Yes, I have high expectations when it comes to African Americans and Islamophobia. I do not expect black Americans, who experience hate crimes more than any other group in this country, to turn around and treat with contempt another group that does not look like the white majority. Further, I would hope that African Americans, painfully aware of how the dominant media has historically vilified black people in this country and around the world, would see through the lies, biases, and distortions of the media and of racist individuals when it comes to Islam and Muslims, here in America and abroad. Realistically, however, as we know from Ben Carson’s Islamophobic comments, the high standards to which I hold black Americans do not always hold.

As a Black-American Muslim who feels deeply connected to both the Black and Muslim communities, there is a perspective that I want to share from my personal experiences that I know are not uniquely mine, but also not widely shared.

Reports of hate crimes against Muslims in America are rising following the horrific Paris and San Bernardino attacks. Islamophobia is real and it is serious. Muslims all over are speaking out in different ways. Muslims are demanding hateful rhetoric from the likes of Trump to be condemned and for it to stop. But let’s be clear, it didn’t begin with Trump; and it didn’t begin with 9/11. Islamophobia is a symptom of a larger problem that exists in America

Scholars and experts on Islam in America have drawn upon the analytical framework of critical race theory to explore the “othering” and racialization of Muslims since 9/11. The “us versus them” binary that posits Muslims as the foreign “other” ignores the long history of Muslim in North America, which predates the Declaration of Independence. This binary erases Black American Muslims whose Muslim identity is homegrown, with few ties to trans-national ethnic networks. Black Muslims have critiqued National Muslim organizations that tend to privilege the immigrant and first and second generation American Muslim experiences, as well as trans-national issues.

Trump's anti-Muslim sentiments also caused Rashad, who is married and also a mother, think of her family - especially her son. She called it her "Momma Bear" mode, adding in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and Trump's anti-Muslim sentiment, she worries about her son's life chances. "We are caught in the middle of the really intense discussion around the value of black life and the value of black Muslim lives," she said.

Jackson suggests Trump's statement creates a shift of sorts.

"It means fundamentally that we have moved from citizenship as a status that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, to some other criterion that does discriminate on that basis. This renders some Americans 'more American' than others, more entitled to Constitutional protections than others, based purely on their religion," he said

I was raised to believe that being Muslim comes before everything else, and so I never thought much of the anti-Black comments that would come from my non-Black peers at the mosque. I didn’t question why our mosques in Boston were segregated by ethnic and racial backgrounds.  The casual throwing around of the N-word from Desi and Arab teens did not bother me. The stories that my Desi and Arab friends told me when we giggled about future husbands, when they’d casually say, “My family would never allow me to marry a Black person” — none of these experiences really fazed me. I mean, we were all Muslim, right? What does it matter that the only time Black Muslims were ever talked about was either Bilal (RA) or Malcolm X?

And others openly wondered how the world might have reacted to Mohamed’s story if he had been black.

But Mohamed’s racial identity is as complex as the country of his descent. The African nation of Sudan is predominantly Muslim and is comprised of some 600 ethnicities. Arabs and indigenous Africans have intermarried and mixed there for centuries and most speak Arabic.

To wit, the phrase given to the region now inhabited by Islamic people in Africa, which includes modern-day Sudan, is “Bilad al-Sudan” and it means literally “the land of negroes” or “the land of blacks.”

Further complicating the situation is the fact that high-profile praise came from such figures as Indian American comedian Aziz Ansari, who compared his own experience to Mohamed’s.

Parallels can be drawn fairly easily, of course, between Islamophobia and anti-black racism as specific manifestations of a similar impulse, but making the leap to consider them intimate bedfellows may seem like an analytical stretch. In public discourse, we easily link anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination as being nearly one and the same. Yet, in spite of the fact that a full one-third of the U.S. Muslim population is black, we rarely tend to think of issues of anti-black racism, poverty, mass incarceration, or police brutality as legitimate “Muslim” issues. This is because we rarely consider black Muslims.

But when you add the identity marker of “Muslim” to that of “Black,” something very different happens: erasure. Black Muslims are invisible to their faith communities and to wider society, for Muslims, unlike Black people, must actively legitimize their identities as Muslims—through practicing faith, maintaining proximity to a community, or a cultural inheritance. The hypervisibility of Blackness makes one’s identity as a Muslim impossible precisely because Blackness precludes Muslimness in the cultural imaginary. 

Many Muslim American activists consider social justice work to be a fundamental tenet of their faith — but the community’s cohesion on this front occasionally breaks down along racial lines.

Things are beginning to change, however, as black Muslim leaders work to raise the issues of racism and police brutality in the broader Muslim community, reminding Muslims of all backgrounds of the moral imperative to speak out against injustice.

Racism has affected the black Muslim community for generations. America’s first Muslims were brought to the country as slaves, as historian Peter Manseau described in a recent HuffPost blog,

It points towards a general attitude within British society generally and within Muslim communities of predominantly South Asian heritage; one is either Black, or Muslim. Never the twain shall meet. There is little to no representation, despite our numbers. Growing up, I have found myself often looking to America to see myself in its mosaic. Which would be paradoxically hilarious, if it wasn’t so sad. From Ibtihaj Muhammed to Malcolm X, Amir Suleiman to Ice Cube, Black American Muslim figures have provided me, and so many others, with the image nourishment we all need to love and value ourselves wholly. I found symbols of Black American racial pride; the dashiki worn with a kufi bearing a crescent. Mos Def becoming Yasiin Bey, Malika Bilal’s astuteness, even Kareem Abdul Jabbar by way of my Canadian, basketball-obsessed cousins. I marvelled at this grounded community. Yet here, Black British Muslim communities are still seen as strange newcomers, shuffling our feet at the welcome rugs of British Islam.

 Now even in my nostalgia about the Brooklyn of my youth, I can recall some hostility toward Islam and Muslims. This came from some black Christians — for perhaps obvious theological reasons—and from certain Afrocentrists who espouse what University of Michigan Professor Sherman Jackson has termed “Black Orientalism,” the reductive ideological position in which Islam is a synonym for Arab and therefore culpable in the East African slave trade and any and all forms of Arab “imperialism.” Yet the anti-Muslim bias found in the statements of Williams and Cain is starkly different from these older hostilities. This is because today’s anti Muslim bias has its roots in America’s history of white supremacy.

Whether it’s vandalizing a Mosque or a hateful taunt, harassment of Muslim Americans post 9/11 is at an all time high. But what about African-American Muslims, who according to the most recent study by the Virginia based Allied Media Corp, make up 24% of 7 million Muslims in America? They can be harder to recognize (they often don’t wear scarves or head dresses) but they are lawmakers, rappers, and even corporate executives.

Debra Mubashshir Majeed, an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Beloit College in Beloit, WI and author of Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America (Indiana University Press, 2006), says this is really about the stereotype of what a Muslim looks like. Dress is the cultural aspect of the faith and interestingly, since 9/11, people associate the Arab garb with Islam.

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Intersectional Invisibility: To explain why people with intersecting identities will tend to be defined as non-prototypical members of their constituent identity groups…. because people with two or more subordinate identities do not fit the prototypes of their constituent subordinate groups, they will experience intersectional invisibility. By intersectional invisibility we mean the general failure to fully recognize people with intersecting identities as members of their constituent groups. Intersectional invisibility also refers to the distortion of the intersectional persons’ characteristics in order to fit them into frameworks defined by prototypes of constituent identity groups... Such individuals tend to be marginal members within marginalized groups. This status relegates them to a position of acute social invisibility.