Fighting a war on two fronts! Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry.”
(Kameelah Rashad, University of Pennsylvania)
Yup, you know it is true! Or, why would Somali Muslims, for example, want to build their own mosques in a community where the Arab Muslims already had one?
Also, according to The Atlantic there is a split between immigrant Muslims (many black) and the long-established (well-off) Arabs in America. The tension within the ‘community’ burst in to full-flower, we are told, at a December Muslim conference in Toronto.
The article is a bit disjointed (or maybe it is me!). Or, could that be because the author can’t quite present the politically-incorrect information in a straightforward manner?
[BTW, when you have a few minutes look around at the many historical reports about how light-skinned Arab Muslims enslaved Africans for over a thousand years.]
Here are a few snips of Emma Green’s article at The Atlantic (emphasis is mine):
Muslim Americans Are United by Trump—and Divided by Race
When weary Muslims gathered in Toronto in December for an annual retreat, marking the end of a tumultuous U.S. election year, they probably didn’t expect the event to turn into a referendum on racial tensions within the American Muslim community. But it did.
[….]
Even though slightly less than one-third of American Muslims are black, according to Pew Research Center, American Muslims are most often represented in the media as Arab or South Asian immigrants. The distinction between the African-American Muslim experience and that of their immigrant co-religionists has long been a source of racial tension in the Muslim community, but since the election, things have gotten both better and worse. While some Muslims seem to be paying more attention to racism because of Donald Trump, others fear that any sign of internal division is dangerous for Muslims in a time of increased hostility.
While the Toronto conference was upsetting, Evans [Ubaydullah Evans, the executive director of the American Learning Institute for Muslims, who is black] said, he doesn’t think it’s representative of the biggest racial problems in the American Muslim community. White racism toward black people is “not the kind of racism that circumscribes my life as an American Muslim,” he told me. “It’s the social racism I experience from people of Arab descent, of Southeast Asian descent. This is the racism no one is talking about.” [Wait! I thought only white Europeans could be racists! Arabs too?—ed]
[….]
The wave of immigration that shaped today’s American Muslim population began in the 1960s, after Congress lifted previous race-based restrictions on immigration. In many ways, this surge was directly connected to the work of black Muslims and others involved in the civil-rights movement: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed far greater numbers of people from Asia and Africa to emigrate to the U.S. As of 2014, an estimated 61 percent of Muslims were immigrants, according to Pew, and another 17 percent were the children of immigrants. Many of the perceived racial tensions among Muslims come from conflicts between these immigrant communities and non-immigrants, who are often black.
[….]
“Immigrant Muslims had a convenient comfort zone,” said Omar Suleiman, an imam based in Dallas with a large online following. As each new immigrant community established its own mosques and community centers, portions of the Muslim American population became segregated by ethnicity and income.
For non-black Muslims who grew up in the suburbs, attended private schools, and rarely encountered black Muslims in their mosques, it’s easy “to internalize many of the poisonous notions about the black community that … diminish the pain of those communities,” he said.
“I think a lot of African American Muslims see a hypocrisy sometimes with immigrant Muslims,” said Saba Maroof, a Muslim psychiatrist with a South Asian background who lives in Michigan. “We say that Muslims are all equal in the eyes of God, that racism doesn’t exist in Islam.” And yet, cases of overt racism aren’t uncommon, like when South Asian or Arab immigrant parents don’t want their kids to marry black Muslims. “That happened in my family,” she said.
[….]
Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry,” Rashad [Kameelah Rashad, a black Muslim chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania] said. But “if I have to contend with anti-Muslim bigotry outside of the Muslim community, and within my own community, I’m having to push back on anti-black racism, I’m kind of fighting a war on two fronts.”
There is much more, continue reading here.
Melting pot myth exploded!
So, not only do we have a lack of assimilation among the many ethnic and religious groups we are admitting to the US, we obviously have it within Islam in America too!
