Cameron Mohammed was shot in the face because he “looked Muslim.”
On January 3, 2013, Mohammed and his girlfriend were walking to their car in a Wal-Mart parking lot near Tampa, Florida. A man suddenly approached, shouting, “Are you Middle Eastern?” Mohammed, who was raised in Florida and born in Trinidad, simply said no. “Are you Muslim?” Mohammed is Catholic, so again, he said no. The stranger scowled, “Nigger with a white girl.” Suddenly, he pulled out a gas-powered pellet gun and fired at Mohammed’s head, at point-blank range. A hailstorm of pellets lacerated Mohammed’s face and neck. The shooter, a White man named Daniel Quinnell, fled the scene before police arrived. Fortunately, Mohammed recovered, but he needed surgery to remove some of the pellets. A few days after the shooting, Quinnell was captured by police. When an officer informed him that Mohammed was not Muslim, he did not seem to care. “They’re all the same,” he reportedly said.1
This hate crime is an example of “Islamophobia,” even though Cameron Mohammed is not Muslim, because the attack was motivated by a desire to harm a Muslim or someone from the Middle East. This shooting bears disturbing similarities to the brutal murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American who was shot and killed on September 15, 2001. The shooter in that case, also a White man, intended to avenge the 9/11 attacks by, in his words, “shooting some towel-heads.”2 Dozens of violent attacks like these have been reported in recent years. Sikh Americans have been frequently targeted. Like Cameron Mohammed and Balbir Singh Sodhi, everyone hurt or killed in these attacks were vulnerable to Islamophobia because they “look Muslim”—because of race.
It should go without saying that the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims span the full range of human appearance. There is no way to actually “look Muslim.” Nevertheless, race operates at the very core of Islamophobia.
The racial lens through which Americans see the world distorts and conceals the obvious truth that it is basically impossible to accurately determine someone’s religion based solely on their physical appearance. That racial lens is why it is possible to “look Muslim” in America. In other words, there are a set of physical traits and characteristics that can mark someone as “Muslim,” regardless of their actual religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Race is the only way to explain how this is so.
The process by which Islamophobia came to affect anyone who “looks Muslim” is an all-too-familiar process, one that has constantly roiled American life: the social construction of racial categories. Race is what links aspects of physical appearance (facial features, skin tone, attire, hair texture, etc.) to an ascribed social identity such as White, Black, or Asian. In America, as a fact of life, everyone gets ascribed with a racial identity. In today’s America, “Muslim” or “Middle Eastern” is one of the most commonly ascribed racial categories. Most of the time, getting racially ascribed with this identity is quick and easy. But the violence in some Islamophobic hate crimes serves as a reminder that racial identification is not benign.
Quinnell, the shooter in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Florida, saw Cameron Mohammed’s physical features and then placed a racial identity upon him: “Muslim.” At that point, Quinnell had done nothing out of the ordinary; looking at someone and assigning a racial identity based on physical appearance is unavoidable, nearly automatic in America. Racial identity is always there, in every social interaction. Usually it remains in the background—silently understood by everyone. Sometimes, however, race enters the foreground, like when someone makes race the topic of conversation. Sadly, on that January evening, Quinnell’s brazen questioning—“Are you Middle Eastern?”—and the shocking violence that followed it made the usually invisible and automatic process of racial identification all too visible. Race made Cameron Mohammed vulnerable to Islamophobia, as it has so many others.
In the United States, anyone who racially “looks Muslim” is similarly vulnerable to Islamophobia. Many South Asian Americans are Muslim, but many others are Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, or have no religion at all. Whatever their ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage, South Asian Americans often get caught up in Islamophobia because of race. Similarly, many Arab Americans are Christian, Jewish, or agnostic, but race exposes them to Islamophobia all the same. Because of race, these communities and many others have been pulled into the swath of Islamophobic discrimination, social exclusion, and violence that has marred American life for decades.
Even as non-Muslims have been directly affected by Islamophobia, there is, of course, no doubt that Muslim Americans and American Islamic institutions have been severely affected by Islamophobia. Slanderous rhetoric about Islamic faith has dramatically increased in intensity in recent years, as politicians and pundits frequently proffer uninformed opinions about Islam and Muslims.3 Along with the renewed trend in anti-Muslim rhetoric, denial of fundamental civil liberties such as basic religious freedom has been a growing problem across the United States. Mosques have been vandalized and faced protests against their very existence. Moreover, Muslim Americans have suffered the second-largest number of reported hate crimes over the past few years, second only to Jewish Americans, according to official Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) hate crimes statistics.4
Somehow, Islamophobia remained largely under the radar until the 2000s. Despite decades of widespread, extremely damaging effects, Islamophobia did not attract a great deal of attention in America until recently. No doubt the new attention is mainly due to the unprecedented scale of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (or, 9/11), which led to an extraordinary surge in Islamophobic hate crimes and discrimination. This led many analysts and scholars to conclude that a “new” wave of specifically anti-Muslim sentiment had appeared in the United States. A great many books and articles have described the challenges facing Muslim American communities and the specifically anti-Muslim components of “post-9/11” Islamophobia. But limiting the discussion of Islamophobia to the “post-9/11” era obscures the long history of racial discrimination affecting Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians, and others in the United States. In fact, discrimination that would today be called “post-9/11” Islamophobia has thrived in one form or another in the United States since at least the seventeenth century. Understanding the problems posed by Islamophobia requires not only looking farther back in time than just 2001, but it also means expanding the understanding of Islamophobia beyond religious and ethnic frameworks. Race must be part of the analysis.
This is because American Islamophobia developed in very much the same ways as all American social structures that involve race. As a form of racism, Islamophobia is built into American institutions. White supremacy and Islamophobia stem from the same root, and they are both burrowed into the foundations of American institutions. Therefore, any effective understanding of Islamophobia must take into account the full scope of American race and racism.
This presents a tremendous challenge, to contextualize Islamophobia as part of a newly salient manifestation of a centuries-long process that classifies people from North Africa and Southwest Asia (i.e., the Middle East) as racially distinct. Explicating this process requires elaborating the co-constituted nature of Islamophobia and the very concept of race itself. Each of these dynamic, overdetermined concepts—race and Islamophobia—is too complex to encapsulate fully in any one study. Despite the challenges and necessary shortcomings of any attempt like this one, there are significant analytic advantages that can only be brought by the endeavor to understand the co-constituted nature of American racism and Islamophobia.
Placing Islamophobia into the well-worn context of American racism makes it less anomalous and less mysterious. Racism has always been present in the United States, so it should not surprise us that Islamophobia has roots that extend far deeper in history than 2001. This approach also seeks to apply the tools developed for understanding racial discrimination to the analysis of Islamophobia. Drawing the connections between race and Islamophobia provides, among other insights, the only plausible explanation for why Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and people of all faiths are vulnerable to Islamophobia. Moreover, shining a light on the intrinsically dehumanizing elements of racism enables an understanding of connections between hate crimes and discriminatory “counterterrorism” policies, both domestically in the United States and globally on the so-called battlefields of the “War on Terror.” All of these flow directly from the same source: Islamophobic racism. Seeing the links between them requires an understanding of how racism is embedded into American social institutions.
To illustrate the difficult task of untangling the complex web that connects race and Islamophobia, consider that there is no name for the socially constructed racial category that has been used to collectively ascribe Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. This category is called by many names: “Muslim,” or “Middle Eastern,” or sometimes it is rendered with an acronym like “MENA” (Middle Eastern and North African). Even when there is acknowledgment that there is, in fact, a racial category here, it has been nearly impossible to find a generally accepted term for it, yet all the while it finds constant expression through everyday encounters and in strucutral Islamophobic discrimination.
Currently, the most common colloquialism for this racial category is probably “Muslim,” but over the years, the most popular term for this racial category has varied quite a bit. Thirty years ago, the term “Arab” referred to people from a broadly conceived Middle East, while at that time “Muslim” had a close association with Black American communities. That these terms have shifted is not at all unusual. The popular names for racial categories change all the time. White people were more likely to be called “Caucasian” in the recent past, and that bizarre term still lives on today. Similarly, a Black American person would have been called “a Negro” sixty years ago, but today that term is generally considered archaic at best (and more than a little offensive). Moreover, the exact physical attributes associated with any racial category have never been static, much less obvious. The contours of racial categories are always contested and changing. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the racial categories exist. Elasticity—in terminology and otherwise—is an intrinsic part of the constant social reproduction of racial categories in the United States.
Today, based solely on his appearance, Cameron Mohammed might often get called “Muslim” or “Middle Eastern” by many of the people he meets. A century ago, however, in the early 1900s, someone looking like him would most likely have been called “Syrian.” That was the most common collective term for people from North Africa and Southwest Asia at that time. In the decades since then, as the terminology shifted, the contours of the “Syrian” (or Arab, Middle Eastern, etc.) racial classification—the physical features thought to be associated with it—underwent changes as well. The embodied, corporeal characteristics associated with this category, such as facial features, skin tone, hair color and texture, and so on, have never been consistent or definitive. Despite these variations, there can be no doubt that a socially constructed racial category exists, and has existed for a long time. There has been an undeniable consistency in the application of this racial category to people who have heritage in the vast geographic region stretching from India and Pakistan to Algeria and Morocco, from North Africa to Southwest and South Asia. Today that huge region is often referred to simply as “the Middle East.”
There are profound implications to recognizing that a single racial identity spans across Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians in America. Consider that when most Americans today use the term “Muslim” in conversation, they are probably not really talking about Muslims. Instead, they are calling up this longstanding racial category, one that haphazardly includes hundreds of ethnic groups containing both Muslims and non-Muslims. Because this particular racial term, “Muslim,” also happens to connote a religion, it has the unfortunate confounding effect of ascribing both a religious and a racial identity to a seemingly indiscriminate collection of communities.
This is the awesome power, the terrible magic, and the ignoble wonder of race: to ignore diversity, to reject indigenous identity, and to promulgate its own version of history all at the same time. Muslim Americans—people who follow the religion of Islam—represent a tremendous diversity of communities. That vibrant diversity is simply ignored by the racialization process. What’s worse, this process also distorts the histories, identities, and cultures of all the myriad people and communities of non-Muslims swept into the racial category. The mish-mash that is race in America violates all of these communities, Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians especially. Apart from denying the heritage of so many people, numerous malicious stereotypes are closely associated with the socially constructed “Muslim” racial category. Most notably there is the bigoted assumption that “Muslims” are somehow predisposed to become “radicalized” terrorists.
The racist and demonstrably false stereotype about terrorism and “Muslims” is so pervasive that openly asserting it has become a perfectly acceptable, mainstream opinion in the United States. Such opinions find expression in nearly any discussion about terrorism, whether it takes place on the floor of the United States Senate, on nationally broadcast news programs, or around the family dinner table. This stereotype is so deeply ingrained that only acts of violence committed by “Muslims” are immediately and unquestioningly labeled as “terrorist attacks.” In today’s political climate, it is seen as a mark of seriousness, of “telling it like it is,” to assert impudently that “Muslims” are uniquely dangerous and predisposed to commit terrorism. Anything less than that is maligned as wishy-washy “political correctness.”
Remember, because of race, nearly all references to “Muslims” in discussions like these actually point to the racial category—the racial category that includes Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians. Bigoted statements like “Most terrorists are Muslim,” or “Islamic culture encourages terrorism” (as though there is only a single “Islamic culture”) are therefore necessarily racial statements that reinforce the perception that anyone who “looks Muslim” may be dangerous. When public officials like Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Peter King propose policies to increase surveillance of “Muslims,” they not only place Muslim Americans in harm’s way, they also endanger Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans as well, because of race.
Using the colloquial term “Muslim” to refer to the racial category is confusing, to say the least. Again, actual Muslim communities are extremely diverse and cannot be described as a singular, homogenous group. Therefore, the term “Muslim” will not suffice for an in-depth analysis in large part because it is not precise enough. At the same time, listing Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian Americans when referring to the racial category is cumbersome and still inaccurate, because communities and individuals beyond those described even by that long list are swept into the racial category. Moreover, there is no other racial identity category commonly referred to by listing some of the various ethnic, religious, and panethnic groups swept under the umbrella of racial ascription. In short, the lack of a name for the racial category is a big problem.
Advocates have long struggled with this situation. Finding a widely agreed-upon identity term is often a crucial part of building an effective advocacy effort. For much of the latter half of the 1900s, the term “Arab American” was the preferred term for many advocates. It became a politically powerful identity category due to the successful organizing of advocates beginning in the mid-1900s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, “Arab American” had been largely (but not completely) replaced in mainstream discussions by the term “Muslim American.”
Since 2010, there have been several attempts by advocates to come up with a new, succinct collective term for the racial category, one that avoids singling out just one group like “Arab” or “Muslim.” Some have tried using the acronym AMEMSA (Arabs, Middle Easterners, Muslims, and South Asians). Others have promulgated a different acronym, SWANA (Southwest Asians and North Africans). Both of these have a certain pronounceable quality to them. Each provides a way to describe the various groups with ties to the vast geographical space across North Africa and Southwest Asia, and SWANA does do without using the controversial term “Middle Eastern.” These are noble efforts, but no other racial category is referred to with an acronym. In any event, neither acronym has yet taken hold, and the term “Muslim” remains the most prevalent one in common parlance in the mid-2010s. There are simply no good alternatives to “Muslim.” Every alternative has significant drawbacks.
Despite the problems with it, I will use the term “Middle Eastern.” Throughout this book, I refer to the Middle Eastern racial category. I use “Middle Eastern American” when describing the American communities ascribed with this identity.5 This term has the advantage of fitting in with similar racial terms. Compare “Middle Eastern American” with “Asian American,” which also denotes a racial category by making reference to a vast geographic region with unclear boundaries. No firm definition exists for determining who qualifies as an Asian American, yet saying “Asian American” today conjures up a clear racial image in the minds of Americans. I contend that saying “Middle Eastern American” evokes a racial image in exactly the same way, despite the lack of an accepted definition for “Middle Eastern.”
Like all racial categories, the exact borders of the Middle Eastern category will always be contested, and they will always be in flux. The process of racialization that created this category is ongoing, and it is messy. Nevertheless, this racial category exists, and it has real meaning. Powerful forces have embedded it deeply into fundamental social structures. There is also some evidence that increasing numbers of individuals are using the term “Middle Eastern” to self-identify.6 Informally, I have noticed the term “Middle Eastern” used more frequently to describe people (and not just restaurants) over the past decade.
Still, using the term “Middle Eastern” in this way poses many problems. For one thing, the term “Middle East” has its origins in brutal colonialism, which is why many people actively avoid using it. Military officers in the British Empire are thought to have invented the term to refer to a huge expanse of geography stretching from the Indian subcontinent to northern Africa.7 Perpetuating the use of “Middle Eastern” might very well serve to legitimate colonialism, in effect denying agency and a more meaningful social identity to the formerly colonized communities from this region. Almost anyone from the region would hesitate before identifying themselves as Middle Eastern people (although some living there do use that term). Perhaps most importantly, saying “Middle Eastern” to refer to a group of people is extremely imprecise at best and offensive at worst. It is arguably even more confusing or offensive to say that a Sikh man “looks Middle Eastern” than it is to note that Sikhs are “mistaken for Muslim.” Is the Punjab region of India, the origin of Sikhism, in the Middle East? What about Pakistan? Is Turkey in the Middle East, or Europe, or both? How can a single category encompass Sikhs alongside Copts, Berbers, Kurds, Turks, and Chaldeans? Even more problematic is how Middle Eastern racial identity does not at all correlate with Muslim religious identity. Many Muslim Americans do not identify in any way as Middle Eastern, and many Middle Eastern Americans do not identify as Muslim. Many Muslim Americans are Black, and many others are White, Asian, and Latin@. Therefore, the term “Middle Eastern” just cannot be equivalent to the term “Muslim.”
Despite these problems, using the term “Middle Eastern” to refer to the ascribed identity category involved in Islamophobia is the least bad option. After all, Middle Eastern is already used as a shorthand—albeit a crude one—for the ethnic, religious, cultural, and national groups in North Africa and Southwest Asia. No term is perfect, but “Middle Eastern” will work well enough for my purposes.
To sum up, I join with a growing group of scholars who find that a Middle Eastern racial identity category exists in American culture.8 Like other socially constructed racial categories, it is unstable even as it firmly connects stereotypes and prejudices with physical appearances. It coexists with many overlapping social identities. As a result, perceptions of the Middle Eastern category depend on social context. Someone who “looks Middle Eastern” in one neighborhood might, for example, “look Latin@” in a different neighborhood. These contradictions and discontinuities do not nullify the existence of the racialized Middle Eastern category. On the contrary, these sorts of inconsistencies and illogical tensions always exist in the social construction of racial identity categories. These categories are necessarily arbitrary, volatile, and often bitterly contested by those they purport to describe. Yet racial identity categories are nonetheless quite real, and they retain a great deal of social power. Particularly in the area of counterterrorism policy, due to the racist stereotype that Middle Easterners are predisposed to commit acts of terrorism, there is a great deal of race-based discrimination built upon this racial category.
It goes without saying that the government should make every responsible effort to prevent terrorist attacks. The people working on the front lines of counterterrorism have committed themselves to saving lives, and they face a difficult and often thankless task. Unfortunately, many of the architects of American counterterrorism strategies have created deeply flawed and often bigoted programs. The federal government’s counterterrorism programs have been ostensibly designed to catch terrorists without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity. In practice, however, many of these programs have been used almost exclusively to target Middle Eastern Americans.9 These programs have expanded in recent years to include the power to detain suspects of terrorism nearly indefinitely, even without trial; the use of torture during interrogations of suspected terrorists; the use of secret evidence in deportation hearings; the ability to designate organizations as “sponsors of terrorism”; the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles to kill terrorist suspects without a trial; and the surreptitious surveillance of restaurants, cafes, entire neighborhoods, and even places of worship where terrorist plots are thought to be in development. Almost every one of these programs and policies has been disproportionately used against Middle Eastern Americans.
Because of race, when counterterrorism programs disproportionately affect Muslim American communities, they also have a direct impact on the broader communities of Middle Eastern Americans. Discriminatory counterterrorism programs therefore both draw from and contribute to the bigoted stereotype that Middle Eastern Americans are inherently dangerous and more likely to become terrorists.
Such an obviously bigoted belief should be recognized as false on its face, but this stereotype has motivated a gigantic amount of law enforcement, military, and intelligence resources over the past several decades. To be clear, there is no evidence to support the conclusion that Middle Easterners or Muslims are uniquely predisposed to violent extremism.10 In fact, between 2001 and 2011, “radicalized” White Americans—most often from the right-wing fringe—were deadlier than Muslim terrorists in the United States.11 Policymakers, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement willfully ignored this evidence in crafting their responses to terrorism. There seems to be a persistent, bigoted belief among counterterrorism officials that something about Muslim or Arab culture contributes to terrorist impulses, that Middle Eastern Americans are prone to “self-radicalize” into “lone wolves,” or to strike from shadowy “sleeper cells.” No amount of evidence to prove that these fears are unfounded has stopped the freight train of counterterrorism resources directed at Middle Eastern American communities. Indeed, one Arab American advocate who met regularly with officials from the Department of Homeland Security flatly told me that “the White boys in charge are convinced it’s Islam”—that Islam is the root cause of terrorism.12 On this basis, officials in federal agencies have created and expanded programs that target Middle Eastern Americans for extra scrutiny in counterterrorism efforts.
One such program is the FBI’s counterterrorism surveillance and “sting operation” program. In an effort to find and preempt terrorists before they have a chance to strike, the FBI has employed a network of tens of thousands of undercover informants.13 Since 2003, these informants have produced over 200 terrorism-related criminal prosecutions.14 Nearly every single one of the cases generated by this “sting operation” program has ensnared Muslim Americans, sending dozens to prison as convicted terrorists on “illusory” charges, according to Human Rights Watch. Critics of the program have shown that the FBI is creating the very enemy it hunts: “Middle Eastern terrorists.”
In many of these cases, the FBI informants provide everything the supposed terrorist needs: money, weapons, and perhaps even the concept for the deadly attack. Critics observe a clear pattern. First, the FBI recruits a confidential informant—often someone who is in trouble on some unrelated criminal charges or immigration violations—and in exchange for participating they offer cash incentives, leniency in sentencing, or some other reward. Then, the confidential informant is sent “undercover” to observe people or a place—often a mosque, Middle Eastern restaurant, or another place where Muslims are known to congregate—and the informant is instructed to look for signs of trouble. Knowing or believing that the rewards from the FBI are based on producing results, the informant soon “discovers” a terrorism plot brewing. Frequently, the “dangerous radical” is a petty crook eager to score some quick money, someone with an intellectual disability, or an impressionable, troubled youngster eager to prove their mettle. The FBI, according to critics, preys on these vulnerable members of the Muslim American community, because they are easier targets.15 Many of the people targeted by the FBI would receive counseling, referral to social services, or perhaps court-ordered psychiatric evaluation if the context were something other than “counterterrorism.”
To establish the deadly intent of the “terrorist,” the FBI informant surreptitiously records conversations over a period of weeks, months, or in some cases, years. Then, after the “radical Jihadist” finally commits to carrying out an attack, just in the nick of time, FBI agents swoop in and make a dramatic arrest. Juries have unfailingly convicted people caught by this program, frequently on charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorist organizations (even when the “terrorist organization” was really just the FBI in disguise and there was no actual contact with known terrorists). These charges typically carry twenty-year federal prison sentences, or even longer imprisonment terms. To be sure, the juries in these cases are often faced with someone who tried to commit mass murder—so the lengthy sentences are not necessarily unjust. Still, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson’s analysis found that this has happened so often over the course of this fifteen-year-old program that “the FBI is responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than any other organization.”16 Human Rights Watch called the FBI program that produces these terrorism cases “abusive” and recommended “robust oversight” of the program.17
It is obvious that this FBI “counterterrorism” program is targeted at Muslims. But targeting Muslims, a religious group, is not, strictly speaking, racist. Nevertheless, the effect of this FBI program is racist, because of the way the program is justified, the methods by which it is sustained, and how the FBI presents its work to the public.
Eager to show its prowess in disrupting terrorist plots, the FBI almost always holds a dramatic press conference to discuss the arrest of the “radicalized terrorists” who came so close to causing massive harm. Photos of the accused terrorists are splashed on TV screens and in news reports, where the press almost always uncritically reports on the horrific terrorist attack that the FBI “thwarted.” The media reports focus on the awful damage that the fake terrorist attack would have caused, but the reports frequently fail to point out that the FBI controlled the fake attack from start to finish, and no one was ever actually in danger. Meanwhile, the visual images of the alleged terrorists—nearly always young, Middle Eastern men—reinforce the pre-existing racial stereotypes around Middle Eastern Americans and their propensity to commit terrorist acts.
In essence, what we have is an FBI program that is both motivated by and contributes to a racial stereotype. The reason that confidential informants so often target Muslim Americans is due to the stereotype that Middle Eastern Americans are the likeliest source of terrorism. As each of the hundreds of “sting operations” develops, they accordingly reproduce this stereotype, literally by reproducing “Middle Eastern terrorists.” The images of the young, Middle Eastern men caught up in this FBI program appear repeatedly in the media, making it seem as though the FBI is barely containing the “Middle Eastern terrorism” problem. This vicious circle repeated again and again, with another “sting operation” case on average once every two months between 2009 and 2013.18 Despite renewed criticism after the FBI failed to prevent several attacks, and after agents shot and killed a “suspected terrorist,” FBI officials revealed in a 2016 interview with the New York Times that they not only plan to continue using these “sting operations,” but they have expanded their use in a purported effort to stop the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.19
Because there is already a racial identity in place that makes it possible to “look Muslim,” Muslim American communities are not the only ones affected by this FBI program. Everyone who fits into the Middle Eastern racial category—especially Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian Americans—are affected by the stereotypes that this program perpetuates. In addition to the fundamental civil liberties implications of the FBI’s “sting operation” program, the racist stereotype bolstered by this program leads directly to hate crimes, like the attacks on Cameron Mohammed and Balbir Singh Sodhi.
This is one prominent example of how the bigoted idea that “Muslims are predisposed to terrorism” has led to the institutionalization of racism affecting Middle Eastern Americans. This stereotype justifies many discriminatory programs and policies, including torture, mass surveillance, and indefinite detention. In response to critiques of these programs, the policymakers and project managers responsible assert that such policies are only intended to harm “terrorists,” or “bad guys.” These are euphemisms that rely on the Middle Eastern racial category. There is usually no need to say explicitly that only Middle Eastern Americans and other communities of color will be affected, and “regular Americans” (read: White Americans) have no need to fear torture, surveillance, or indefinite detention. This racial meaning is encoded in ways that enable the seemingly non-racial justification of these so-called counterterrorism policies. In turn, these programs and policies serve to reify the Middle Eastern racial category. Race and Islamophobia are thereby intrinsically linked in a vicious cycle.
The sudden salience of the Middle Eastern racial category in recent years should not come as a surprise to anyone who understands the history of race in America. Throughout American history, in addition to the emergence of new racial categories, those that already exist have frequently undergone major shifts. The intrinsic fluidity of racial categories means that someone perceived as Asian today may one day find a different racial identity placed upon her. Physically apparent differences between groups of human bodies have always existed, but the criteria for placing those people into various different racial categories is based entirely upon the social and historical context in a given place. The process of racial formation drives these changes, sometimes gradually, and sometimes quite rapidly.20
The upshot to all of this is that race has always been central in American life. Ignoring race in the understanding of Islamophobia, or asserting that religion or some other factor is more important than race, are similar to assertions that race can be reduced to class. These assertions are naïve at best. Race must be understood as race.
The beginning of that understanding comes through the foundational realization that race is a social construction that plays a powerful part in shaping nearly every aspect of American life. Even though biologists have confirmed again and again that there is only one human race, social scientists have conclusively shown again and again that race still matters. Given the centrality of race in American life, just about everyone in the United States has at least a passing familiarity with what race means and the fact that it has social power. Most Americans would, if asked, rattle off a list of racial identities that they personally recognize. Just because “everyone knows” about race does not mean that it is trivial to describe how race actually works, though. Scratching the surface of race exposes massive cracks in its facade. For starters, any effort to provide a taxonomy of all currently existing racial categories is doomed to fail. Racial categories undergo constant change, and they are never fixed. Such a list will always fail to account for huge numbers of groups that do not easily fit into any single category. Still, despite these contradictions, David Hollinger suggests the existence of a relatively stable “ethno-racial pentagon” in the contemporary United States.21 This is a sort of “top five” list of racial identity categories that have dominated mainstream American culture over the past few decades.
Specifically, Hollinger names five socially constructed racial categories as dominant in American culture: Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latin@, and White. Of course, “dominance” does not mean that these categories face no challenges. For example, an individual who self-identifies as Latin@ may be perceived by others as Black, or Native American, or White. Furthermore, multiracial identity, either as a distinct category or as a specific combination of two or more racial categories, has always posed a significant challenge to the “pentagon.” Another challenge comes from changing demographics. As the relative size of various groups and subgroups change, classifications sometimes change with them.
Despite the contradictions and inconsistencies in the “ethno-racial pentagon,” it is undeniable that most Americans today classify themselves and each other according to this “top five” list of racial categories. The absurdity of this racial reality is profound. Nearly every single individual in America is placed into one of these five imperfect and often offensive categories in every social encounter that they have. Even worse, social programs and policies based upon this racial classification produce a tremendous amount of social power. Membership in these racial categories is correlated with unequal access to health care, education, wealth, political opportunity, and more.
Where do Middle Eastern Americans fit on the “ethno-racial pentagon”? Some would say that a “Middle Eastern” category should just join the rest to create a “top six” list of generally accepted categories. They might point to all the ways this has already become an accepted social identity. Americans enjoy Middle Eastern cuisine, listen to Middle Eastern music, and enroll in Middle East Studies academic programs. There is no question that “Middle Eastern” is already a recognized, actively used social category. But many others would insist the contrary: that there is no Middle Eastern racial category at all, nascent or otherwise. After all, the Middle East is not a racially distinct place. There is no actual culture or ethnicity that can properly be called “Middle Eastern.” The Middle East, an enormous geographic expanse, contains people from a huge diversity of groups—ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural. On this view, there is no good reason to single out race as the main factor at work by speaking of Middle Eastern Americans as a racial group. The often-heated debate over whether there is a racial category that includes “Muslims and those mistaken for Muslims” signifies that, at least at the moment, there is no room on the “top five” list for the Middle Eastern racial category. It is too controversial, and it is not universally recognized.
The lack of a recognized racial identity for Middle Eastern Americans contributes to a great deal of confusion for individuals, advocates, policymakers, journalists, and scholars. It is a tremendous challenge to speak accurately about the racial dynamics at play in Islamophobia without a clear recognition of the racial category that sweeps so much diversity into a single undifferentiated group. The lack of an accepted identity category makes the conversation about the co-constituted nature of race and Islamophobia even more difficult.
To illustrate how difficult this is, allow me to share one personal anecdote. For the past several years, I have asked undergraduate students in some of my courses to write an essay on this issue. I pose a question about whether there is a clearly defined racial category for Middle Eastern Americans. They compose this essay after spending two months studying sociological theories about race alongside the histories of Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American communities. I have been surprised to find that, year after year, the class divides almost exactly in half on this question.
As this racial confusion continues, the discussion of American Islamophobia has been dominated by studies with religion as the focus. Most of the scholarly analyses of Islamophobia and the coverage in the popular press over the past decade have centered on Islam and Muslims, and few of these have considered race in their analyses. There is a lot of value, of course, in looking at Muslim American experiences with Islamophobia since 9/11. The problem is that the racial nature of Islamophobia has been obscured because of analyses that rarely go beyond that framework.
There is no single explanation for why race has been largely absent from discussions of Islamophobia, but part of the reason stems from problems with the word itself—“Islamophobia.” This term is not very helpful, but it is unavoidably popular. Its suffix, -phobia, denotes irrational fear. Irrational fear often motivates Islamophobia, but history, social patterns, and cultural developments, at least as much as irrational fear, also drive Islamophobia. At the same time, the Islam- in Islamophobia implies that it is something that only involves Islam, the religion, and Muslims. This stands to reason, because, of course, Muslims have had to bear the brunt of Islamophobic prejudice and discrimination since 9/11. Still, Islamophobia constantly affects many communities, not just Muslim communities.
Moreover, Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon that involves a wide range of social issues. Religion, gender, class, sexuality—all these and more play crucial roles in the reproduction of Islamophobia. Race is not the only contributing factor. Any given Islamophobic hate crime or policy will have elements of most, if not all, of these factors. This means that it easy to look at any given manifestation of Islamophobia without noticing the race and racism embedded within it.
This presents a major challenge, because there is a general tendency in America to deny the existence of racism whenever possible, even if racism is as plain as day. Many (if not most) Americans believe that the last vestiges of racism are slowly but surely fading away, even as evidence mounts of persistent racial discrimination. The obvious racial segregation of American cities and schools is often explained not by referring to racism, but by looking at any other possible explanation: economic inequality, “choice” of where to live, and differences in “culture.” When White police officers shoot unarmed Black people, for example, many explanations are proffered, and the claim that racism has something to do with it is debated and sometimes even decried as radical and “divisive.” Likewise, proponents of increased racial profiling and immigration restrictions insist that racism plays no part in their proposals. Commentator Bill O’Reilly, for example, flatly proclaimed that “it is not racist to support a wall on the border or stringent vetting of Muslims entering the USA from terrorist precincts.”22 Similarly, supporters argued there was nothing even remotely racist about a policy in Arizona that would have required police to determine the immigration status of anyone they stopped if they had a “reasonable suspicion” that they might be an undocumented immigrant.23
Examples like these underscore the reality that many Americans do not accept the premise that racism presents a serious problem today. If there is any believable way to show that race is not the only factor at work in a social issue, then you can expect many Americans to jump to the conclusion that race cannot be a cause of the problem. Americans, generally, prefer to think of the United States as a society that is moving away from a racist past, not as a society still riven by racism.
These complications partly explain why many scholars studying Islamophobia often simplify their analyses by describing religious discrimination and ignoring or minimizing the role of race. In a survey of the scholarly literature, Nasar Meer found a “virtual absence of an established literature on race and racism in the discussion of Islamophobia.”24 Rather than go into the complex racial implications of Islamophobia, most scholars examine Muslims in isolation, neglecting the many non-Muslim communities directly affected by Islamophobia because of race.25 Many treatments oversimplify Islamophobia in other ways, as well, mainly by referring to the phenomenon as a “new” form of discrimination that emerged in the “post-9/11” world. In this context, Islamophobia is presented as time-limited “backlash” after terrorist attacks, rather than as a longstanding, centuries-old social issue. The inability to see the racial origins of discrimination against Middle Eastern Americans leads to difficulty in showing how Islamophobic policies and programs have an impact on everyone in that racial category.
The good news is that most Americans genuinely want to live in a society free of racism. Legal and social protections against hate crimes and discrimination create a clear distinction between the America of today—the so-called post–civil rights era—and the long era of unchecked racist violence that came to an end in the mid-1900s. The civil rights movement transformed America, and by the end of the 1960s, racial discrimination and outright racial bigotry became legally and socially unacceptable.
Racism nevertheless persists. The civil rights movement accomplished a great deal, but there is no question that work remains to be done. In the decades since the height of the movement in the 1960s, community advocates have continued to uncover hidden racial disparities, confront bigotry, and demand an end to discriminatory policies and practices. Advocacy organizations emerged as the vehicle for this work, organizations defined primarily by racial identity.26 Hundreds of organizations advocating on behalf of Asian, Black, Latin@, and Native Americans have stood up for improved civil rights, part of the “advocacy explosion” in the post–civil rights era.27
While in theory any individual can stand up for their rights, in practice, professional civil rights advocates do most of the day-to-day work of enforcing civil rights protections. Advocates working in these organizations call out racial discrimination affecting their communities. They reach out to the authorities, and they can rightfully expect swift action. In some cases, advocates compel change by filing a lawsuit to win a court-ordered remedy. They appeal to policymakers in legislatures and in corporate boardrooms. They also take their case directly to the public. To advance their cause, civil rights advocates organize rallies, boycotts, and sit-ins, they take part in community forums, and they engage in other forms of protest. Generally speaking, many of the grievances of civil rights advocates get addressed in some way in today’s United States, more often than not through existing anti-discrimination programs and policies. Because racism is so abhorrent, when community leaders call out racial discrimination, they have a powerful moral claim. That alone is sometimes enough to bring about an attempt at resolution.
This system of civil rights protection, whereby civil rights advocates file grievances and bring about relief, has operated, more or less, since the 1960s. There have been ebbs and flows in the ability of advocates to win major reforms. Many would argue that since 1980, there has been a gradual fraying of civil rights protections, and this is why so much discrimination and inequality remains intractable some fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevertheless, it remains true that blatant racism is still generally not accepted in today’s United States. Unless that racism is Islamophobic.
Given the aversion to racism in American public life, it is remarkable that Islamophobia has risen to become so mainstream in recent years. Islamophobia, frankly, is a popular form of racism. Prominent, national leaders—even candidates for President of the United States—frequently make patently bigoted, Islamophobic statements, and they seem to suffer few significant consequences.
The 2016 presidential campaign produced some of the most egregious examples of Islamophobic political rhetoric in recent memory. Businessman and television personality Donald J. Trump led the quest to deliver the most far-reaching counterterrorism policy statement of the campaign season by demanding a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”28 This proposal attracted the support of a majority of Americans polled in March 2016, with a striking 81% of Republicans in favor.29 Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz attempted to match his opponent for the Republican nomination with a proposal to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”30 Cruz, apparently unaware that the FBI and several local law enforcement agencies had already implemented some version of this bigoted idea, managed to convince some 45% of Americans to agree with his proposal, including 74% of Republicans.31
The rhetoric of Trump, Cruz, and other nationally prominent politicians should not be surprising. By now, the inclusion of patently Islamophobic statements is a well-worn tradition at all levels of American politics. For example, in 2005, then-Congressman (and later Senator) Mark Kirk of Illinois stated that he is “OK with discrimination against young Arab males from terrorist-producing states. I’m not threatened by people from China. . . . I just know where the threat is from.”32 Congressman Peter King of New York, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, agreed that “the threat of al-Qaeda recruiting individuals from within the American-Muslim community is real.”33 Along similar lines, South Carolina State Senator Jake Knotts once described Governor Nikki Haley as a “f—ing raghead” who would bring foreign influence into the state because of her Sikh ancestry. Knotts later apologized, and claimed he was only joking.34
Leading political commentators frequently echo Islamophobic slurs made by public officials. Popular FOX News television host Brian Kilmeade explained to his audience that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”35 After he apologized, he nevertheless continued repeatedly to call for discrimination against Muslims. Among other ideas, Kilmeade proposed expanding the use of “racial profiling” in terrorism investigations and suggested “bugging Mosques” to find hidden terrorists.36 There are many more examples like this—again, not from the fringes of American politics but from well-respected elected officials and from commentators with prominent national platforms. One study found that speaking out about the “Muslim threat” can even be profitable due to the generous support of a $40-million industry providing grants and good-paying jobs to self-declared experts willing to promote Islamophobia.37 In a society where racism is considered abhorrent, it is quite unusual for openly bigoted statements like these to remain socially acceptable and even promoted by well-known foundations and wealthy individuals.
Part of the explanation for how Islamophobia became mainstream in American politics is the common insistence that it is not racist to express concerns about Muslims and Islam. Consider the controversy in 2014 when Oklahoma State Representative John Bennett commented to his supporters that Muslims are “a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out.”38 He defended himself by asserting that Islam is not a racial group, which means that he cannot be called racist for speaking out against Muslims.
They said, “Oh, Rep. Bennett, that guy on TV, he’s a bigot and a racist. He’s an Islamophobe.” Well, if I’m an Islamophobe for speaking the truth about Islam, then you’re absolutely right. But I find it hard to believe. How can I be racist against Muslim or Islam when the ethnicity is actually Arab? This is kind of confusing.39
The bizarre reference to an Arab ethnicity was Bennett’s attempt to assert that Islam is not a racial category, meaning that his critical statements by definition could not be racist. Bennett’s maneuver here is typical in the post–civil rights era. Americans will generally accept any excuse to avoid seeing racism. By narrowing the definitions of race and racism, it becomes possible to tolerate even blatant bigotry.
The takeaway from all of this is that the slipperiness with which racism has been redefined not only enables Islamophobia to pass as legitimate discourse, but it also helps Americans avoid talking about racism, even when it is patently obvious. This tendency to reject the conclusion that racism is operative in Islamophobia presents a profound dilemma for Middle Eastern American advocates working to confront Islamophobia.
Strategically, does it benefit civil rights advocates to call out Islamophobia as racism? Or would it be wiser if they avoided the controversial issue of race? For example, they might instead describe Islamophobia as an infringement upon religious freedom, or a violation of human rights, or find some other way to discuss Islamophobia without bringing up race explicitly. By steering clear of the rhetoric of racism when describing Islamophobia, advocates can sidestep the thorny terrain that always surrounds the topic of race.
On the other hand, using the language of race to link their efforts against Islamophobia to venerated, longstanding civil rights campaigns against racism might provide Middle Eastern American advocates with a powerful moral authority. Calling out Islamophobia as racism might also bring additional support from a broader community of racially marginalized communities. The racial dilemma for these advocates is the choice of how to frame their efforts—whether they choose to represent themselves as marginalized communities of color struggling against racism, or position their communities as mainstream, regular Americans who just want to be treated equally.
Aside from the strategic concerns for Middle Eastern American advocates, this dilemma represents a crucial turning point in the tortured American history with race. If one of the most pervasive and damaging forms of racism—Islamophobia—is not challenged as racism by advocates, what does that mean for civil rights in America?
In an interview with me, a leader at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the largest advocacy organizations confronting Islamophobia, explained why he did not believe racism is a central issue for Muslim Americans.40
It [racism] does appear, but that’s not the main thing. I’ll tell you why. Most of the time our criticism of laws or proposed laws is based on criticism of the merits of the law itself. We usually oppose the substance of the law, the premise of such laws. . . . [If] you’re assuming that Muslim countries are producing bad guys more than other countries, that’s not true. Now, dealing with the racist aspect of it is one of the factors, one of the elements. But the real element is the premise, the dangerous aspect of starting to separate Americans by ethnic groups and religious groups and so on. . . . When you get stopped by a police officer, and he asks you, ‘Which mosque do you go to?,’ you usually are initially stopped because you were darker [in skin tone] than some other person. So there is an element [of racism] there but it is not the main driving force.41
Even as he describes a situation where physical appearance—“darker” skin tone—leads directly to discrimination by law enforcement, this Muslim American advocate simultaneously asserts that racism is not a “main driving force” in Islamophobic discrimination. Rather than describe the problem as racism, he instead stresses the ideal that all Americans deserve equal treatment regardless of their religious or ethnic identity. Furthermore, in his view it is counterproductive, or even “dangerous,” to speak in terms of racial identities. For him, to “separate Americans” would only serve to perpetuate more discrimination, so it is better to assert a common American identity. This framing allows him to sidestep the issue of race while still advocating against Islamophobic discrimination.
Many Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American advocates routinely use language like this. This is how they navigate away from the sensitive issue of race. One of the goals of this approach is gaining mainstream approval. On this view, bringing up race or accusing someone of being “a racist” will make advocates appear too radical, or too unreasonable, and it could potentially result in many Americans tuning out the message instead. The advocacy strategy of avoiding race therefore requires carefully tuned messaging that will not offend the sensibilities of an American public divided on race and concerned about terrorism.
One of the most common ways advocates avoid talking about race is by describing Islamophobia as religious persecution. Religious communities enjoy a great deal of respect and legitimacy in the United States, and standing up for religious freedom is almost never controversial (unlike standing up for racial justice). By highlighting religious identity—Muslim, Sikh, Hindu—advocates can make the unimpeachable claim that their community should not be treated any differently than Christians or Jews. This approach also has the perceived advantage of avoiding associations with stigmatized, racially defined groups like Blacks and Latin@s. With this strategy, many advocates champion religious freedom without making broader calls for racial justice.
To further develop this strategy, several Middle Eastern American advocacy organizations worked with Hattaway Communications, a high-profile Washington, DC, public relations firm in 2012. Grants from generous donors, including the Open Society Foundation and Kellogg Foundation, enabled Hattaway to conduct a national survey with 1,200 respondents, interviews with “a wide variety of advocates and policymakers,” and “focus group discussions across the country.” The resulting “message manual” recommended specific phrases for use in public statements by advocates to “address fear” and “promote fairness.” The manual warns:
Messages aimed at addressing fear fall flat if they suggest that preserving important values, such as civil liberties, should take precedence over keeping America safe. Instead, we must deliver messages that: 1) offer an approach to terrorism that doesn’t unfairly target American Muslims, [and] 2) show that American Muslims—like other Americans—help to address terrorism.
Notably, the words “race” and “racism” do not appear anywhere in the message manual. Instead, the manual recommends focusing on messages that emphasize national unity and religious freedom. The authors note that statements around “religious freedom” are “highly effective” in promoting “tolerance.”42
By using poll-tested, carefully crafted messages like these, which stay away from controversial statements about race, many advocates believe they can position themselves firmly in the center of American political discourse. The vocabulary used to accomplish this can be such a stretch that it might be humorous, if the issues were not so serious. Advocates describing hate crimes when Sikhs or Hindus are attacked frequently use the laborious construction “Muslims and those mistaken for Muslims.” Used in this way, “mistaken identity” becomes a euphemism to avoid explicitly mentioning race and racism.
This race-neutral advocacy strategy has been effective at winning some significant reforms. One victory, in 2010, saw the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) dismantle a program that required extra scrutiny of airline passengers traveling through a short list of “high-risk” countries, which apart from Cuba were all Muslim-majority countries. TSA hastily announced that they would pull aside all passengers traveling from these countries after an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant attempted to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a jetliner flying over Detroit on December 25, 2009. Because all of the Muslim-majority countries on the TSA list were in Africa and Asia, the advocates could have chosen to use a familiar term to describe the problem with this program: “racial profiling.” Instead, they avoided the term “racial” when describing the discrimination. Advocates from CAIR and several other advocacy organizations issued a statement that the TSA program was based on “religious and ethnic profiling.”43 In response to the petitions for change from CAIR and other organizations, the TSA ended the discriminatory program less than five months after introducing it.44
Because of successes like this one, using language that avoids race might indeed be the most effective strategy for advocates confronting Islamophobia. However, there are potential advantages in an explicitly race-conscious approach to civil rights advocacy, as well—one that embraces calls for racial justice.
A race-conscious strategy would seek to co-opt racial identity for leverage as it ignores and obscures ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. Islamophobia unavoidably pushes Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American communities into an undifferentiated Middle Eastern racial category. Recognizing that collective racial identity could open various avenues for coalition building and dynamic advocacy strategies. For one, the collective Middle Eastern identity could become the basis for a coalition spanning a wider range of community organizations. Rather than only working separately as advocates for dozens of groups defined by nationality, religion, or panethnicity (Lebanese, Sikh, South Asian, etc.), a Middle Eastern American coalition could bring together all of these communities. This would enable a pooling of resources and an efficient division of labor among diverse allies. Moreover, by positioning Middle Eastern Americans alongside other racially marked communities of color, this strategy would promote even larger advocacy coalitions with Asian, Black, Latin@, and Native Americans. Finally, recognizing the role of race would allow for the use of the powerful moral language of civil rights: characterizing Islamophobia as not just objectionable or offensive but specifically racist.
Some anti-Islamophobia advocates have adopted a race-conscious strategy. A prominent example is the Arab American Association of New York, under the direction of Linda Sarsour. Speaking in terms of “multiracial coalitions,” Sarsour led several efforts in the 2010s to coordinate with Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American organizations, and to expand these coalitions by joining with other communities of color. For example, in 2014, Sarsour traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, joining Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality after a young Black man, Michael Brown, was shot to death by a White police officer. Sarsour organized a “Muslims for Ferguson” campaign, and she explained her strategy in an interview with Colorlines magazine:
We were thinking about what our role is as Arab Americans and Muslims, as the children of immigrants or immigrants ourselves. What is our role in the larger conversation about race and racism in the US?45
Sarsour’s framing of the issue deals directly with race and racism. Unlike advocates who avoid race, here Sarsour does not seek to gain popular acceptance by obscuring the role of racism. She positions herself as a civil rights protester demanding reforms with the moral language of the racial justice movement. In another 2014 campaign, Sarsour explicitly linked racial profiling of Blacks and Latin@s in police stop-and-frisk policies with the need for New York City public schools to recognize Muslim holidays. Both of these issues discriminated against communities of color, in her view. This perspective motivated a multiracial coalition of organizations to pressure the city government to change policies on both of these issues simultaneously. The coalition won significant reforms: major changes to the stop-and-frisk policies of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the addition of two Muslim holidays to the public school calendar.
The differences between the CAIR leader’s strategy and Sarsour’s approach—one “colorblind,” and the other outspoken about race—clearly illustrate the strategic dilemma that race presents for Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American advocates. Both approaches have merits and drawbacks. And each approach carries wider implications for the construction of race, writ large, in the United States.
Civil rights advocates have always played a pivotal role in the development of American racial thinking. The actions and statements of civil rights campaigners have historically had tremendous power to shape and even to transform the social construction of race in America. By challenging discrimination and enabling anti-discrimination policies and programs that can lift up subjugated communities, civil rights campaigns in the twentieth century achieved nothing less than a major reconstruction of American politics and culture. Now and in the decades ahead, Middle Eastern American civil rights advocates have a crucial role to play in determining how the nation deals with race and racism. In this book, I explore the strategic choices and challenges that lie between both the race-conscious and the race-neutral strategies as they are described by American advocates working to confront “Islamophobia.”
To learn more about how Middle Eastern American civil rights advocates have crafted strategies to deal with the racial dilemma, I spoke with dozens of Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American advocates. Alongside these interviews, I conducted a contextual analysis of documents such as pamphlets, conference programs, newsletters, and websites published by several of the largest Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American advocacy organizations. I also built a database with information about hundreds of advocacy organizations in these communities across the United States, with data from 1980 and 2004.
Most of this research was conducted between 2005 and 2014. I made several research trips to Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, to meet in person with advocates and to get copies of documents produced by several leading advocacy organizations active in these locations. I also spoke by telephone with activists in New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis, and a few smaller cities as well. Throughout the time that I gathered these data, I continually developed and added information to my database describing the wider Middle Eastern American advocacy field. I describe each of the three components of my research below, and additional details about my methodological choices appear in the methodological appendix.46
I sought out current and former board members, executives, staffers, volunteers, and members from several prominent advocacy organizations for in-depth, qualitative interviews. I found these advocates by calling, writing, or visiting the offices of the advocacy organizations. After each meeting, I asked for the contact information of anyone else with whom I might speak, and through this “snowballing” technique, I quickly reached several dozen potential interview subjects. I did not limit interviews by institutional affiliation, but I instead took the approach of speaking to anyone working in this field in almost any capacity, from new volunteers to longtime board members. I ended up meeting advocates working at more than twenty advocacy organizations, and I was also able to speak with a few government officials working at agencies that interface with advocacy organizations, such as the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. In all, I conducted seventy interviews with sixty-two advocates and officials (this includes eight follow-up interviews).
Each interview was, of course, customized for the person I spoke with, and I asked different questions based on what I already knew about the advocate and her or his organization. Generally, each interview covered organizational history, the differences and similarities among various organizations in the field, the advocate’s opinions on important organizational decisions, strategies, and tactics, and the goals and dilemmas facing the organization and the field. All interviews included a discussion of coalition building, and most of those conversations included detailed discussions about the role of race and racism in anti-Islamophobia advocacy work.
I promised to keep each respondent’s identity confidential. This enabled everyone I interviewed to offer their thoughts and opinions freely, without worrying about damaging their reputations among their colleagues or in their communities. All names and other information that would personally identify the source for my interview quotes have been altered or omitted, except in rare cases where I have been given explicit permission to identify a source for a quote.
The data generated from these interviews allowed for a close analysis of organizational strategic decisions and the relationships among organizations covered in the study. Overall, the interview data provided a vivid picture of the field of anti-Islamophobia advocacy at the national level, from the late 1970s through the early 2010s.
I conducted an analysis of documents produced between 1980 and 2014 by ten national-level advocacy organizations. The documents include websites, press releases, and pamphlets produced for the general public, newsletters directed toward organizational members and subscribers, and internal memoranda, conference agendas, research impressions, and other assorted materials. The documents contain a wealth of information about these organizations: details on prioritized issues and concerns, events and campaigns, services offered, promotions and public relations, lobbying and other governmental relations, fundraising efforts, membership drives, opinion articles, electoral voting guides and endorsements, and media talking points.
The analysis allowed for additional information on how strategic decisions were made, which issues were (and were not) considered important by leadership at the organizations, how and when coalitions and jointly coordinated campaigns were undertaken between different organizations, and it allowed for a general examination of the efforts (or lack thereof) at coalition building with other advocacy organizations.
The third and final component of the study involved building a custom database with information about hundreds of Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American advocacy organizations. The design and idea for this database were adapted from a method originally developed by Debra Minkoff.47 Data for this project were primarily obtained from the Encyclopedia of Associations, a directory produced annually since the 1960s by Gale Research. The Encyclopedia catalogs information in an effort to describe every voluntary association in the United States, including large corporations, political action committees, and civil rights advocacy organizations. The research staff at Gale seek out new organizations for inclusion by Internet, from references in newspapers and periodicals, and by referral. The Encyclopedia includes a wide range of basic information on each organization, including the year that the organization was established, its membership size, geographic location, a narrative description of its goals and activities, and its relationships to other organizations in the same field.
I coded two separate editions of the Encyclopedia, the 1980 edition and the 2004 edition. This allowed me to observe changes between these years. I augmented the 2004 data with more recent information (typically 2010 or newer) from the Guidestar database on funding levels and budgets for many of the organizations listed in the Encyclopedia.48
The Encyclopedia does not contain information about every Middle Eastern American civil rights advocacy organization. In particular, newer, smaller, or short-lived organizations were unlikely to be included in the database. Even with this selection bias, the sample obtained for this study is significant and includes a large proportion of the organizations working in this arena.
While my methods have produced an extensive amount of data on the field of Middle Eastern American advocacy, my study has several major shortcomings. Perhaps most notably, my discussion of Black Muslim organizations is extremely limited. It goes without saying that there is a deep tradition of civil rights advocacy among Muslim Americans in Black communities. In any discussion of race and Islam, the histories of Black Islamic movements are crucial. The constellation of racial contradictions in motion when discussing American Muslims—many of whom are Black—are examined by scholars like Sherman A. Jackson and Aminah McCloud.49 In order to do justice to the deep history of civil rights work in these communities of Muslim Americans, I would have to write a different book. I touch on these dynamics in several places in the book, but in an unavoidably insufficient way.
In addition, my analysis focuses on the racial issues at work in Islamophobia, and intersectional issues get insufficient attention in my analysis. Gender, sexuality, class, and other axes of difference all operate simultaneously with race. I chose to focus almost exclusively on race because, in my view, it is the axis of inequality that is the most contentious and the most relevant when discussing strategic concerns for anti-Islamophobia advocates. This is especially true when finding ways to develop coalitions among Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American organizations. I discuss some of the gendered and classed aspects of Islamophobia, but my attention to sexuality is wholly inadequate. Again, by focusing my critique on race, my intention is to highlight the intersectional nature of Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination, but no single study could possibly do justice to all of the elements of intersectionality involved in Islamophobia.
Another important limitation in my study comes because of my focus on large advocacy organizations with a national scope. While I argue that this level of analysis is important, I recognize the weaknesses in this approach. In fact, early in the development of my research, I planned to focus on local-level advocacy organizations to avoid the weaknesses associated with “top down” research. I began this project by meeting advocates working in the Detroit area. While there, I came to realize that the local chapters of prominent anti-Islamophobia organizations relied a great deal on the guidance and support of their national headquarters. Furthermore, to describe the historical co-constitution of race and Islamophobia, I quickly realized that I would need to focus on the national level. Race takes on different contours in each local context, but much of the strategic advocacy decisions on dealing with race take place in the national headquarters of advocacy organizations. Many of the advocates I interviewed described how the advocacy field in Detroit differed from that found in Chicago, or New York. Others noted that the Washington, DC, headquarters of organizations like ADC and CAIR, while important in many ways, were not representative of some of the work done in local field offices. I make reference to some of these variations, but it is not possible to describe all of these nuances in a single study. There is a pressing need for more studies, like Nadine Naber’s in San Francisco and Louise Cainkar’s in Chicago, that describe local advocacy fields in rich ethnographic detail.50
Finally, I want to emphasize that my study is in no way an attempt to instruct advocates on their best course of action. I understand that in my role as a scholar I might provide some new context, and I attempt to find new perspectives on old problems. Many advocates described to me how the nature of their work leaves very little time for reflecting on history. I was surprised that several of the advocates I met asked me about the history of their own organizations, because they honestly believed that I would know more than they would. One fact that was clear from early in my work is that there are extraordinary demands on the time of civil rights advocates. It is more than a full-time job just keeping up with the day-to-day cacophony of Islamophobic statements from public leaders, and all too frequent calls for help from people facing discrimination. My greatest hope for this book is that some advocates might find some value in my attempt to get “above the fray” to offer a unique vantage point on the issues that they deal with every day. I cannot give a comprehensive history of each organization I studied, but I intend to show how race intersects with the strategic decisions that many anti-Islamophobia advocates make. Perhaps in some small way this analysis can contribute to a discussion among scholars and advocates on the issues of race and Islamophobia and how they can best be confronted.
Chapter 2 begins by going into further detail on sociological theories of race to show that it is a paradox. Racial identity is both obvious and invisible, and it is both a cause and an effect of Islamophobia. To get to the bottom of this paradox, I use racial formation theory to lead a deeper dive into the relationship between race and civil rights advocacy. This puts into sharp relief the racial dilemma that has frustrated Middle Eastern American advocates for decades: Should advocates describe Islamophobia as racism?
Then, in chapter 3, I present the parallel histories of American racism and Islamophobia in culture, politics, and policy. I begin with the construction of “the Orient” in Western scholarship and discourse. This shows the thread that connects racist stereotypes about Middle Easterners through the early 1900s melodramas around Middle Eastern piracy, the nefarious, cartoonish “oil sheiks” of the mid-1900s, and the menacing specter of “Islamic terrorism” in the 2000s. I juxtapose these stereotypes with a history of racial discrimination in general, explaining how the parallel development of racial ideology and Islamophobia had a profound impact on Middle Eastern American communities throughout the 1900s. I then discuss how present-day policies and practices discriminate against Middle Eastern Americans in an ostensible effort to prevent terrorist attacks. I review the problems of racial profiling, political exclusion, and immigration policies that all serve to reinforce the bigoted stereotype that casts Middle Easterners as “dangerous.”
I then turn to focus squarely on the advocates working to confront Islamophobia. Chapter 4 describes the history and trajectory of six of the most important organizations in the Middle Eastern American advocacy field. By reviewing key moments in the development of these organizations, I show how the racial dilemma has presented a challenge for Middle Eastern American advocates, even from the earliest days of their work in the 1900s. Then, in chapter 5, I describe how Middle Eastern American advocates have crafted varying strategies in an effort to solve the racial dilemma. I find that for a short time in the 1970s and 1980s, some Middle Eastern American advocates used race-conscious strategies, and sought to build durable, transformational coalitions with Black civil rights organizations. By the time 9/11 presented a new crisis, though, advocacy strategies had shifted toward a colorblind approach that eschewed the language of racism. The largest Middle Eastern American advocacy organizations did little coalition work in the early 2000s, even as the federal government led efforts to encourage race-based coalitions among Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American organizations.
Finally, in chapter 6, I conclude by looking toward the future of American civil rights in general, given the persistence of Islamophobia and the seemingly intractable racial dilemma that has confounded Middle Eastern American advocates. I argue that the lack of durable coalitions among Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian American organizations is mainly because of the success of the conservative reaction to the civil rights movements of the 1960s. I close the book by asking whether American civil rights advocates in the years ahead will have to develop new, race-conscious strategies as America becomes a so-called majority-minority nation by the mid-2000s. There can be little doubt that the way that Middle Eastern American advocates have navigated the rapidly shifting terrain of civil rights advocacy over the past forty years will prove to be one of the most crucial case studies illustrating how the United States responds to racism in the post–civil rights era.