LogFAQs > #885395548

Things seem to have only gotten worse for black and Muslim communities since, not the least of in my own city, New York, a supposed bastion of liberalism that has in the past two decades routinely and egregiously violated the civil liberties of its black, Muslim and Latino residents.

To me, the debate about whether Ahmed is “Muslim” or “black” and to which part of him the Irving school system and police department responded misses the point. Firstly, because as some have pointed out, “Muslim” and “black” are not mutually exclusive categories.

Secondly, because the debate fails to recognize that it is only because Muslims have been racialized that most Americans have particular ideas of who one is, and what she or he is supposed to look or act like. As Saher Selod writes, Muslims’ “religious identities have acquired racial meanings associating their bodies with terror and violence resulting in their increased experiences with racism.”

Thirdly, and this is the point I’d like to emphasize, the “what is Ahmed” debate is a distraction from a more urgent question. More than one in four Muslim Americans identify as black, and one in three as Asian or Latino. Why isn’t there more solidarity and cross-movement organizing between those fighting Islamophobia and others battling to bring an end to America’s deeply rooted structural racism, which feeds the school to prison pipeline and mass incarceration?

As Crenshaw explains in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “the term [intersectionality] brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members, but often fail to represent them.” This invisibility currently characterizes the position of black Muslims in their own communities.

Islamohophia actively builds on structural racism, at the very least through the use of its tools (aggressive policing, hyper surveillance). Americans face a web of interlocking subjugations that draw on various configurations of class, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status. Movements and organizations that have operated largely independently from one another need to do a better job of realizing that discrimination rarely operates along one axis, and to organize accordingly. Otherwise, they risk leaving those they are meant to serve “invisible in plain sight.”

One last point: Much of the media’s focus in the Ahmed Mohamed story, and ours in turn, has been on President Obama’s invitation to the teenager to visit the White House, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s encouraging words. Not insignificant acts by any means, least of all I imagine to Ahmed himself, who was stripped of his dignity and rights in front of his whole school.

But the response is also symptomatic of what America is prone to do: turn these kind of stories into a greeting card — “Sorry you were profiled. Know that you are precious.” That’s just not enough anymore. It never was, otherwise we wouldn’t be facing “outrageous” stories again and again.
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I am Kely.
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