American Muslim Women

Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah

Jamillah Karim

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814748282
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

African American Muslims and South Asian Muslim immigrants are two of the largest ethnic Muslim groups in the U.S. Yet there are few sites in which African Americans and South Asian immigrants come together, and South Asians are often held up as a "model minority" against African Americans. However, the American ummah, or American Muslim community, stands as a unique site for interethnic solidarity in a time of increased tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants.

This ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideals of racial harmony and equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities. The volume focuses on women who, due to gender inequalities, are sometimes more likely to move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaces and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice.

American Muslim Women explores the relationships and sometimes alliances between African Americans and South Asian immigrants, drawing on interviews with a diverse group of women from these two communities. Karim investigates what it means to negotiate religious sisterhood against America's race and class hierarchies, and how those in the American Muslim community both construct and cross ethnic boundaries.

American Muslim Women reveals the ways in which multiple forms of identity frame the American Muslim experience, in some moments reinforcing ethnic boundaries, and at other times, resisting them.

1

African American and Immigrant Relations

Between Inequality and Global Flows

Safiyyah, a Muslim woman who lives on the South Side of Chicago, calls herself black, as do most of the others who live in her neighborhood. But Safiyyah dresses her little girl in shalwar kamiz (traditional South Asian garments) and dreams of traveling to Pakistan, a place of belonging and roots for Safiyyah. Her real roots, however, reflect a painful discovery. Safiyyah grew up in a college town in the United States thinking that she was a dark Pakistani but later learned that her South Asian family adopted her in Tanzania before migrating to the United States. Now Safiyyah knows that her biological parents were East African. It makes sense now that when she looked at the faces of the African American women at her local mosque, she sensed a mysterious kinship. Looking like an African American woman in the United States, Safiyyah experiences the racism that comes with brown skin, and she now claims membership in an African American community in Chicago, resisting the isolation and second-class treatment that she encountered in her South Asian family and community. These events explain why Safiyyah lives on the South Side of Chicago but longs to find her place in Pakistan.

Safiyyah’s narrative is both powerful and provocative. I would have never imagined meeting a woman who would so strikingly challenge the categories, African American Muslim and South Asian Muslim, with which I began my research. Safiyyah claims both ethnic identities yet slips out of both at the same time. She is not a South Asian immigrant or the American-born daughter of South Asian immigrants or the descendant of African slaves. Instead, she is biologically East African. Transcending the boundaries of my research, Safiyyah’s multiple identities forced me to imagine outside the usual ethnic boxes. How do I define Safiyyah’s ethnicity? Not her language (English), her skin color (brown), her neighborhood (Chicago’s South Side), or her kinship (East African and South Asian) can fully describe her.

Safiyyah’s narrative illustrates the unexpected, fluid forms of identity that arise from global migration. The movement of ethnic identities across the globe create new possibilities, but not without the emergence of new inequalities. Migrations to the United States have created new configurations of race and ethnicity. With this “mix of diverse newcomers,” increasingly from Asia and Latin America, ethnic identities and group boundaries have been recast,¹ and it is this change that frames how the American ummah emerges as a space in which African Americans and immigrants negotiate their ethnic identities and sometimes cross the group boundaries that separate them. The possibilities for ethnic solidarity in the American ummah must be understood against the backdrop of new race relations in America, redefined by the movement of Asians and Latinos into the United States.

The streams of migration that enable unpredictable ethnic genealogies are labeled by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as global flows, “flows of persons, technologies, finance, information, and ideology.” These growing flows inspire imagination, says Appadurai, prompting individuals like Safiyyah to imagine themselves in new places. Various ethnic and class groups dream and then move across the landscapes of a dynamic world, creating “images of flow and uncertainty.” Migrants move for various reasons, but for many, the hope is to make true “dreams of wealth, respectability, and autonomy.”² Many arrive here believing in American ideals of democracy. But how do we account for a landscape that seems to steal dreams before they are imagined?

Describing Chicago, an African American imam spoke of the city’s abundant resources that “mysteriously” escape a substantial segment of the African American population. The enthusiasm in his voice plummeted to a sullen low: “Sometimes I feel like this place is cursed.” During the Great Migration, African Americans left cities like Macon and Memphis to settle in cities like Camden and Chicago. Now these lands of promise appear unpromising. Did their migration create dreams of wealth, respectability, and autonomy? Not always.

The American social landscape is one of dreams achieved and dreams deferred. Global flows—particularly flows of people—do bring promise to American shores. Just as mass migrations have created unexpected possibilities in the global age, they have radically remade the ethnic landscape in the United States. In particular, mass migrations challenge the historical color line, the arbitrary division that confines racial identity options to black or white. Immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas complicate the effort to fit people into narrow binaries. Representing a vast array of linguistic, regional, class, cultural, and religious identities, immigrants challenge Americans to think beyond black and white. At the same time, however, the mass migrations to the United States, camouflaged as multiracial democracy, have expanded racial classifications, refining and reorganizing differences to maintain white privilege. For example, “white” has become “white, not Hispanic.” Hence, dreams of ending white supremacy remain dreams deferred.

Even as mass migrations to the United States defy traditional categories of race, new categories are constantly constructed that reduce immigrants to arbitrary racial and ethnic groupings. Immigrants, primarily European, coming to the United States before 1965, were classified by nationality, even though they did not define themselves in such broad terms before arriving in the United States. Here, however, the distinctions that shaped their identities in their native lands, such as class, language, and region, were subsumed under a common nationality or ethnicity. Then with the post-1965 waves of immigration, ethnic categories broadened to include groups marked by increasingly greater differences, groups that did not even share national borders. The category “Asian American,” for example, includes Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Vietnamese, and Cambodian immigrants. Society literally creates new ethnic categories when the census and other public policy studies and programs lump distinct groups under a single panethnic label.³ Both race and ethnicity are constructed concepts that reduce Americans to boxes: Asian or Pacific Islander; Black, Not Hispanic; Hispanic; Native American or Native Alaskan; White, Not Hispanic; Other.

Therefore, as much as we may celebrate that migrations across borders have contested old categories, they also have facilitated the creation of new ethnic boundaries. Like race, ethnicity is an artificial, not a fixed, marker of human difference. In certain contexts, ethnic identities form in response to social, political, and economic structures.⁴ In response to anti-immigrant racism, newcomers claim ethnic identities imposed from the outside, identities like Asian American and Hispanic American. Despite the diversity of subgroups contained in these panethnic identities, immigrants appropriate these ethnic labels to form extensive ethnic mobilizations against the racism and discrimination experienced in their new context.⁵

Immigrant ethnic identities form in relation not only to other immigrants who share experiences of marginalization but also to established residents, especially African Americans and Anglos.⁶ Once in the United States, immigrants must negotiate a U.S. racial order that privileges whiteness as superior and opposite to blackness. Although complicated by the growing number of Asian and Latino migrants, this black–white racial binary has not gone away but persists as indicated by racialized residential patterns. The majority of suburban whites, 86 percent, reside in neighborhoods in which African Americans make up less than 1 percent of the population.⁷ As a result, the ethnic identities of non-European immigrants are racialized in relation to long-established categories. In the 1970s, the U.S. Census classified Asian Indians as white, a classification that was later repealed, indicating the arbitrary nature of race and ethnicity.⁸ Today, non-European immigrants are generally racialized as non-white; African and Caribbean immigrants are racialized as black; and in contrast, European immigrants are racialized as white.

The racialized ethnic identity of most non-European immigrants can be described as “an intermediate racialized location somewhere between white and Black.”⁹ At the same time that Asian and Latino immigrants cannot become white, they refuse to identify as black. In response to a racial hierarchy that demonizes blackness, nonwhite immigrants construct ethnic boundaries that separate them from African Americans. Even African and Caribbean immigrants make clear their difference from black Americans. Since they are easily racialized as black, most emphasize their ethnic identity, Nigerian or Trinidadian, to avoid racial categories.¹⁰ Second-generation Caribbean Americans are more likely than their parents to assert their racial identity as black. Growing up in the United States, they feel that their lives have been shaped by racial discrimination in ways similar to the experiences of African American youths. However, a substantial number of second-generation Caribbean Americans—more than one-third of respondents in one study—find it important to distinguish themselves as “second-generation nonblack Americans.”¹¹

Anthropologist Mary Waters described how the color line still functions in an era of increased nonwhite migrations: “To erase the color line we must move beyond both cultural and vulgar racism, preventing new Americans from accepting the color line in order to cross over to its advantageous side.”¹² The pursuit for acceptance causes immigrants to differentiate themselves from blacks and also drives them to perceive and treat blacks with a scorn taught by the dominant racial discourse. It is this reality, difficult to escape, that moved Toni Morrison to write that “racial contempt” of African Americans is the “rite of passage into American culture.” “Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete.”¹³

The irony of this learned racism against African Americans is that immigrants accept it even as they themselves are subjected to forms of racial discrimination as nonwhites.¹⁴ South Asian immigrants have been the victims of fatal beatings, police brutality, and labor exploitation. One white teenaged male told the press after the fatal beating of a South Asian, “It’s white people against the Hindus.” Another stated, “I just don’t like them, I can’t stand them.” It is this kind of anti-immigrant racism—or, rather, the fear of it—that impels South Asians to condone antiblack racism. This fear of not being accepted, of not making it in America, always looms and lingers. Why associate with the native underclass when one’s immigrant status already threatens one’s assimilation? The hierarchies of discrimination embedded in white supremacy—African Americans are treated differently from Latinos who are treated differently from Asian Indians who are treated differently from West Indians—make it possible for those who experience one form of racism to discriminate against others. South Asian immigrants imagine it to be “far better to be acknowledged as having some value than to be denied any at all.”¹⁵

There is certainly an appeal to being imagined better than those most systematically vilified and demonized in American culture. Nothing illustrates this better than the way in which South Asian immigrants have claimed the label of “model minority,” which essentially means that “we are better than blacks and Hispanics, so don’t associate us with them.” By claiming this label, South Asian immigrants participate in a form of “inferential” antiblack racism. The model minority concept implies that African Americans are a problem minority and that they are to be blamed for the high rates of unemployment, incarceration, HIV, and other harms ravaging poor African American communities. Accommodating this form of antiblack racism comes easily, therefore, because it wears the veil of innocence. Celebrating Asians’ stunning success seems harmless, but not when it is done at the expense of African Americans. Asian achievement, specifically in education and income, has been used against African Americans to bolster fictions of African American incompetence and laziness. “Look at the Asians, every black activist was told; they seem to make it on their own; what’s wrong with your people? Can’t they also make it?”¹⁶

The idea of the model minority was conceived as part of a state agenda and therefore demonstrates how boundaries between Asians and African Americans are developed in wider political and socioeconomic contexts. In a time of neoliberalism and conservative domestic policy advocated by the Republican Party, the state used Asians’ success to back its claims of American egalitarianism. By the 1970s, state policy favored a colorblind society. Policy experts insisted that race was no longer a barrier to achievement and that individual merit should be the sole basis of decisions related to admissions, hiring, or promotions. Every racial and ethnic group could succeed in the United States. Because of the success of some immigrants, America could claim to be a truly multicultural society that celebrated cultural differences. Asians do better than other ethnic minorities, it was said, because they have higher cultural values.¹⁷

But Asians, and in particular South Asians, do better because the majority of them came to the United States already prepared to do well. The 1965 immigration act favored highly skilled immigrants, and for most Asians, it was their skills, not their culture or family, that granted them initial entry into the United States. While the credit for the Asians’ success should have been attributed to the skills that they acquired in their native lands, it instead was attributed to their ability to study, work hard, and succeed in a new land despite the odds against them. Their success as minorities provided the perfect basis for claiming that racism had ended and that affirmative action programs should be abandoned. This view suggested that those who had not succeeded, that is, African Americans, had not because of their own failures. In contrast to African Americans, successful Asian immigrants were declared exemplary, a model minority.¹⁸

Those who used this claim overlooked the fact that the majority of South Asian immigrants were “the cream of the bourgeois South Asian crop.” Of course they did better because they came to the United States already privileged, compared with African Americans who were struggling to overcome generations of structural racism. But rather than address these inequalities through public policy, the state minimized federal policies that would ensure access to quality education, housing, and health care across class lines, and it did so soon after African Americans had fought a formidable civil rights battle. The state’s lack of accountability for economic justice has sustained forms of structural racism, since it limits policies to overcome past and present discrimination against African Americans. Instead, the state has promoted other policies and ideologies, such as multiculturalism, color blindness, and the model minority, in order to create the image of a plural society that gives everyone an equal opportunity to advance.¹⁹

The problem with “color-blind justice” is that it conceals unequal power relations. What kind of justice declares race obsolete when race-based inequalities from the past continue to be perpetuated in the present?²⁰ Multiculturalism often disguises these power incongruities under the cloak of “cultural celebration.”²¹ But ethnic lines in America signify both difference and cultural difference embedded in unequal power relations. While these state ideologies are often embraced to create a cultural discourse inclusive of people of all colors, they displace the struggle to directly resist white privilege and power. For this reason, Vijay Prashad asserts that “multiculturalism emerged as the liberal doctrine to undercut the radicalism of antiracism.”²² It is one thing to commit to a plural society, but it is quite another to commit to “the struggle to abolish the idea of racial hierarchy.”²³ Because multiculturalism, color blindness, and the model minority image work together to conceal asymmetries in power and privilege, Prashad refers to them as three interconnected dimensions of the “new racism.” The new racism represents a recasting of inequalities in an era of increased opportunities.²⁴

Like the old, the new racism spirals into a vicious assault on African Americans. Because many nonwhite immigrants have done well financially, they can easily accept new forms of antiblack racism. Many affluent Asians, Latinos, and other immigrants acknowledge past racism against African Americans but believe that nothing is preventing them from doing well now. With racism now in the past, many feel that now African Americans can “study, go into business, and get ahead like everyone else, and if they did not it was their own fault.” The tragedy of this perspective is that it reduces racism to its more overt manifestations: legal segregation, hate speech, prejudice, stereotypes, and violence. Because civic society now opposes such blatant forms of racial hatred, successful ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• introduction
• 1 African American and Immigrant Relations
• 2 Race, Class, and Residence in the Chicago Ummah
• 3 Across Ethnic Boundaries
• 4 Negotiating an American Muslim Identity after September 11
• 5 Negotiating Gender Lines
• 6 Negotiating Sisterhood, Gender, and Generation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index
• About the Author