslims—even in this moment when black bodies are at the very center of the unrest. More here.