Culture, Religion, and the Racialization of Muslims

Although Islamophobia is often portrayed as religious intolerance, and not racism (Love Reference Love2017), religion and culture have been prominent elements in the racializing of Muslims as long ago as fourteenth-century Spain where Muslims and Jews were regarded as essentialized “heathens” (Rana Reference Rana2007). Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the concept of race become “secularized,” moving from a religious foundation to one believed to have a biological basis (Rana Reference Rana2007; Selod and Embrick, Reference Selod and Embrick2013). As Steve Garner and Saher Selod (Reference Garner and Selod2014) write, “the long 19th century of body-fixated race theory is an anomaly in a longer history that evidences various combinations of culture and phenotype being combined to define racial characteristics” (p. 12).

Religion remains tied closely to race as shown in the 2003 Detroit Arab American Study where nearly three-quarters of Christian Arabs identified themselves as White compared to only about half of Muslims surveyed who responded similarly (Baker et al., Reference Baker, Stockton, Howell, Jamal, Lin and Tessler2006). Cultural and religious markers of Muslim identity have been shown to alter the racial status of those who adopt them (Ajrouch and Jamal, Reference Ajrouch and Jamal2007). For example, Muslim women who otherwise may be identified as White may find their racial status altered if they decide to cover their heads (Ajrouch and Kusow, Reference Ajrouch and Kusow2007).

In other contexts, markers of Muslim identity may be used to distinguish an individual who otherwise might be ascribed an African American racial identity. Atiya Husain (Reference Husain2017), for example, describes the experience of an African American Muslim participant who was followed by a police officer when walking home late at night. When the man took off his hood revealing a kufi beneath, the man’s shifting racial identity caused (as he believed) the police officer to drive away. Likewise, Kristine J. Ajrouch and Amaney Jamal (Reference Ajrouch and Jamal2007) depict the ways in which Somali Muslim immigrants in Canada emphasize their religious and cultural identities in order to avoid being identified with the racialized Afro-Caribbean population.

This brief overview suggests that Muslims’ racial identity is defined, in part, by culture and religion and is distinct from a binary White or Black categorization (Cainkar and Selod, Reference Cainkar and Selod2018; Husain Reference Husain2017; Zopf Reference Zopf2018). As Louise Cainkar and Saher Selod (Reference Cainkar and Selod2018) put it, religious and cultural markers such as turbans and veils, or even one’s name, can “provoke a racial response” (p. 170). Although this work has made it clear that culture and religion play a role in the racialization of Muslims, few scholars have addressed the intersection of social class with this process. In what follows, I explore the ways in which social class has influenced the ways that Muslims have been historically incorporated into the racial hierarchy of the United States. These processes illustrate the ideological connection between race and class whereby middle-class identity is linked with Whiteness and poverty is associated with racialized Others (Moss Reference Moss2003; Ortner Reference Ortner2006; Urcuioli Reference Urciuoli1996). For immigrant groups, therefore, the process of becoming “American” is itself racialized as integration requires not just “an embrace of American identity but specifically of White American identity” (Roediger Reference Roediger2005, p. 178). Although social class resources may have provided Muslim immigrants in the United States the capacity for social mobility, such advantages may be disguised by a “model minority” ideology which displaces class features onto culture.

Social Class, Racialization, and the “Model Minority”

Social class has played an integral role in the construction of a Muslim racial identity in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Under the In re Najour case of 1909, for example, those from Syria-Lebanon were granted a legally White status in the United States which made them eligible for citizenship (Haney López Reference Haney López1996). Although this claim on Whiteness was most clearly based on an association with Christianity, Sarah Gualtieri (Reference Gualtieri2009) notes that Syrians later began to rely on contrasts with other racialized groups such as African Americans after recognizing the conditional nature of their civic inclusion. Such contrasts emphasized class factors such as their high levels of education, English proficiency, and position as small business owners (Gualtieri Reference Gualtieri2009). This historical legacy, combined with selective acculturation and high levels of cultural and economic capital, helped establish a “marginal White” status for many Middle Eastern Muslim Americans throughout the twentieth century (Cainkar Reference Cainkar2002; Naber Reference Naber2000) despite being subjected to Orientalizing discourses which blocked their full inclusion into society (Maghbouleh Reference Maghbouleh2017; Said Reference Said1978).

Like other “Arabians,” South Asian Muslims were barred entry to the United States under the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind ruling of 1923 that deemed them as non-White and ineligible for citizenship (Haney López Reference Haney López1996). Yet, after the immigration policy shift of 1965, large numbers of highly-educated South Asian migrants arrived in the United States to help keep pace with the Soviet Union and provide medical staff for the new social programs initiated during the 1960s (Bald et al., Reference Bald, Chatterji, Reddy, Vimalassery, Bald, Chatterji, Reddy and Vimalassery2010). Like many Middle Eastern Muslim Americans, South Asian Muslims leveraged their class position upon arrival to promote social mobility and build positive cultural representations of themselves as “model minorities” (Purkayastha Reference Purkayastha2005). Though this “model minority” status did not fully shield South Asians from the effects of racism, they were able to, in large part, advance their social position through educational advancement and consumption practices facilitated by class resources brought with them from their native countries (Dhingra Reference Dhingra2007, Prashad Reference Prashad2000).

Far from establishing a White identity, the social mobility of these so-called “model minorities” has nonetheless been frequently invoked as a way to distinguish Muslim immigrant groups from other racialized minorities while rarely acknowledging the role of class in this process. This stereotype not only valorizes upwardly-mobile immigrants for overcoming the challenges of migration but chastises African Americans for their seeming inability to move up the social ladder in the same fashion (Prashad Reference Prashad2000). These narratives also lend support to the ideology of meritocracy by presenting the successful immigrant as indisputable evidence that anyone is capable of success in the United States with the right attitude and work ethic (Hochschild Reference Hochschild1996). Previous scholarship has shown that new arrivals often view the United States in meritocratic terms and may use this ideology to both rationalize hardships and justify their success (Kao and Tienda, Reference Kao and Marta1995; Leo Reference Leo2019; Louie Reference Louie2004).

Neglecting the impact of U.S. immigration policy that selected for highly-educated immigrants from South and East Asia and the Middle East, the “model minority” stereotype ultimately promotes attacks on Black culture and family structure while hampering the potential to establish cross-racial unity (Louie Reference Louie2004; Maira Reference Maira2016). In benefitting from their contrasts with other racialized minorities, many immigrant groups have willingly adopted this ideology and contributed to a colorblind ideology that denies the power of racism in society and obscures class inequalities (Chan-Malik Reference Chan-Malik2011; Love Reference Love2017). In the absence of a discourse on class, racial inequalities are frequently explained as cultural or personal deficiencies rather than outcomes of a history of political, economic, and racial injustice (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood, 2014; Skeggs, Reference Skeggs2004).

Although class resources may have helped many Muslim immigrants and their descendants in the United States be viewed as a “model minority,” this status may have been revoked under the War on Terror and the increasingly nativist climate ushered in under the Trump administration (Cainkar and Selod, Reference Cainkar and Selod2018). Furthermore, the increasing numbers of working-class Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim immigrants entering the United States may lack the economic and cultural capital of their predecessors, and therefore fail to attain the same social mobility that their middle- and upper-middle class counterparts had in the past (Dhingra Reference Dhingra2007). Working-class Muslim immigrants are also more susceptible to detention and deportation and likely to be targeted for immigration policing based on visa status or petty criminal violations (Rana Reference Rana2011).

In sum, for many Muslim immigrants throughout the twentieth century, racial ascription has critically involved social class, a factor which has created cleavages between Muslims in the United States and other racialized minorities, specifically African Americans. As the pernicious history of the “model minority” demonstrates, the same class resources which helped many Muslim immigrants attain social mobility also created a fracture with other racialized minorities.

Responding to Racialization

Racial tensions involving Muslim immigrant students were described by teachers at Parkside High as an important issue which occasionally manifested in hallway “bullying” incidents, physical altercations, and online harassment. Such events often involved features of culture and religious identity that were emphasized as a deviation from American norm, thus drawing on an ideology which suggests that Muslims are inherently antagonistic to “Western” culture and therefore unassimilable (Jaffe-Walter Reference Jaffe-Walter2016). During one of my first days at the high school, for example, I waited after school in the library for a student participant. An Afghani girl on a computer accidentally unplugged her earphones while listening to music causing the song to be played loudly throughout the library. Before she had a chance to silence the music, a booming reproach from a male African American student was heard from across the room: “Turn that Arab shit off!” Through his comment, the young man served to police certain areas of the school, demanding that public areas such as the library exclude any features of outsider culture. Additionally, by referring to the Afghani music as “Arab,” the young boy “flattened” the heterogeneity of all Muslim culture, turning it into a recognizable and essentialized Other (Omi and Winant, Reference Omi and Winant1994; Said Reference Said1978). Amidst these experiences, many participants endeavored to manage racial stigma and some articulated critical views of Islamophobia (Maira Reference Maira2010; Marvasti Reference Marvasti2005).

Though integration may have historically been a potential lever for class and racial mobility (Portes and Rumbaut, Reference Portes and Rumbaut2006; Portes and Zhou, Reference Portes and Zhou1993; Waters and Jiménez, Reference Waters and Jiménez2005), many participants felt that their religious affiliation made it hard to “fit in” with other Americans. As Aziz, a seventeen year-old Iraqi refugee who had arrived in Parkside two years prior to this fieldwork, told me, “I want to do it [go to parties, drink alcohol] so badly so I can get along with them and be like, feel like someone American. And at the same time, I feel like that’s not who I am. I’m changing into another person and that’s not what I’ve been raised to do and what I’ve learned from my religion.” Mehdi, an Afghani refugee, felt that his religion conflicted with what he saw as the fundamentally secular values of the United States. “If you’re religious, you’re not going to be in American culture because Americans are too easy about everything and in Islam especially they have their own limits [to what is considered acceptable behavior].” Mehdi spoke disparagingly about other Muslim newcomers who abandoned their identities: “I’ve seen a lot of people who give up everything, and they just become American and they forget about everything. It’s wrong.”

Such narratives demonstrate how participants often saw full integration as being in conflict with their religious and cultural identities as Muslims (Jaffe-Walter Reference Jaffe-Walter2016). Yet even participants who felt that they were guaranteed religious freedom in the United States still felt that their identities as Muslim presented obstacles to inclusion. When asked whether she felt comfortable practicing Islam in the United States, Miriam, an Iraqi woman who arrived two years before the study was conducted replied, “It’s legal for you to practice your religion here, but I think that you feel like you are strange. People look at you like, ‘Why do they do that?’ It makes you want to do it alone. You don’t want anyone to see you.” Responding to the same question, Leila, an outspoken young woman who arrived from Libya two years ago as a refugee, gave the following response:

As these comments demonstrate, participants felt that their cultural and religious identity as Muslims presented an obstruction to full integration into U.S. society. Miriam and Leila, unlike Mehdi, wore headscarves and were likely more visibly racialized than the other youth who participated in this study since, according to Islamophobic ideology, head coverings represent a clear example of Muslim women’s oppression or are evidence of the unwillingness of Muslims to assimilate (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2013; Jaffe-Walter Reference Jaffe-Walter2016). Although women report more instances of discrimination-related stress than do men (Sirin and Fine, Reference Sirin and Fine2008), attacks on headscarves affect Muslim men as well since they portray Muslim culture and family life as essentially patriarchal and oppressive towards women (Al-Saji Reference Al-Saji2010). Notably, all three students found consensus in the belief that their religious obligations and identities as Muslims present a barrier to full inclusion in their new country.

Even those who were less “visibly Muslim” reported experiences of discrimination and racialization. Fatima, a fair-skinned Iraqi refugee who described herself as “not that religious,” spoke fluent English, and did not wear a hijab, was still attuned to the effects of Islamophobia. She described a racist attack suffered by her parents’ friends who were taking English classes at a local church:

When I asked Fatima if that made her angry, she replied, “I’m not one to complain, so I don’t really care if someone is racist against me or if they say something that’s not nice. I tend to just walk away and pretend like it never happened.”

Like Fatima, several students expressed anxiety over rising levels of Islamophobia which coincided with Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency. During the first ten days after Trump was elected, there were 900 reported incidents of hate crimes, and in 40% of those cases Trump’s name was used when victims were attacked (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017). While some students I spoke with shrugged off the rise in Islamophobia coinciding with Trump’s rise, others reported elevated levels of visibility and exclusion. In a classroom conversation the day after Trump’s election, for example, one student said jokingly that he was thinking of returning home to West Africa. Another student sarcastically quipped, “Hurry close the door before Trump comes in!” Leila responded to the election scoffing, “White people are more scared of Trump than we are!” Despite these jokes, one teacher told me that a few students asked her pointedly why Trump “hated them.” “They’re afraid,” she said.

The accounts above demonstrate the ways in which Muslim newcomers are racialized along cultural and religious lines as well as the complex ways in which Muslim youth respond to their racialization through various techniques and strategies to manage stigma (Marvasti Reference Marvasti2005). Several students like Leila utilized a blend of humorous and defiant strategies to deflect and refute mischaracterization of Muslims. Other youth utilized an “educational” strategy of stigma management such as Sharif, who encouraged me to visit his mosque as Ramadan approached (Marvasti Reference Marvasti2005). After he told me that “many people come to speak with the Imam there—news crews came one time,” I responded, “Wow, that is a lot of attention.” Nodding, he replied, “It’s important to teach people about Islam so that they aren’t learning about it from the wrong people… like Trump.” Unlike other youth, the comments made by Sharif suggest that Islamophobia can be “corrected” through teaching others about Islam.

Several students went beyond managing stigma, however, and incorporated what Sunaina Maira (Reference Maira2010) calls “dissenting citizenship,” a penetrating critique of power imbalances which often conflict with the official state politics. For example, when Leila remarked that “White people are more scared of Trump than we are,” she takes aim at the notion that marginalized groups cannot stand up for themselves without the help of the White majority (Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988). Likewise, Miriam picked up on the contradiction between the “legal” protection to practice Islam in the United States, and the feeling that she wanted “to do it alone.” Such “racial loopholes” demonstrate the limits to multiculturalism and participants’ critical awareness of inequality in the United States (Jackson Reference Jackson, Esposito and Khan2010; Maghbouleh Reference Maghbouleh2017).

My interactions with these students demonstrate the ways in which Muslim newcomers experience racialization along cultural and religious lines and respond to their racialization through varied techniques that manage racial stigma and develop critiques of U.S. society. Such findings further highlight the ways in which racial identity is not simply ascribed in a top-down fashion but actively contested and negotiated by individuals (Bashi Treitler Reference Bashi Treitler2013; Omi and Winant, Reference Omi and Winant1994).

The following section furthers this discussion by situating participants’ views of their own racialization vis-à-vis African Americans. Their comments evince a racial ideology which links African Americans to poverty and deviance and Whiteness to affluence and social mobility (Ortner Reference Ortner2006; Urcuioli Reference Urciuoli1996). Although social class factors underlie many of their experiences, most participants displaced class inequalities onto cultural features, while several newcomers more explicitly associated social class with racialization. These findings point to the need to consider class in the process of racialization and the ways in which racialized minorities relate their own experiences to other racial groupings.

Class, Culture, and Racializing Discourse

In discussing relations between African Americans and Muslim immigrant youth, several teachers mentioned incidents in which African American students called Muslim immigrant students “terrorists” as well as a brawl in a Parkside neighborhood which involved weapons and police intervention. As an administrator thoughtfully explained, “What happens with an oppressed group is, another oppressed group that’s been around longer might actually have conflict with them.” In referring to numerous negative comments about African Americans made by her Muslim students, one teacher said that “they [Muslim immigrant youth] don’t come here with a very high view of African Americans to begin with.”

In the comments made by several participants, class differences were displaced onto race and culture and often interpreted as cultural deficits rather than social inequalities. Although nearly all participants’ experiences with African Americans were in low-income, segregated neighborhoods, such disparities were rarely emphasized when participants discussed their interactions with African Americans whom they frequently depicted as frightening and aggressive Others. For example, several students described the negative perceptions of African Americans they had after being resettled in neighborhoods on Parkside’s North end, an area inhabited largely by low-income African Americans. Sadiq, an Iraqi refugee and graduate of Parkside High, compared his first neighborhood unfavorably with the rest of the city due to its racial makeup. “It’s okay. But it’s a lot of Black people so… it’s not a good example.” Sara, Miriam’s sister and graduate of Parkside High, described her first neighborhood in the following way:

Other participants commented on the difficulties that they had “getting along” with African Americans in their neighborhoods and in school. Tariq, a nineteen year-old Iraqi refugee who spent most of his childhood in Egypt before being resettled in Parkside in 2014, told me bluntly, “I’m not trying to be racist, but the Black people are bad. I mean, not all of them… but most of them, they don’t like to communicate with Arabs. I don’t know why.” He added that his opinions came “from experience” living on the North end of Parkside. Sharif, too, commented that he couldn’t make friends with his African American neighbors because “they were always yelling and fighting.”

Another example of a racializing narrative directed at African Americans came from Salim, a Bangladeshi immigrant whose family came to Parkside in 2012 looking for “better opportunities.” He commented on what he felt were the differences between “groups of Black people” such as African Americans and immigrants with dark complexions whom he also saw as Black (though himself not a member of either group):

In these cases, participants neglected class factors and instead couched their negative experiences with African Americans in cultural terms (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2005). In contrast to the youth above, comments made by other respondents reflected a nascent recognition of class inequality as they explicitly linked class disparities and racialization.

For example, one day during class I asked Mahmoud, whose comments about Donald Trump were mentioned in the preceding section, about his job working as a short-order cook. He complained exasperatedly, “I do everything. Nobody helps me,” he said. “Do you get paid well at least?” I asked. Mahmoud replied, “I get some tips, but only White people give me tips. Black people never tip me. And sometimes Black men come in and start asking for money. I tell them that I’m just working, but they start yelling and cursing.” Karim, an Iraqi refugee who spent six years in Syria before arriving in New York State, offered similar comments which linked economic deprivation to racial inequality. When asked whether Muslim immigrants get along with African Americans, he said:

Ibrahim, an Iraqi refugee who arrived in the United States eighteen months prior to our meeting after fleeing to Jordan for three years, also drew an association between class inequality and racialization. Like Karim and Mahmoud, Ibrahim related issues of class inequality to negatively perceived cultural characteristics among African Americans. One day at the end of class, we began to chat about the different places in Parkside. I asked him about his neighborhood and he excitedly told me that he had just moved to a new neighborhood. Like many newcomers, he had shared a small apartment with his family on the North side of Parkside. “We had problems there… the Blacks didn’t like us; they were always fighting. I didn’t like it,” he said about his former neighborhood. With more secure income coming in from the small restaurant owned and operated by his father, his family sought to move to a more diverse working- and middle-class area in Southern Parkside. I asked him how he liked it and he responded with a smile, “Oh my new neighborhood is better. The Black people there have more money, and they get along with immigrants.”

In many ways, the comments made by participants echo a long history of racialized immigrants adopting anti-Black attitudes (Bashi Treitler Reference Bashi Treitler2013; Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995; Roediger Reference Roediger2005). As Toni Morrison (Reference Morrison1993) writes, “the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African Americans” (p. 57). However, these narratives also illustrate the relationship between social class and the process of racialization. For example, while class resources have frequently been used as a means to mitigate racialization for immigrants in the U.S. (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998; Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995; Roediger Reference Roediger2005), many participants failed to account for class in their criticisms of African Americans despite the fact that their experiences with African Americans were in largely low-income, segregated neighborhoods. In the absence of a class discourse, participants instead criticized African Americans through the lens of culture. The tendency to implement individual or cultural explanations at the expense of a class discourse is unsurprising given previous scholarship which has demonstrated that new arrivals often view the opportunity structure of the United States as open and meritocratic (Kao and Tienda, Reference Kao and Marta1995; Leo Reference Leo2019; Louie Reference Louie2004). Such ideologies neglect class inequality and may draw on the “model minority” stereotype discussed above which suggests that social mobility and integration is possible for those who put forth effort and diligence (Dhingra Reference Dhingra2007; Prashad Reference Prashad2000). From this view, the failure to achieve social mobility can only be seen as a result of individual or cultural deficiency.

In contrast, Karim, Ibrahim, and Mahmoud more clearly associate racialization and class inequality. Through this lens, poverty and segregation are envisioned as features of the racialized underclass, yet class mobility is envisioned as one way in which racial position is mitigated (Ortner Reference Ortner2006; Urcuioli Reference Urciuoli1996). Thus, according to these youth, African Americans were less threatening to participants when they had more wealth, education, and were more integrated with the White population of Parkside. These comments illustrate the close relationship between race and class. Or as Sherry Ortner (Reference Ortner2006) puts it, “racial and ethnic categories are already class categories” (p. 73). Despite this nascent recognition of class, the comments made by these three youth can still be seen as perpetuating a form of racism insofar as assimilating to Whiteness— “living with” or “act[ing] like White people” as Karim put it—is viewed as a prerequisite to social mobility (Moss Reference Moss2003).

In spite of the racializing attitudes towards African Americans expressed above, comments made by several participants pointed to the potential for establishing cross-racial solidarity between Muslim newcomers and African Americans. It is this topic which is explored in the following section.

Cross-racial Solidarity in a Colorblind Era

In contrast to the racializing narratives discussed above, several Muslim newcomer participants expressed moments of solidarity with African Americans, thus calling attention to shared experiences of racism and exclusion as well as the complicated relationship between African American Muslims and Muslim immigrants (Jackson Reference Jackson2005). These comments further illustrate the ways in which Muslim newcomers both recognize their non-White status and highlight the potential to establish cross-racial alliances despite significant barriers (Maira Reference Maira2016).

Moments of solidarity between participants in this study and African Americans often rested on the belief that both groups were victimized by racism at the hands of Whites. For example, when asked whether African Americans and Muslim newcomers get along, Muhammed, a newly-settled Iraqi refugee, responded hesitantly “sometimes,” but added that the experiences African Americans are similar to immigrants because they both experienced racism from “White people.” Amir, a Sudanese refugee, expressed a similar sentiment after attending an event in the library in honor of Black History Month. “It is good for them [African Americans] to have the history month,” he said. When I asked him if immigrants have similarities with African Americans he paused and then said, “I don’t know. I don’t feel like it’s my country. Maybe that is similar to what they feel.” Even Salim, who had criticized African Americans for their unwillingness to talk to immigrants, later told me that he had tried to make more of an effort to be friendly with Blacks in his neighborhood. “Over time,” he said, “my mind has changed a little.” Such comments highlight the recognition by participants that racialized minorities share the common burden of discrimination and exclusion.

A poignant example of solidarity between Muslim youth and African Americans was displayed during a school play put on by students several months into my fieldwork. During the play, immigrants, refugees, and African American youth recounted powerful narratives involving bullying, racial profiling, and discrimination. One skit depicted a Puerto Rican girl shown to be pregnant in a hospital. As nurses surrounded her asking questions, the girl exasperatedly tried to answer in Spanish. One nurse turned to the other and remarked, “She’s been here five years and still doesn’t know English?” Later in the play, a young Sudanese woman came on stage speaking rhetorically to the crowd: “Mom, why did daddy shave his beard? Is it okay to be religious here? Why do they call me a terrorist?” In a final scene, an African American girl described an incident in which her family was pulled over by Parkside police, taken out of their vehicle, and angrily told to show their hands. Her younger brother, suffering from a physical disability, did not want to take his deformed hand out of his pocket. The cops became increasingly angry and pointed their weapons at him before he finally showed his hands.

The interwoven narratives in the play created spaces of solidarity between Muslim youth and African Americans by calling attention to the practices of exclusion and Othering to which both groups are subjected. As Maira (Reference Maira2016) notes, the adoption of civil rights language by Muslim American activists has provided a space for cross-racial dialogue which understands the experiences of Muslims and African Americans as part of a larger history of race-based exclusion in the United States. The narratives of the play directly allude to such practices by suggesting that racialized minorities may not feel, as Amir put it, like the United States is “my country.” These sentiments further illustrate the long-standing association between integration, belonging, and Whiteness in the United States (Jackson Reference Jackson, Esposito and Khan2010).

Several students also seemed to find moments of solidarity with African American Muslims through their common religious affiliation. For example, Ali, a newly-arrived student from Chad, described his surprise when he found American Muslims at the mosque near his home. “People used to say to me, ‘In the United States, people don’t like Muslims’… but when I came here there’s like American Muslims and immigrant Muslims. Everyone is going on their way and doing what they want to do.” During one history period where students were given the opportunity to read a book of their choice, I noticed that Jamal, a Yemeni student who had been living in the United States for two years, was reading A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. He caught me looking at him and I asked, “How do you like that book?” Jamal, who I had discovered over the course of my fieldwork to be highly interested in U.S. history—even going so far as to criticize the War in Iraq to an unsympathetic teacher—replied with a hint of surprise and excitement, “Did you know about the ‘Nation of Islam’? There are lots of Black people who are Muslim!” Given what I knew about Jamal’s interest in history and politics, his response suggested sincere enthusiasm to learn about the role of Islam in the United States, especially regarding a group actively involved in social justice movements throughout the twentieth century.

Although the above comments suggest that Islam may provide a link between African Americans and Muslim immigrants, cross-racial unity based on a common religious identity may be difficult to build. While Islam in the African American community played a liberatory role in the twentieth century and continues to be a source of anti-racist activist movements (Aidi and Marable, Reference Aidi and Manning2006), schisms began to emerge as post-1965 well-educated groups of Muslim immigrants began to wrest power from the Black Muslim elite (Jackson Reference Jackson2005). Political divisions remain difficult to bridge as Muslim immigrant activists often direct their focus on issues of U.S. imperialism abroad, while African American activists emphasize domestic issues such as police brutality and incarceration (Maira Reference Maira2016, Turner Reference Turner1997). Additionally, as Erik Love (Reference Love2017) notes, many Muslim advocacy groups have reframed their positions in terms of religious, not racial, discrimination since 9/11. Such an approach reduces complex issues of racism and exclusion to religious intolerance that can be combatted through interfaith dialogue (Maira Reference Maira2016). This “faithwashing” coincides with the growth of a universalist version of Islamic which is decidedly postracial as well as the spread of “colorblind ideology” which denies the salience of race and existence of racism in society (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2006; Maira Reference Maira2016; Omi and Winant, Reference Omi and Winant1994). These factors have caused what Sherman Jackson (Reference Jackson, Esposito and Khan2010) refers to as “racial agnosia” among Muslim immigrants. And as Vijay Prashad (Reference Prashad2000) notes, contemporary Muslim populations in the United States are even less likely to participate in social movements involving racial activism due to their precarious social position.

These factors pose significant challenges for building cross-racial coalitions while also exposing the continuing durability of a racial hierarchy which traps African Americans at the bottom. As demonstrated above, the ongoing tendency for immigrant groups seeking to distance themselves from African Americans may further erode any potential for racial solidarity (Bashi Treitler Reference Bashi Treitler2013; Haney López Reference Haney López1996; Roediger Reference Roediger2005). Muslim immigrants have a vested interest in maintaining the racial hierarchy as their ascendance may depend on keeping African Americans at the bottom (Tehranian Reference Tehranian2008). As Vilna Bashi Treitler (Reference Bashi Treitler2013) writes, “A ladder with no bottom rung cannot be climbed” (p. 169). Furthermore, the allure of the “model minority” narrative may continue to provide a means for Muslim immigrants and their descendants to potentially heighten their social standing without acknowledging the class resources which have played a role in their success (Dhingra Reference Dhingra2007). Ultimately, the absence of a discourse on class inequality and support for meritocratic ideology both advance a view of success and failure which result solely from individual and cultural characteristics. As discussed above, the promotion of these narratives has often come at a cost to African Americans who are seen as the “real foreigners” who have failed to assimilate to the norms of the White middle-class (Dhingra Reference Dhingra2007, p. 122).

Indeed, despite the potential for solidarity discussed in this section, moments of racial solidarity at Parkside High were rare as Muslim newcomer youth hardly seemed to intermingle with African Americans in school. Throughout the entire school year, I rarely saw African Americans and Muslim students talking with each other or with White students. Mahmoud summed up the liminal, racialized position which he and other Muslim newcomers seemed to occupy: “Black and White people stay apart mostly [in school]—and we’re just separate from everybody.”