10 Anti-​Catholicism, Islamophobia, and in the

Scott C. Alexander

Introduction

As self-​congratulatory as it may sound, there are actually a few things I have in common with my esteemed mentor and friend, Professor John L. Esposito. We are both Italian American Roman Catholics who have dedicated much of our lives to the study of and Muslim–​Christian relations and to the struggle against and Islamophobia.1 Unfortunately, this is where most of the similarities between us begin and end. For example, it is worth mentioning—​without a scintilla of either false humility or hyperbole—​that the output of six months in the storied life of this magnificently prolific and seismically influential scholar would dwarf that of my entire career of over thirty years. Nonetheless, I have always thought that our shared ethnic and religious backgrounds are not entirely superficial, incidental, and insignifi- cant with respect to our chosen vocations. Although I am a bit younger than he and bear an anglicized version of my original Italian surname, Professor Esposito and I share distant but strong memories of the journey into Whiteness that is the story of our fa- milial immigrant forebears’ gradual but relatively speedy assimilation into US American society. We remember their being White enough to be granted citizenship and to escape the brutal inhumanity of Jim Crow. In fact, we re- member how being Italian American made one “White enough” to engage in acts of anti-​Black hatred and .2 And yet, at the same time, Professor Esposito and I are old enough to remember not being quite as White as those with significantly more socioeconomic capital. In my case growing up in a working-​class suburb outside of Boston, Massachusetts, our WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon,​ Protestant) neighbors—when​ they deigned

Scott C. Alexander, Anti-​Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy in the United States In: Overcoming Orientalism. Edited by: Tamara Sonn, . © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190054151.003.0010 246 Overcoming Orientalism to interact with “our kind”—missed​ no opportunity to insinuate that we were less than White, and thus not really “American.” And many of our Irish American coreligionaries did more than insinuate this on what seemed to be an almost constant basis. Thus, I offer this essay in honor of a fellow Italian American Catholic who has been an unparalleled exemplar for me of how to channel the cognitive and affective legacy of our own respective journeys into American Whiteness into the aspiration to be an ally to our Muslim sisters and brothers—and​ all people of color—​against the scourge of racial and marginaliza- tion that has threatened to destroy what would become the United States from the earliest days of European hegemony in the “New World.”3 The essay itself is a preliminary experiment in the application of an in- tersectional4 approach to the analysis of the history of anti-​Catholicism and Islamophobia in the United States. It makes no pretensions to being defini- tive. Rather, its aim is to offer a comparative analysis of these two phenomena in an attempt to suggest that a certain intersection exists between each phe- nomenon and the social construction of Whiteness and the maintenance of White power and privilege in US history. The particular historiographical lens the essay employs to this end is an examination of two micro-​historical moments or “seasons of discontent”—the​ summers of 1854 and 2010, and a triangulation of each with the presidential election season of 2015–​2016. The essay suggests that each of these micro-​historical moments of exclu- sion intersects with a well-​researched macro-​historical narrative of systemic structures of Whiteness, White supremacy,5 and its attendant modes of racial oppression and marginalization. The essay’s overall aim is to help broaden the discourse on the nature and causes of Islamophobia in the United States from a relatively narrow and historically myopic focus on its alleged root causes in acts of international and domestic since September 11, 2001 to include a more sustained consideration of the relationship of Islamophobia to an endemic “matrix of oppression”6 which has shaped, and continues to shape, so much of US history.

Two Seasons of Discontent: The Summer of 1854 and the Summer of 2010

The first two definitions of “discontent” in The Oxford English Dictionary indicate that—at​ the time of Shakespeare’s employment of the term in the Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 247 opening lines of Richard III—​the word denoted “strong displeasure” and “in- dignation,” especially in the sense of a “ dissatisfaction with existing social or political conditions.”7 Although in the play’s opening soliloquy, Gloucester (later Richard III), speaks of a “winter . . . of discontent” having been “Made glorious summer” by his brother’s coup, in the drama that fol- lows, this impending “summer” will prove to be at least as filled with “discon- tent” as its preceding “winter.” Despite its sunny metaphorical connotation, the idea of a “summer” of discontent is not as counterintuitive as it may seem. Whether primarily due to the conduciveness of a balmier climate to outdoor activities, or the espe- cially irritating effects of heat and humidity on already angry people, sum- mers have often proven to be likely seasons for the “indignation” generated by “dissatisfaction with existing social or political conditions” to reach its fever pitch. One need only consider such momentous expressions of discon- tent in modern US history as the Watts Uprising of August 1965 or the mo- mentous protest at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, just three Augusts later, as two cases in point. What is key to recognize in all of this is that the circumstances of extreme—​ especially violent—manifestations​ of social and political “discontent” have little, if anything, to do with the literal seasons of the solar year. Instead, they have a much broader and more complex temporal archaeology centered on “seasons” in the history of the American social and political psyche. This was certainly the case in the summer of 1854 in Maine when a certain John Sayers Orr8 took his mission of preaching invective against the to the town of Bath. Known by the nom de guerre “the Angel ” (allegedly because he would dramatically call people into his orbit with a trumpet), Orr incited certain citizens of Bath to rise up against the perceived Catholic threat and burn down the local Catholic Church. The fact that this immigrant church had been established through the conversion of an abandoned settlers’ no doubt added metaphorical fuel to what eventually resulted in a literal fire.9 This was also the case in the summer of 2010—when​ the headlines were filled with reports of incendiary protests of both the figurative and literal type. Pastor caused quite a stir with an announcement that his Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, would mark September 11, 2010 as “International Burn a Koran Day.” The nearly imme- diate, if not desired, effect of Jones’s announcement was not only an assault against the dignity of the faith of his fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim. 248 Overcoming Orientalism

Quickly achieving viral status on the Internet, Jones’s announcement placed US troops occupying Muslim-​majority societies in Afghanistan and Iraq at increased risk, and further jeopardized the vulnerable civilian populations of these societies who suffer the most from the violence engendered by ex- tremism of various types. The summer of 2010 was also the summer of the protests against the Lower Manhattan site of the Park 51 Project of the , transposed into the false and deliberately misleading meme: “the at Ground Zero.” It was also during this same summer that, on August 28, four mechanical excavators at the proposed new site for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, were doused with accelerant and one actually set on fire by an arsonist. This particular expression of “discontent” was the culmination of a series of speeches by local Tennessee politicians who, feign- ing constitutional awareness, declared that most were not places of worship, but breeding grounds for radical and staging grounds for terrorist activities.10 Even televangelist and onetime presidential candi- date Pat Robertson offered his “spiritual” counsel on the matter by preaching to his audience: “You mark my word, if they start bringing thousands and thousands of into that relatively rural area, the next thing you know they’re going to be taking over the city council.”11 There is no doubt that the summers of 1854 and 2010 were quite literally two summers of “discontent” in US history. But, as Richard III ultimately reveals, the seasonal quality of social discontent—especially​ when such dis- content takes the form of fear, hatred, and bigotry—​has far less to do with the rhythms of the solar year, and far more to do with the nativist rhythms of our national psyche and mood. These seasons of nativist discontent can be identified as those days, months, years, decades, and so on when the dom- inant culture experiences audio shock as the white noise (pun intended) of our long, violent, seemingly interminable, and ultimately shameful macro-​ history of the struggle to preserve White power and privilege suddenly undergoes a dramatic shift in volume. In the case of both the summers of 1854 and 2010, the decibels spike in a relatively micro-​historical intersection between real or perceived demographic shifts, on the one hand, and the sym- bolic power of the cycle of national observances like the Fourth of July or a midterm election, on the other. What follows is an analysis of these two specific “seasons” of nativist American discontent with two minoritized religious out-​groups: Roman Catholics and Muslims. It will argue that, as chronologically distant as these Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 249 two micro-historical​ “seasons” are from one another (some 156 years), they share a striking number of common elements, not the least of which is the way in which they intersect with and reflect the macro-​historical systemic perpetuation of White power and privilege as a key component of national identity.

Nineteenth-​Century Anti-​Catholicism

The Bath took place on July 6, 1854, just two days after the “Angel Gabriel” observed Independence Day by encouraging the vandalism of St. Anne’s Catholic Church in the largely Irish immigrant section of Nashua, New Hampshire, known as the Acre.12 As is so often the case, this particular season of discontent far outlived the long days of that particular summer. It stretched into the autumn of that year and well beyond. In October, the seeds of hate and intolerance Orr had been planting throughout his New England tour yielded a robust fall harvest—once​ again, in Maine. The distinguished historian John McGreevy grippingly describes the scene:

Near midnight, on Saturday evening, October 14, 1854, a mob of one hun- dred men in the small shipbuilding town of Ellsworth, Maine, attacked Fr. John Bapst, a Jesuit priest. Bapst had stopped in Ellsworth, hearing confessions for much of the day, en route to a sick call in a nearby town. Carrying lanterns and torches, the members of the mob surrounded the modest home of a Mr. Kent, an Irish immigrant, where Bapst was known to be staying. Kent at first denied that Bapst was inside. “We know he is, and we must have him,” yelled the mob. Bapst crept into the cellar of the home, closing a trap door behind him. Kent invited the mob to look in the win- dows. The mob would not relent. “If you don’t produce him we will burn down your house and roast him alive.” Bapst emerged from the cellar to spare an on Kent’s home. According to one witness, he still hoped that the “instincts of humanity” would prevail, but the mob rushed upon him, dragged him one mile down toward the Union River and tied him to a rail. Some in the mob advocated burning Bapst alive. The consensus was to tar and feather him, which the mob did, after stripping him naked, taking his watch and emp- tying his wallet. One eyewitness recalled plucking feathers from Bapst’s 250 Overcoming Orientalism

body after a search party had found him, then shaving off the priest’s hair and eyebrows to remove remaining bits of tar.13

Bapst escaped alive, but the country at large by no means escaped the hate-​ mongering discontent expressed in Orr’s “ministry” and the propaganda of those who shared his perspective on the increasing Catholic presence in the United States. Indeed, in no way did the “Angel Gabriel” represent some lunatic fringe of mid-​nineteenth-​century US nativism. No less than two years after the attacks in Maine did a sitting member of the thirty-​fourth US Congress (representing the fifth District of New York/​Manhattan)—​Thomas R. Whitney14—​publish a best-​selling monograph warning of the impending dangers to the republic posed by the Catholic presence in the United States.15 In this monograph, Whitney, who was a leading voice in the infamously anti-​immigrant and anti-Catholic​ “American Party” (also known as the “Know Nothings”) has a chapter entitled “Papal Aspirations in the United States.” He focuses on “Jesuitism” as “the principal working element of the Church” which, he admonishes, “does not openly declare or make known its projects and purposes, until it is morally certain that all the rudiments of success have been perfected, and that a consummation is sure.”16 The “con- summation” of which Whitney speaks is what he sees as the logical endgame of a faith tradition that, by its own admission, seeks to bring the entire world into its fold. It would come as no surprise to any historian of US Catholicism that Whitney was particularly concerned about the activities of the Irish-​born Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, . Hughes was a tire- less advocate for the religious freedom of US Catholics, who never shied from vigorous engagement in the public square in pursuit of his agenda. He was known for debating noted Protestant clergy on questions such as “Is the Protestant religion the religion of Christ?” and “Is the Roman Catholic religion, in any of its principles or doctrines, inimical to civil or religious liberty?”17 In addition to being a prodigious fundraiser and supporter of nu- merous building projects for Catholic churches, hospitals, and schools in his , Hughes was a gadfly on the horse of the Protestant establishment. For example, based on his contention that Catholic school children were unfairly exposed to the “corrupted” King James translation of the Bible in the public school system—​then funded by public monies administered by the private, Protestant-​dominated Public School Society—he​ spearheaded a petition to the Common Council of the City of New York that Catholic Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 251 schools be approved recipients of a percentage of the funding appropriated for the Public School Society.18 Hughes was also an ardent opponent of the expectation that US Catholic parishes would increasingly subscribe to what the Catholic hierarchy referred to as “trusteeism”—a​ system of lay Protestant trusteeship over congregational funds designed to democratize local congre- gational governance by keeping the power of the purse ultimately out of the hands of clergy. Pursuant to a directive from Rome,19 all lay Catholic boards in the United States were to cede ultimate authority over Church pro- perty, as well as the employment of priests, to the local bishop.20 With distinct anti-Catholic​ , but not without some provocation on the part of Hughes, Whitney and others saw Hughes’s agenda as part of an overall plan to overthrow the Protestant establishment—​a nexus of institutions which Whitney and his fellow anti-​Catholics were quite convinced was the spiritual and cultural backbone of the republic. In fact, Whitney alleges that Hughes once declared publicly that it was the intention of the to con- vert the president, members of Congress, members of the judiciary, mem- bers of the armed services, and so on to Roman Catholicism.21 Thus Whitney draws on the concerns of people like Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond and British “Governor of the Canadas” (1818–​1820),22 and maintains in his book that such statements speak for themselves: Hughes and other Catholic leaders are clearly exposing the intent of the papacy to transform the United States “into a papal nation and government.”23 Among other pieces of evidence of a planned deconstructive Catholic takeover of the United States, Whitney points to certain high government positions then occupied by Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church has, Whitney argues, “obtained the control of our post-office​ department and secured the chief justice of the United States.” The chief justice to whom he refers is none other than Roger B. Taney. The significance of Whitney’s anonymous reference to Taney cannot be underestimated, but not for the reasons one might immediately suspect. There can be little doubt it was seen as a critical data point for all those who shared Whitney’s fears of an insidious Catholic takeover of the republic. It also says something about the larger context of religious in mid-​ nineteenth-​century American civic life: as strong as anti-​Catholic sentiment undoubtedly was, it was not strong enough to prevent a Roman Catholic from becoming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It would be tempting to conclude that Taney’s twenty-​eight-​year tenure as chief justice—​at a time when anti-​Catholic fervor in the US body politic was at one of its highest 252 Overcoming Orientalism points in history—speaks​ to a noble ability of the system to work “above” the prevailing of the day. One might even be tempted to contrast Taney’s historical context with our own and hypothesize the unlikeliness of the appointment of a Muslim to the Supreme Court (let alone a chief justice) in the post-9/​ ​11 United States. As incredible as it may sound, however, it would not be such a stretch to conceive of the appointment of a Muslim to the Supreme Court in 2020, es- pecially if that Muslim were thoroughly culturally assimilated. Imagine a distinguished American Muslim jurist who happened to be a strict construc- tionist in method of constitutional interpretation. Now imagine this Muslim as either a woman who did not wear or a man whose wife did not cover. Add to this a penchant for being a sharp and outspoken critic of “rad- ical Islam,” and an alignment with many items on the social and economic agenda of the conservative movement (e.g., highly suspicious of the decision in Roe v. Wade). This certainly would not be the first time in US history that the prevailing system of power and privilege would welcome the advance- ment of an individual subaltern from a group of otherwise deliberately mar- ginalized subalterns as long as such advancement could somehow serve the interests of the dominant culture, especially by way of insulating this culture from the potentially dangerous critique that it is inherently exclusive and un- democratic and thus “un-​American.”24 In Taney’s case, one of the major factors working in favor of his advance- ment was undoubtedly his close allegiance to his primary political patron—​ Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s passionate commitment to extend “freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites”25 and the populist movement he led would ironically have been as attractive to immigrant Catholics as it would be to many of the plebeian Protestants likely to share Whitney’s anti-​ Catholic anxieties. Indeed, Jackson never seemed to try to hide his affinity for the Catholic community in the United States. He likely never forgot the way in which Catholic New Orleans hailed him as the conquering hero of the republic in the immediate aftermath of his victory over the British in January of 1815.26 In all likelihood, Taney understood the significance and rarity of Jackson’s ability to lead a populist movement without an appeal to anti-​Catholic nativism. Taney knew that it was no small thing when Jackson spoke of himself as a “lover of the Christian religion” but “no sectarian.”27 “I do not believe,” Jackson proclaimed in 1835, “that any who shall be so fortu- nate as to be received to heaven through the atonement of our blessed Savior will be asked whether they belonged to the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 253

Episcopalian, the Baptist, or the Roman Catholic [faiths]. All Christians are brethren, and all true Christians know they are such because they love one another. A true Christian loves all, immaterial to what or church he may b e l on g .” 28 What Taney also understood, however, was Jackson’s commitment to pre- serving a union with a slaveholding South, and the degree to which an alli- ance with his powerful Catholic-​friendly patron would ironically necessitate a compromise of his values as a Catholic. Although it is true that Taney was born into a wealthy slave-owning​ family, his attitudes toward seem to have been far more in line with what was emergent Catholic teaching re- garding the trafficking and holding of slaves.29 As a young Maryland lawyer acting as defense counsel for the Rev. Jacob Gruber, a Methodist min- ister charged with inciting slave rebellion in an abolitionist sermon, Taney denounced slavery in open court as immoral and “a blot on our national character.”30 He was also known to have “quietly” manumitted his own slaves and even to have supported his older manumitted slaves by “giving them wallets for small silver pieces that he replenished every month.”31 In these ways Taney could be said to have embodied, especially in his private life, the abolitionist orientation that was becoming the dominant strain in Catholic teaching. Taney’s jurisprudence from the bench of the Supreme Court, however, is quite a different story. As a son of a Mason-​Dixon “border” state which was the cradle of American Catholicism, staunchly slaveholding, and yet chose ultimately not to secede from the Union, Taney’s rulings as chief justice re- flect a strong support not only for the rights of slaveholders but also for the rights of the slaveholding states to secede peacefully from the Union.32 Most significantly in this regard, Taney’s most memorable juridical legacy is as the Catholic jurist who authored the infamous 1856 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford. In brief, Taney’s majority opinion denied that Mr. Scott had any constitutional standing as a citizen to sue his owner for emancipa- tion. Using strict constructionist logic, Taney argues that the framers con- sidered all Black Africans to be “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” “This opinion,” Taney maintains, “was at that time fixed and uni- versal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily 254 Overcoming Orientalism and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.”33 In the context of the famed Lincoln-Douglas​ debates, Lincoln echoed the dissenting opinions of Justices Curtis and McLean. He did not so much chal- lenge Taney’s strict constructionism as he challenged the historical accuracy of the latter’s assumption that the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the framers were unanimous in their allegedly implicit exclusion of Black Africans from the privileges of citizenship, especially since, at the time of rat- ification of the Constitution, Black men could vote in five of the Thirteen Colonies.34 This raises the question as to why, if Taney did indeed harbor personal objections to slavery—likely​ rooted in his Catholicism—he​ wrote the opinion he did. Although what I am about to suggest as an answer to this question is en- tirely impossible to substantiate with any direct evidence from Taney him- self,35 the circumstantial evidence involving the formative effect of his political alliance with Jackson and his unquestionable self-image​ as patriotic American Roman Catholic unionist in the Jacksonian mode is more than compelling. Indeed, it would be tantamount to historiographic negligence to ignore the very strong possibility that one of the primary causal factors behind the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford was Taney’s determination to demonstrate that a Catholic Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could de- cide an opinion in direct contradiction to the dictates of the Catholic faith. I wish to hypothesize the high probability that the Dred Scott decision was a product of a particular strain of anti-​Black : namely, an eagerness for inclusion in the broader construction of normative “Whiteness” which was threatening to exclude Catholics from the mainstream of US civic life based on an allegedly superior loyalty to Rome over the republic, and which thus required bold proof to the contrary. In further support of the contextual evidence involving Taney’s own Catholic abolitionist roots, his relationship with Jackson, and the viru- lent anti-Catholic​ sentiment surging in the dominant culture of his day is evidence from neuroscience and social psychology. One of the salient characteristics of what human behaviorists have come to refer to as “Us/​ Them-ing”​ 36 is the tendency to demonstrate in-​group loyalty or the de- sire to be accepted into a dominant in-​group by acting against the inter- ests of an out-group​ and/​or by attempting to disprove a dominant culture of one’s own out-​group. The former involves the tendency for Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 255 a transgressing member of an in-group​ to atone for his or her violation by behaving more antisocially toward members of an out-group—​ ​what Robert Sapolsky aptly summarizes as “sometimes you help Us by directly helping Us, sometimes by hurting Them.”37 The latter involves a member of an out-group​ attempting to earn dominant in-group​ approval by aggres- sively attempting to live down what the dominant in-group​ perceives to be a liability of one’s own out-group.​ To illustrate this dynamic, Sapolsky tellingly points to examples from US such as Italian American ’s legendary prosecution of the Mafia; African American Chris Darden’s role in the prosecution of O.J. Simpson; and the prosecu- tion of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell (Jewish Americans accused of spying for the Soviet Union) by Jewish American attorneys Roy Cohn and Irving Saypol before a Jewish American judge, Irving Kaufman, “all eager to counter the stereotype of Jews as disloyal ‘internationalists.’ ”38 I would add at least one more example from US legal history to Sapolsky’s list: Roman Catholic American Roger B. Taney’s infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford. If my Taney hypothesis is reasonably substantiated—and​ I believe it is—​ then it offers quite a strong indication that the mid-​nineteenth-​century micro-​historical season of discontent of the US dominant culture with Catholics and Catholicism intersects with the macro-historical​ struggle over the social construction of White power and privilege in the United States and the country’s long-​standing struggle over issues of national identity and race.

Early Twenty-​First-​Century Islamophobia

According to the Spring 2012 Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010 was a banner year for Islamophobia, with a summer marked by a particularly intense rash of outbreaks.

Anti-​Muslim hate crimes soared by 50% in 2010 skyrocketing over 2009 levels (107 to 160) in a year marked by the incendiary rhetoric of Islam-​ bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called​ “Ground Zero Mosque” in . . . . It was the highest level of anti-​Muslim hate crimes since 2001, the year of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the FBI reported 481 anti-​Muslim hate crimes. The year 2010 saw multiple verbal attacks on planned mosques, along with several violent attacks and and the first 256 Overcoming Orientalism

attempts to ban Shariah , even though the Constitution already precludes [such a ban].39

Given that they occurred 156 years apart, there is undoubtedly a great deal that differentiates the summer of 1854 from the summer of 2010. But there are a few similarities worth considering for the purposes of this chapter. In addition to being punctuated by countless Independence Day parades and other celebrations such as the one that brought the “Angel Gabriel” to Bath, Maine, in 1854, 1854 and 2010 were both midterm election years. In the presidential election of 1852, the Whig Party suffered a major defeat with the victory of the Democrat Franklin Pierce over the Whig candidate General Winfield Scott. Just two years later, the Kansas-Nebraska​ Act was passed, thus vitiating the Missouri Compromise and allowing popular sov- ereignty to determine whether or not the Western Territories would allow slavery—​considerably exacerbating the abolitionist/nonabolitionist​ divide and eventually contributing greatly to the disintegration of the Whigs and the de facto collapse of the so-​called second party system. This collapse, in turn, opened up space in the American political landscape for the forma- tion of new political parties, one of which was the party spawned by Thomas Whitney’s nativist anti-Catholic​ Order of United Americans—the​ “Know Nothings”—​who eventually became known as the American Party. The mid- term elections directly following the summer of 1854 (along with local and state elections in the following year) marked a bonanza for the new Know Nothing Party in which its candidates managed to secure twelve governor- ships, one hundred Congressional seats, and at least one thousand other state and local legislative offices.40 There are at least two striking similarities between the Know Nothings of 1854 and the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party in the mid- term elections directly following the summer of 2010.41 The first is that, -al though not a full-​fledged political party, the Tea Party backed a total of 138 Republican candidates “running for nearly half the Democratic or open seats in the House and a third of those in the Senate.”42 According to an NBC re- port issued the day after the election, 32 percent of all Tea Party–​backed can- didates won seats in the US Congress—​five in the Senate and forty in the House.43 Although these numbers are far below the benchmark set by the Know Nothings in 1854, they are significant given that in 2010 there was no seismic shift in the party system proportional to the death of the Whigs in Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 257

1854, and given that the Tea Party was merely a “movement” which chose to graft itself onto the existing Republican Party. The second striking similarity between the Know Nothings of 1854 and the Tea Party of 2010 is that both were largely White, populist movements which reflected both a widespread disdain for legal and other structural changes designed to enhance the rights and status of the Black population, on the one hand, and a strong nativism, on the other. The relationship between mid-nineteenth-​ century​ US nativism and the slavery issue appears to be quite complex. In his landmark research, Tyler Anbinder has documented the significant degree to which Know Nothing rhetoric (at least in the North) linked Catholicism with slavery.44 Scholars have suggested, however, that this rhetoric tightly associating Catholicism with slavery may have been, at least in part, a disingenuous (with respect to abolition) political tactic on the part of the Know Nothings designed to reduce abolitionist fervor in the North and preserve the Union based on a common opposition to immigration.45 In other words, it was a way of appealing to Northern abolitionist sentiment to shift its focus onto immigration and con- comitant Catholicization as a far greater threat to the republic than slavery. The evidence appears to indicate that Know Nothings saw the immigra- tion/​Catholicization threat as the overriding threat around which the entire nation (North and South) could unite. In other words, the Know Nothing message was simply that as terrible as slavery may be, it is not something we should be quarreling about when the country is virtually being invaded by German and Irish Catholics! Perhaps this is part of the reason why, in their attempt to be unofficially reclassified as “White,” Irish Catholic immi- grants followed the lead of Daniel “the Liberator” O’Connell and tried to keep the emphasis on abolition by strongly supporting the anti-​slavery cause.46 Countering the Know Nothing narrative that they supported slavery would be one strategy US Catholics could deploy to garner support among the northern Protestant abolitionists who might be susceptible to what Noel Ignatiev reminds us was the widespread speculation in the antebellum United States “that if racial amalgamation was ever to take place it would begin between those two groups [i.e., African American slaves and Irish immigrants].”47 The rationale here would be to convince the more socially progressive Whites that the Irish were White in their fashion—​opposed to slavery but supportive of and thus staunchly opposed to “miscegenation.” 258 Overcoming Orientalism

Were one retroactively to invent a Know Nothing slogan which parallels the famous unofficial Tea Party mantra “I want my country back,”48 it may simply be “Don’t let them take my country!” What the two share is an implicit (in the former) and explicit (in the latter) fear of a constructed economic, ra- cial, and religious “they” who are poised to effect social change of a magni- tude that threatens the power (im)balance—​economic, racial, religious, and otherwise—​of the status quo. According to Dick Armey’s Tea Party Manifesto, published in the summer of 2010, ’s “liberal” agenda to “apologize for the United States” and “remake America” in order to create a “more just society” is nothing less than a move toward an un-​American, European-​style “socialism.” Liberals, Armey maintains, “prattle on about ‘social justice.’ They misuse the phrase. Justice means treating every individual with respect and decency and exactly the same as anyone else is treated under the laws of the land. As best we can tell, ‘social justice’ translates to really wise elected (you know, smarter than you) redistributing your hard-​earned income to their favored social agendas, all dutifully administered by a well-intentioned​ bureaucrat.”49 On the issue of race, Skocpol and Williamson emphasize that, contrary to liberal , it is grossly unfair to characterize all or most Tea Partiers as “unreconstructed racists—as​ people who react to politics and policy only through racial oppositions.”50 Yet if one were to distinguish between racism and personal bigotry such that the former refers to systems of structural in- justice which can function independent of any conscious recognition of the latter among any particular set of White individuals, we get a somewhat dif- ferent picture. The University of Washington’s2010 Multi-State​ Survey of Race and Politics reveals that of the 45 percent of Whites who either strongly or somewhat approve of the Tea Party movement, “only 35 percent believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 percent believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41 percent think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54 percent of White Tea Party supporters be- lieve Latinos to be hardworking, only 44 percent think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42 percent of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trust- w or t hy.” 51 As Skocpol and Williamson point out, a majority of mostly White Tea Partiers are quick to accuse fellow “entitled” Whites of many of the same character flaws to which the former would attribute the latter’s lack of suc- cess. “Tea Partiers,” they remind us, “have negative views about all of their fellow citizens; it is just that they make extra-jaundiced​ assessments of the work ethic of racial and ethnic minorities.”52 Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 259

As for opposition to immigrants and immigration, Tea Partiers are ap- parently not as concerned with undocumented immigrants taking jobs away from citizens or with the effects of widespread cultural change due to immigration, as were the nineteenth-​century Know Nothings. Rather, “Tea Partiers regularly invoke illegal immigrants as prime examples of free-​ loaders who are draining public coffers.” “Tea Party members,” Skocpol and Williamson report, “base their moral condemnation [of undocumented immigrants] on the fact that these are ‘lawbreakers’ who crossed the border without permission and thus are using American resources unfairly.”53 This seemingly important difference between the Tea Party and the Know Nothings when it comes to expressions of nativism, however, appears to evaporate almost completely when it comes to at least one cat- egory of immigrants and, incidentally, their indigenous African American coreligionaries: Muslims. Dick Armey’s Manifesto makes no explicit mention of Islam or Muslims, and its only references to “terrorism” or “terrorists” come either with respect to the “eco” brand or in an ironic defense against the slander of the Left that the Tea Party is somehow related to the right-wing​ domestic form of “ter- rorism.” Nonetheless, ethnographic fieldwork reveals that, although Tea Partiers were generally averse to express—at​ least openly—fear​ and hatred of African Americans, Latinx, or other ethnic minorities, this was not the case when it came to Muslims as a religiously minoritized community. As Skocpol and Williamson’s research indicates,

This kind of prejudice was not invoked to talk about freeloaders or public spending but about terrorism and cultural change—​even when the people being discussed were American citizens. Bonnie, for instance, said she had been hearing stories about “the Islamics [sic] wanting to take over the country.” An Tea Party seminar on Islam was advertised as a way to “learn about the mindset of Muslims who follow these teachings and how the Islamic movement in our country has been affecting laws, cul- ture, workplace, and teachings in our schools.” The seminar advertisement suggested that participants “START asking the tough questions about the teachings of Islam and the truth behind the acts of in our own backyard!” Even relative moderates are very worried about the threat posed by Muslims in America. “Most of them [Muslims] just want to prac- tice their religion in peace,” Gloria explained to us. But she was also cer- tain that some significant percentage wanted to impose “ law” in the 260 Overcoming Orientalism

United States. We never got the sense, however, that any of our Tea Party informants actually knew any Muslim-​Americans personally or even foreign Muslim visitors of whom they disapproved. Their statements and fears in this area were highly abstract.54

It is rhetorically tempting to say that the Islamophobia expressed by these Tea Partiers is “just the tip of the iceberg.” But this would imply that most of the Islamophobia in the United States exists “beneath the surface.” To the extent that this may indeed be the case, as it almost certainly is with anti-​Semitism, the “tip” of the Islamophobia iceberg is fairly massive. And, as noted ear- lier, eerily similar to the rash of anti-​Catholicism in the summer of 1854, the summer of 2010 saw an outbreak of Islamophobic activity. This ranged from protests against a deceptively dubbed “Mosque at Ground Zero,” to a viral video (viewed by many in Iraq and Afghanistan) of a Christian pastor threatening to burn copies of the Qur’an to mark the ninth anniversary of the , to an arson attempt against a mosque building site in Tennessee, and much more. As was the case with the Bath, Maine, incident of 1854 and other public expressions of nineteenth-century​ anti-Catholicism,​ the public acts of Islamophobic “street” protests and “street” violence in 2010 were not without a network of support in the media, albeit far more extensive in form and scope in 2010 than in 1854. Among the more prominent counterparts of Thomas Whitney in this regard are writers and activists such as Robert Spencer, Aayan Hirsi , and . Contemporary Islamophobic “classics” such as Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the ) which made bestsellers list in October of 200555 and his The Truth about : Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (also a bestseller56), along with Ali’s more recent Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Now (2015), claim that “Islam”—​at least in its current form as the faith of 1.6 billion people—is​ severely flawed. These authors allege, as did Whitney with the Catholicism of his day, the essential illiberalism and belli- cose nature of Islam that they decry as utterly incompatible—​not specifically with American civic values as did Whitney—but​ with Western civilization and thus all true “civilization” as a whole. Geller’s purview, on the other hand, is less a quasi-intellectual​ and pseudo-​ analytical attack on “Islam” as a deeply flawed tradition, although she fre- quently refers to this theme as presented in the works of Spencer, Ali, and the Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 261 like. Instead, Geller’s primary focus—along​ with that of her Dutch counter- part —is​ to echo Whitney’s concerns about the very real poten- tial, if left unchecked, of the targeted Muslim out-group​ to destroy the culture of the in-​group through a subtle but hostile takeover of the United States. One of the central admonitions of Geller’s project to “Stop the of America”57 and more recently “Stop the Islamization of Nations” (with the notable and troubling acronym, SION) is a very close analog to Whitney’s admonitions regarding “Jesuitism.” It is her warning against “Shari’a Creep” or the eventual co-​optation of the US legal system—​on both the local and national levels—by​ radical Islam and its domestic agents. This has led to a number of state legislative efforts to single out Islamic legal principles for inadmissibility in US courts.58 Known as “ban Shari’a” initiatives, they have been unanimously struck down by federal courts as unconstitutional, noting an absence of threat sufficient to suspend First Amendment protections of . Such rulings imply the discriminatory nature of such initiatives (why ban the admissibility of only Muslim religious norms from consideration in US courts, for example, when enforcing wills and con- tracts?) as well as their superfluity (US law supersedes any other legal norms which may conflict with its principles and statutes).59 These rulings have led some states—Alabama​ most recently—to​ retool such initiatives as bans on all “foreign laws” so as not to raise First Amendment objections by the fed- eral courts.60

Lifting the Fog of History: Islamophobia, White Supremacy, and the Obama-​Trump Dialectic

All of this amounts to what Nathan Lean,61 Wajahat Ali,62 Todd Green,63 and others have documented, and what Lean has aptly described as an “Islamophobia industry.” It goes without saying that, could he possibly im- agine the scope of contemporary mass-media​ Islamophobia campaigns, Whitney would be green with envy at the sheer capacity of his late twentieth/​ early twenty-​first-​century Islamophobic counterparts to stimulate, feed, and mobilize sentiment against the “menacing” out-group​ that is the target of their sociopolitical agenda. But while vast and significant contextual differences between the anti-​ Catholic project of the mid-​ to late nineteenth century and the Islamophobic 262 Overcoming Orientalism project of the twentieth/early​ twenty-​first-​century abound, the outline of a distinct matrix of oppression appears to be emerging out of an historical fog, the eventual lifting of which is one of the primary objectives of this essay. This matrix has to do with the intersection—in​ the nineteenth century, in the current moment, and presumably at other moments in the intervening history—​of anti-Catholicism,​ Islamophobia, and the social construction and maintenance of White power and privilege otherwise known as White supremacy. My decision to employ the metaphor of an historical “fog” antedates, but has been considerably strengthened by, a stunningly brilliant homily preached by an academic colleague and friend of mine on the Sunday imme- diately following the election of Donald J. Trump as the forty-​fifth President of the United States.64 In this homily, Fr. Edward Foley, OFM (Cap.) made reference to a novel we had both recently read—Kazuo​ Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Foley recounts how the novel, set in mythical post-Arthurian​ England, begins by introducing readers to the central pair of protagonists—​Axl and Beatrice—​an elderly couple who are suffering, along with everyone they know, from a barely perceptible loss of long-​term memory. This gnawing communal amnesia, of which Axl is becoming increasingly aware, is not as- sociated with dementia, but rather with a strange fog which has settled over the entire countryside sometime after the death of Arthur, who defended the Britons from the Saxon invaders and yet who somehow was able to estab- lish a Briton-Saxon​ peace after the great bloodshed of the conflict between the two. Through this mnemonic fog, Axl is able to remember a son who lives in a distant village, and he manages to convince his wife to journey with him on a quest to reunite the family. Along the way the couple meets another pair: a Saxon warrior and an aging Briton knight and nephew of Arthur who grad- ually discover that they are mortal enemies, not despite, but precisely be- cause of the nature of the Arthurian “peace” between their two peoples. We learn that this peace was not forged over time in the anguish-​fueled furnace of truth and reconciliation. Rather, it was forged almost instantly through the “magic” of a dragon whom Merlin enchanted to spew the fog of its amnesia-inducing​ breath over the very countryside that witnessed the hor- rors of Briton-​Saxon warfare, and especially Arthur’s role as ruthless warlord and slaughterer of innocents. The Saxon has been charged with slaying the dragon, while the Arthurian knight is its sworn protector. Both eventually Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 263 realize that the reason Axl was beginning to regain his memory is that the dragon was dying anyway. In Foley’s words:

[The dragon’s] breath is the fog that induces this societal amnesia dampening the memories of hatred and slaughter Rivalry and division that grew out of Arthur’s bloody conquest of the Saxons And so there was a Camelot of sorts But more a camelotic mask A camelotic ruse And once the dragon is slain Memory returns . . . A memory that will once again feed a smoldering anger Between Britons and Saxons And a memory that will feed smoldering doubts Between Axl and his beloved Beatrice Memory is the buried giant here And when it raises its fiendish head Personal division and societal chaos ensue.65

Foley goes on to compare the results of the 2016 presidential election to the slaying of the dragon. He offers the insight that the sixteen-month​ election season did not so much create as expose in bold relief profound preexisting divisions in the body politic of the United (?) States. Although I basically agree with Foley, I wish to take his insight a few steps further. I want to sug- gest that even a brief examination of the Trump phenomenon reveals the ways in which these profound preexisting divisions are evident in the inter- sectional connection between anti-​Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White supremacy at the focus of this essay. At one time I supposed that, were Barack Obama a Roman Catholic (rather than a Protestant) Christian, there would be no more explicit in- stantiation of the particular matrix of domination I am attempting to identify in this essay than the so-​called Birther movement. Led by Donald J. Trump—​and thus part of the larger multidimensional dynamic of what I am referring to as the “Trump phenomenon”—the​ agenda of Birtherism was to question the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by calling into ques- tion his religion and nationality. I supposed that the dog-​whistle rhetoric 264 Overcoming Orientalism of a Black Catholic’s “actually being a Muslim” and (thus) “not a real American” would be a stark indication that the recipe for the Birtherism stew was at least “place one part anti-Catholicism,​ one part Islamophobia, one part White into a crock pot, blend vigorously and allow to simmer for quite some time.” Deeper consideration, however, reveals that Obama’s identity as a Black Protestant may be the key to understanding the precise degree to which the Birtherism stew, and thus the wider Trump phenomenon, has White suprem- acism as its bouillon, and anti-Catholicism​ and Islamophobia, respectively, as the primary ingrédient de la saison. Ironically, Obama’s identification with a Kingian tradition of Black liberationist Protestantism—a​ tradition which has relentlessly insisted on holding a mirror up to a sinful republic marred by the atrocities of , chattel slavery, Jim Crow, , the Vietnam War, and mass incarceration—makes​ him far more a contemporary counter- part of the “subversive” nineteenth-century​ Catholic immigrant than were he himself a Black Catholic, and thus a subaltern within what has unques- tionably become the White-dominated​ US Catholic Church of the late twen- tieth and early twenty-first​ centuries.66 As one conservative writer for the Washington Times67 points out in an op-​ed published a few months after Obama’s inauguration, Obama’s having once been a member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface looms the “threat” of leading African American theologians like James Cone and his particular brand of “black liberation theology” which, the writer is quick to point out, is viewed by “many black pastors” as “a misguided if not aber- rant form of Christianity.”68 The author of this piece questions the veracity of Obama’s claims to be unaware of all of the statements of Rev. Wright. “But,” he argues,

it is likely that Mr. Obama knows about the philosophy, principles, values and teachings of black liberation theology, which is the foundation of his church—​the wellspring from which Mr. Wright’s divisive rhetoric flows. Mr. Obama’s veracity and integrity, or at least his judgment, will be subject to question if he denies having detailed knowledge of black liberation the- ology. And if he knows about the movement, why would he align himself and his family with such a theology for some 20 years? . . . If Mr. Obama wants to be the leader of all Americans, he must clearly and decisively sepa- rate himself not just from Mr. Wright, but from black liberation theology and Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 265

those churches and pastors that preach it as truth. Why he hasn’t done so is a question that still has been neither asked nor answered.69

The two lines of this quotation that I emphasize in italics speak volumes. The first posits a mutual exclusivity between a commitment to the insights and vision of Black liberation theology, on the one hand, and being “the leader of all Americans,” on the other. The second sets the stage for the Birther move- ment, by suggesting that Obama—​by virtue of his being a Black Protestant with liberationist leanings—​cannot possibly be a “real” American, let alone a legitimate president. The distance between the final question posed by this Op-​Ed writer and the claim that Obama may not even be a Christian is minimal. Indeed, from one popular perspective within the matrix of White supremacist domina- tion, Obama’s connection with Black liberationist Protestantism situates him at odds with normative (read “White”) US Christianity. This renders him nearly indistinguishable from those other brown and Black folk who, on the basis of another “anti-Christian”​ and thus equally “subversive” and “anti-​ American” ideology masquerading as a prophetic religion, point to the sins of the United States and seek to do it harm: Islam. It also did not take long for the vague insinuation that Obama was a crypto-Muslim​ to make it from the pen of a rather obscure “senior risk man- agement consultant in homeland security . . . with a master of divinity in biblical studies” writing for the Washington Times, to that of Dinesh D’Souza. A former president of the Kings College of New York City and one of the leading conservative ideologues on the American scene, D’Souza was par- doned by President Donald J. Trump in May 2018 for making a fraudulent campaign contribution. Noteworthy for his South Asian heritage, a comprised of a Catholic background and Evangelical churchgoing, and his singular role as an apologist for Western European ,70 D’Souza claims to have had “a kind of epiphany” after reading Obama’s Dreams from My Father:

I was struggling to reconcile Obama’s self-presentation​ as an African American with his father’s experience as an anti-colonialist​ from Kenya. How, I wondered, could the son’s experience and the father’s dream fit to- gether? Then it hit me.The son’s account of his own experience was largely bogus. Obama never sat at a segregated lunch counter, and neither did any of his ancestors. He is not descended, as most African Americans are, from 266 Overcoming Orientalism

slaves. In fact, his accounts of prejudice in his autobiography are very slight and, it turns out, largely made up. In fact, the son’s formative experiences in , Indonesia, , and Kenya very closely track the anti-colonial​ journey of his father, and thus there is no conflict to be resolved. The son con- sciously chose to make himself in the image of his father, just as he tells us in his book.71

D’Souza goes on to claim that, once he donned his “anti-​colonial specta- cles,” he began to understand “literally everything about Obama.”72 He skillfully—albeit​ disingenuously—​distances himself from any conspiracy theorizing that Barack Obama is actually a Muslim. He even professes to re- sist any suspicion that Obama consciously construes his political and social agenda to be “anti-American.”​ Yet, at the very same time, he sympathizes with those who believe that Obama is “anti-American”​ and a “closet Muslim.” What else, he implies, are Americans to think of a president who wants to “shrink America’s global footprint, to cut America down to size” and who “views Muslims who are fighting against America in Iraq and Afghanistan as freedom-​fighters, somewhat akin to Indians or Kenyans fighting to push out their British colonial occupier.”73 With little effort in decoding required, it becomes obvious that what D’Souza is saying is that Obama is not a Muslim, but he might as well be. If there are any doubts that this is D’Souza’s thesis, one need only consider the thinly encoded title of the book in which he paints his portrait of Obama as a notorious “anti-colonialist”: ​ The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Although, to the best of my knowledge, D’Souza assiduously avoids making any explicit reference to the inspiration behind his title, it is quite obvious to those fa- miliar with the architecture of late twentieth-​century Islamophobic “scholar- ship.” In 1990, Princeton University’s Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, Bernard Lewis, published his Jefferson Lecture in the same year as the cover essay of what is now a rather infamous edition of The Atlantic. The original title of the lecture was the innocuous sounding “Western Civilization: A View from the East.” The title of the Atlantic piece was far more honest, and thus far more expressive of the patent Orientalist bias of which had so pointedly accused Lewis some twelve years earlier;74 “The Roots of Muslim Rage”—complete​ with cover art featuring a cartoon of a scowling, hulking, black-​bearded, Central-Asian-​ ​looking and turban-​sporting figure with the stars and stripes of the US flag menacingly reflected in his eyes; it is a sketch which rivals the skill and effect of any of the Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 267 anti-​Semitic cartoons of Nazi Germany, not to mention the US cartoons of the “Jap enemy” from the same era.75 That the Lewis essay inspired Huntington to write his “The Clash of Civilizations?” article some three years later,76 and that the so-called​ “Huntington thesis” (in the form of a monograph of the same title, but sans question mark) became the virtual manifesto of the neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration toward the Muslim-majority​ world and especially the Middle East, is not directly pertinent to this essay. What is pertinent, however, is that D’Souza clearly triggers the “Obama-​as-​ crypto-Muslim”​ meme in the very title of the book in which he declares his clear conviction that Obama is not actually a Muslim. In The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza speaks as a brown, South Asian, naturalized immigrant, and “son of Western colonialism,” who argues that Obama is not really African American at all, but rather more of an alien “anti-​colonialist.” In one stunningly counterintuitive act of taxonomic leg- erdemain, D’Souza attempts to transform “anti-​colonialist” from a mor- ally positive to a morally negative descriptor; render “African American” a descriptor and identity upon which Obama has no authentic claim (and thus conveniently irrelevant to D’Souza’s ipso-​facto “non-racist”​ critique of Obama); and maintain “Muslim” as a category of dangerous ambiguity, open for his readers to populate with bloodthirsty foreign “anti-colonialists”​ like Obama and his Kenyan father, friendly brown patriotic South Asian neigh- bors not unlike himself, or some combination of the two. Despite his obvious intelligence and professed aspirations to take the un- popular moral high ground against various forms of liberal political correct- ness, it is difficult to see D’Souza as anything but a master of inventing and peddling. Under the guise of high-​minded polemic, he presents a panoply of pseudo-sophisticated​ dog whistles for those of his readers whose self-image​ is rooted in the conviction that they do not participate in, benefit from, and sustain systemic racism in the form of White supremacy, but rather that they are fast becoming the victims of a creeping liberal agenda rooted in a self-​ loathing anti-White​ “racism” of its own.77 As a prominent exponent of neo-​Orientalism, D’Souza is a perfect ex- ample of what Khaled Beydoun reminds us is the of classical Orientalism, Islamophobia, and White supremacy:

Orientalism helped guide, and fluidly tweak, the parameters of white- ness. And in the same way that blackness stood as the racial antithesis of 268 Overcoming Orientalism

whiteness, the necessary other without which whiteness would not exist, the Orientalist construction of Islam marked the faith as the civilizational foil of the West, a contrast that was necessary for the emerging United States to envision itself as an extension of Western civilization.78

Just as there were few more skilled than the brown Dinesh D’Souza at pro- viding the necessary rhetorical code for the more highbrow elements of the White supremacist attempt to delegitimize the first African American pres- ident, no one was more aware of the political liabilities of being the Black man (especially the “angry” Black man), the Muslim (especially the “angry” Muslim), or both than Barack Obama himself. This astute awareness, com- bined with his signature pragmatism, led Obama to make two closely related moves when it came to his identity. The first was his disavowal of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (mentioned earlier). The second was his staunch refusal, until the eleventh hour of his presidency, to be “caught” on camera in a do- mestic (i.e., nondiplomatic) visit to a Muslim house of worship.79 Obama wanted to be perceived as the Black man least likely to be either “angry” or Muslim. Indeed, on those occasions—mostly​ during his first presidential election campaign—when​ he did choose to address alleged Muslim-​ness, Obama shied away from his otherwise cherished role of civics-​ professor-​in-​chief. For fear of what he thought might be unsustainable polit- ical damage, he would typically reply by denying that he was Muslim and/or​ by reasserting his Christian identity. What he never did, at least publicly, was respond by asking the most important questions—​especially from the per- spective of his Muslim American constituents: “And so what if I were? Why should this even matter in a country which prides itself on its uncompromising dedication to freedom of religion?” The only prominent figure who actually did pose these critical questions in a national forum was leading Republican and former Secretary of State , who broke party ranks to endorse Mr. Obama in a Meet the Press interview with Tom Brokaw on October 19, 2008. Referring to the per- vasive nature of the “Obama-as-​ ​crypto-​Muslim” meme in Republican Party rhetoric, Powell expresses how disturbed he is by

what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, “He is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.” But the really right answer is, “What if he is? Is there something wrong with Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 269

being a Muslim in this country?” The answer’s “No, that’s not America.” Is there something wrong with some seven-year-​ ​old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior mem- bers of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.80

That Colin Powell makes this bold statement in the context of his endorse- ment of Barack Obama over John McCain is highly suggestive. At the time of the endorsement, Powell was something of a Republican Party luminary, having distinguished himself as the first and only African American to serve both as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of (1989–​1993) and Secretary of State (2001–2005).​ In the Brokaw interview, immediately after confirming his support for Obama, and a few minutes before his comments on Obama’s religious identity, Powell sets the larger frame for why he has decided not to endorse McCain, whom he describes as a “beloved friend and colleague.” “I have some concerns,” Powell says, “about the direction that the party has taken in recent years.” To what, exactly, is Powell referring? Powell begins his explanation by expressing vague misgivings about McCain’s lack of “a com- plete grasp” of economic issues and clearer misgivings over McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. But this appears to be merely the prelude to his principal concerns. “The approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain,” Powell observes, “has become narrower and narrower. Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He’s crossing lines—ethnic​ lines, racial lines, generational lines.”81 And then, almost immediately before his comments about Obama’s religious identity, Powell raises the issue of the McCain cam- paign’s focus on Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers82 as part of an overall strategy to insinuate that Obama has “some kind of terrorist feelings.”83 Although he is careful to avoid any explicitly accusation of “racism,” it is difficult not to conclude that Powell decided to reject his longtime friend and party precisely because of the extent to which they had opted to suborn brazenly the national narrative of White supremacy. Indeed Powell’s com- ments about the insinuations that Obama is a Muslim appear to be rooted in the former’s awareness of a deeper connection between being Black and being Muslim in the United States—a​ connection which Powell seems to rec- ognize as extending well beyond the demographic that “among the roughly one-​in-​five Muslim Americans whose parents also were born in the United 270 Overcoming Orientalism

States, 59 percent are African Americans, including a sizable majority who have converted to Islam (69 percent). Overall, 13 percent of U.S. Muslims are African Americans whose parents were born in the United States.”84 Powell appears to be painfully cognizant that this connection lies in the fact that, like the Catholic immigrants of the mid-​ to late nineteenth century, both Black Americans and Muslim Americans were and are viewed as potential subver- sives to the republic and the White power and privilege it was designed to protect and perpetuate. The contrast between Powell’s statement on Meet the Press in the context of the 2008 presidential election season, and that of another prominent African American appearing on the same show within the context of the 2015–​2016 presidential election season, could not be starker. On Sunday, September 20, 2015, host Chuck Todd asked leading pediatric neurologist and then Republican presidential primary candidate Dr. whether or not he thought Islam was “consistent with the [U.S.] Constitution.” Carson’s re- sponse was a blunt “No, I don’t. I do not,” after which he immediately volun- teered: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”85 Less than three months later, Carson’s then primary opponent whom he would later endorse for the presidency and to whose cabinet he would eventually be appointed as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, announced that “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shut- down of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s rep- resentatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”86 Despite the usual disclaimer of “love” for Muslims issued by most mainstream purveyors of Islamophobic stereotypes and propaganda, Trump has certainly established formidable Islamophobic credentials. He has done this not only by virtue of his own characteristically incendiary remarks87 (by no means uniquely tar- geting Muslims) but also by his appointment to his inner circle of advisors leading contributors to Islamophobic discourse. Particularly noteworthy among these are convicted felon General Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s original but short-lived​ appointee as national security advisor; , the president’s former chief political strategist; and the lesser known , who was “Deputy Assistant to the President” from January to August 2017. Flynn is on record declaring that Islam—not​ “” as he later appears to emend his rhetoric88—​“is a political ideology. It is a political ideology. It definitely hides behind this notion of it being a religion.” Flynn goes on to Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 271 compare the religion of approximately 1.6 billion human beings to a deadly disease: “It’s like cancer. I’ve gone through cancer in my own life. And so it’s like cancer. And it’s like a malignant cancer, though, in this case. It has metastasized.”89 Bannon is far more strategic in the application of Islamophobic rhetoric than Flynn. Instead of “Islam,” he ironically adopts the slightly more politi- cally correct (at least by so-called​ alt-right​ standards) use of “radical Islam,” “radical Islamic terrorism,” or some variant thereof. Apparently influenced by a combination of the Lewis/Huntington​ “Clash” thesis and Straus and Howe’s exercise in a popular apocalyptic version of pseudo-historiography,​ Bannon insists on emphasizing the “Islamic” nature of the extremist political of phenomena such as ISIS because to do otherwise would not comport with his favorite version of a global historical master narrative. The point of stressing that ISIS and al-​Qaeda are “Islamic” is precisely to counter the narrative that extremist groups which attempt to assert their legitimacy by waving the banner of are actually seen as horribly aberrant by the vast majority of Muslims. According to the Bannon master narrative, were such an inherently nonapocalyptic view to gain traction, the United States would be susceptible to the fatal “delusion” of concluding that these groups are not the ultimate existential threat to the United States and the “West” that they claim to be. If this were to happen, the danger becomes all too real that the “rise of secular individualism” (and especially “liberalism”) and “the rise of (anti-​colonial) Islam” in the “Fourth Turning”90 of American history will be victorious in destroying the United States as we know it. As for Gorka, his negative essentialist view of Islam as an inherently vi- olent religion is evident in his typology of the historical evolution of what he refers to as the “seven swords of .”91 A largely derivative hybrid of the work of Efraim Karsh92 and the “Green Peril” school of neoconservative foreign policy,93 Gorka’s thesis supports Bannon’s apocalyptic narrative and implies that “” is the next great totalitarian threat to humanity—a​ threat which can only be thwarted by the United States in the same way that it thwarted the last great totalitarian threat of Soviet communism. At the time of writing this essay, after a number of US Federal District Courts blocked the first two of three of President Trump’s executive orders banning travel from specified Muslim-​majority countries, the Supreme Court upheld the third.94 Although the legal arguments are beyond my ca- pability to analyze, one of the common threads in all of the lower court deci- sions to stay the first two orders was the courts’ inability to ignore the First 272 Overcoming Orientalism

Amendment ramifications of some of the things candidate Trump said while on the campaign trail—​in particular his December 2015 call for a tempo- rary ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. This suggests that the Islamophobic bias and agenda of the Trump administration is meeting with at least some institutional resistance on the part of the judiciary. Many perceive such judicial resistance, combined with widespread grassroots protests and activism, as the basis for a pragmatic hope that the Trump narrative of may yet fail, and that the White pop- ulist policy agenda of the Trump administration is by no means a fait ac- compli. Too few, however, appear to be asking what the potential of such hope is as long as using expressions such as the “Trump narrative of White nationalism” and “White populist policy agenda” continues to be branded as “reverse racist” rhetoric of the radical Left rather than categories of anal- ysis rooted in a methodologically legitimate read of US history. Let us im- agine, for example, a hypothetical situation in which the majority of White Americans who voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 presi- dential election are somehow exposed to Michelle Alexander’s description of the current system of mass incarceration of men of color as the “new Jim C row.” 95 Would they be more likely to perceive her language as hyperbolic or critically accurate? Although there is no way of knowing the answer to this particular question, a combination of anecdotal evidence and statis- tical research revealing huge gaps between what Black and White American adults think about the level of racist oppression faced by Blacks in the United States suggests that there is a strong likelihood that a sizeable percentage of Whites—​including many who would identify as “anti-​Trump”—​would be inclined to dismiss Alexander’s language as more hyperbolic than critically accurate.96 I would argue that my educated guess in this regard is further supported by the fact that Trump’s calculated, well-​funded, and well-​orchestrated at- tempt to move Birtherism into the political mainstream seems to have had a relatively minor effect on his celebrity status, especially when compared to other White celebrities who used the N-word​ or made other egregious and blatantly racist or sexist remarks.97 It is not unreasonable to speculate that had Trump been “caught on tape” using the N-​word—​rather than lending his persona and financial resources to one of the most overtly racist polit- ical movements since the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s—NBC​ may well have been forced to cancel The Celebrity Apprentice, thus consider- ably compromising his celebrity status, access to media, and perhaps even Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 273 potential as an upset candidate in the 2015–2016​ Republican presidential primary. Instead, the season of The Celebrity Apprentice which opened March 2011—​the very same month in which Trump began to appear on major tel- evision networks questioning, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, the birthplace and thus the legitimacy of ’s first African American president98—​was the highest rated season of the show in six years. The lesson here has sadly become something of a truism among most experts in racial theory and race relations in the United States. As long as the vast majority of leading voices in mainstream political, civic, religious, and media fora are willing to identify and denounce racism only when it takes the form of facilely verifiable verbal expressions of personal bigotry or preju- dice and hardly ever in its far more pernicious encoded systemic manifesta- tions, the “hope” placed in the significant resistance to the latest versions of White nationalism and White supremacy will prove as hollow as such hope has been in the past.

Conclusion: Whither the Catholics?

Now that I have lamented over the reality of so many hopes for racial jus- tice proving hollow in the past and potentially once again, I wish to close by cautiously intimating what might be different this time around. Just as I have described the analysis of the history of anti-Catholicism​ and Islamophobia in this essay as intersectional insofar as it triangulates on the matrix for op- pression known as “Whiteness” or “White supremacy,” this very same word is one heard more and more frequently these days on the lips and even in the brief online biographies of social-justice​ activists.99 As one seasoned African American Muslim community organizer who works on Chicago’s Southside told a class on interfaith community organizing we taught together last se- mester: “A lot of us—​the Black community, the Muslim community, the Latino/​a community, the LGBTQI community—​were complacent during the Obama years because we assumed, wrongly or rightly, that we had an ally in the White House. Now that we know this is definitelynot the case, the en- ergy level—​particularly for building coalitions—​is higher than I’ve ever seen it .” 100 Although this remains to be documented in a reliable way, the inter- sectionality of the grassroots resistance to the policy agenda of the Trump administration may one day prove to be the highest to date on record in US history. 274 Overcoming Orientalism

One somewhat hopeful dimension of this intersectionality, which is particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, involves certain very recent developments in institutional Catholic–​Muslim relations in the United States. Nearly twenty years ago, what is now the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops began to partner with US Muslim organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Islamic Center of Orange County, California, to cosponsor three robust annual regional dialogues.101 Although these dialogues have pro- duced useful documents102 and, more importantly, have served as contexts for forging lasting relationships of mutual understanding, trust, and friend- ship among scores of Muslim and Catholic scholars and religious leaders, there has been relatively little energy on the Catholic “side” to address, in any sustained and public way, the social sin of Islamophobia here in the United States. The one notable exception to this came in the aftermath of this essay’s second “season of discontent” (i.e., the summer of 2010) when then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick103 responded to the call of Muslim leaders and de- cided to lend his articulate voice and enthusiastic support to the Shoulder-​ to-​Shoulder Campaign, an interreligious coalition formed for the purposes of “standing with American Muslims” and “upholding American values.”104 That the US Catholic bishops and most Catholic and congrega- tions have on the whole been reluctant or outright opposed to partnering with Muslims in order to challenge the social sin of Islamophobia should come as no surprise. especially in light of our intersectional analysis of the history of Islamophobia and the fact that, as Massingale persuasively argues, there has been a proportionately anemic response of the US Catholic bishops and faithful to the broader scourge and social sin of White supremacy.105 Put quite simply, the logic of this essay’s analysis indicates that insofar as the US Catholic Church has been and continues to be a “White racist institution,” as Massingale defines it,106 it is improbable that it would mobilize and partner with Muslims to fight Islamophobia. My own experience in the regional dialogues for the past sixteen years has confirmed this improbability. That is, at least until the recent presidential campaign season and election. Unquestionably influenced by what we might look upon as this essay’s third “season of discontent,” a newly conceived and instituted National Catholic Dialogue which, at one point, appeared to be headed in the direction of more benign neglect of the pressing issue of Islamophobia in favor of high-​level theological exchange and scripture study among credentialed scholars107 made an abrupt turn. Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 275

It was at the inaugural meeting of the National Catholic–Muslim​ Dialogue in early March of 2017 at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago that I re- call hearing for the first time Catholic bishops not only use the term “Islamophobia,” but identify Islamophobia as an ominous reality—a​ sin against which US Catholics must stand in with their fellow citi- zens, and especially with their Muslim sisters and brothers. One of the leading voices in this regard was the newly appointed Catholic coconvener of the national dialogue, Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago who issued a letter in the immediate aftermath of the issuance of President Trump’s first executive order banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority​ countries. In his letter, Cardinal Cupich offers an uncompromising moral critique of the discriminatory nature of the travel ban, which he introduces with a powerful historical reflection:

This weekend proved to be a dark moment in U.S. history. The executive order to turn away refugees and to close our nation to those, particularly Muslims, fleeing violence, oppression and is contrary to both Catholic and American values. Have we not repeated the disastrous deci- sions of those in the past who turned away other people fleeing violence, leav- ing certain ethnicities and religions marginalized and excluded? We Catholics know that history well, for, like others, we have been on the other side of such decisions.108

Another leading Catholic voice in the dialogue and its call to fight Islamophobia was that of the episcopal moderator of the West Coast Catholic–​Muslim Dialogue, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego. McElroy devoted a good deal of his public keynote address at the dialogue to the problem of Islamophobia and the imperative that Catholics stand up and be counted as resisting its structures and effects. McElroy insisted that Catholics “condemn unequivocally” anti-​Muslim prejudice. In the spirit of remarks he made one month prior at the World Meeting of Popular Movements (02.28.17) where he spoke about the need to become “disrupters” of narra- tives of hatred, marginalization, and oppression,109 McElroy declared it “un- conscionable that in the United States, in the twenty-first​ century, one of the great world religions is caricatured, misrepresented and despised so widely in our culture. It is even more appalling that Muslims have now become the object of government actions, carefully and deliberately designed in laws to target a specific religious community.”110 276 Overcoming Orientalism

Despite what some conservative US Catholics might maintain about the demonization—​much of it real—​of the Catholic Church by the political Left, it is safe to say that this is no longer the 1850s. According to the FBI’s 2015 Statistics, by far the majority of reported religiously moti- vated hate crimes were a result of anti-​Jewish bias at 52.1 percent (of the total 1,402), with anti-Muslim​ bias ranking second at 21.9 percent, and anti-​ Catholic bias ranking a very distant third at 4.3 percent.111 Although these statistics are just one indication, by most accounts the majority of non-​Latinx and non-Black​ Catholics in the United States inhabit and are the benefi- ciaries of, as Massingale points out, . From the perspective of Catholic social teaching, the only just use of social privilege of any kind is to deploy it for the expressed purpose of realizing the radical mutuality of all relationships characteristic of the inner nature of the Triune God and nature of that God’s reign. To say that the US Catholic Church—​as a White institution—​has its work cut out for it in the struggle against Islamophobia as part of the broader struggle against racial injustice is an understatement. As the statistics of a recent poll of US Catholic attitudes toward Islam and Muslims, and the de- cidedly arrested nature of the civic conversation on the problem of racial in- justice in the United States appear to indicate, a good deal of the progress that needs to be made is in the areas of education and interreligious relationship building. My aim, therefore, as an educator attempting (however feebly) to walk in the footsteps of Professor John Esposito, is to dedicate this essay to him and offer it to readers as a minor contribution to this effort. My hope is that a critical look at the history of anti-Catholicism​ and Islamophobia will help lift the “fog” of historical amnesia which keeps so many of us from identifying the role played by the White supremacist matrix of oppression and domination in contributing to the current level of divisive- ness in US political, civic, and even familial life. My aim, as a Catholic whose ministry is primarily interreligious relationship building with Muslims, is to help call my own faith community in the United States to deeper discipleship in and through an intersectional commitment to fight Islamophobia as one manifestation of the sinful matrix of domination that is White supremacy. My hope in this respect is that, to the degree such a commitment is under- taken by more and more Catholics, it will render the task of achieving racial justice less Sisyphean and perhaps render success in achieving this goal, by God’s grace, just that much more plausible. Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 277

Notes

1. Like so many other terms, the precise definition and value of the term “Islamophobia” has been hotly debated both among researchers and activists, such as myself, who af- firm the reality it attempts to signify, as well as by those who insist that it is a “term of art.” I follow the definition offered by the Bridge Initiative Research Project on Islamophobia at : “Islamophobia is prejudice towards or dis- crimination against Muslims due to their religion, or perceived religious, national, or ethnic identity associated with Islam. Like anti-​Semitism, racism, and , Islamophobia describes mentalities and actions that demean an entire class of people. Jews, African Americans, and other populations throughout history have faced preju- dice and discrimination. Islamophobia is simply another reincarnation of this unfor- tunate trend of bigotry.” See “What Is ‘Islamophobia’?” Bridge Initiative, accessed April 10, 2017, http://​bridge.georgetown.edu/​what-​is-​islamophobia/​. 2. In her magisterial The History of (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter recounts a pertinent incident of what Cynthia Skove Nevels has referred to as “claiming whiteness through racial violence” (Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008]). Painter writes: “With real American identity coded according to race, being a real American often meant joining antiblack racism and seeing one- self as white against the blacks. Looking back to the war years, an Italian American recalled a tempting invitation to take sides during the Harlem riot of 1943: ‘I remember standing on a corner, a guy would throw the door open and say, “Come on down.” They were goin’ to Harlem to get in the riot. They’d say, “Let’s beat up some n[*****]s.” It was wonderful. It was new. The Italo-Americans​ stopped being Italo and started becoming Americans. We joined the group. Now we’re like you guys, right?’ The temptation and the decision to succumb did not pass unnoticed. Malcolm X, spokesman of the black nationalist , and Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, later noted that the first English word out of the mouths of European immigrants was frequently ‘n[****]r.’ Actually, Morrison said it was the second, after ‘okay.’ ” 3. An earlier version of this essay was originally published online in the Religion and Culture Forum of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Joel Brown, ed., April 14, 2017, accessed June 15, 2019 https://​voices.uchicago. edu/​religionculture/​2017/​04/​14/​summers-​of-​discontent-​title/​. 4. “Intersectionality” is a relatively new field of sociological discourse. The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and later was taken up by Patricia Hill Collins. Both Crenshaw and Collins developed the idea of intersectionality as a way for Black feminist/womanist​ theorists and others to talk about the “intersection” of various modes of oppression, domination, and marginalization. See Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–​167, and especially Collins’s notion of the “matrix of domination” in her landmark Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of (: Routledge, 2000), 227–228.​ 278 Overcoming Orientalism

5. I employ these terms somewhat interchangeably. In usage I follow the lead of Birgit Brander Rasmussen et al. in their “Introduction” to Rasmussen et al., eds., The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), who point out that, like other categories pertaining to the broader category of “race,” Whiteness is marked by “an inherent definitional slipperiness and instability, and who thus prefer to offer, in lieu of one definition, a number of mutually inclusive char- acteristics such as: ‘invisibility’; ‘emptiness’; ‘structural privilege’; ‘violence’; and the ‘institutionalization of European colonialism.’ ” Although somewhat problematic for the reasons Rasmussen et al. discuss, I also find Elizabeth Martinez’s notably less academic and more activist-​based definition of “White supremacy” useful: “White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploita- tion and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.” See Martinez’s “What Is White Supremacy,” SOA Watch, accessed March 27, 2017, http://soaw.org/​ ​index.php?option=com_​conte nt&view=article&id=482. 6. See Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 7. “discontent, n.1,” OED Online, December 2014, Oxford University Press, accessed February 2, 2015, http://​www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​53901?rskey=tf71Nd&result=1. 8. For more on Orr, especially his anti-​Catholic activities in Scotland, see Colin MacDonald’s “The Tree of a Son of Skye” post entitled “John Sayers Orr and Greenock’s Anti-​Catholic Riots,” accessed February 2, 2015, https://​sonofskye.word- press.com/​2014/​06/​02/​john-​sayers-​orr-​greenocks-​anti-​catholic-​riots/​. 9. Wilfred H. Paradis, Upon This Granite: Catholicism in New Hampshire, 1697–1997​ (Manchester, NH: Diocese of Manchester Centennial Committee), 66–​67. 10. Travis Loller, “Candidate Denounces Murfreesboro Mosque Proposal,” , June 25, 2010, accessed February 3, 2015, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/​ ​ news/​ap/​politics/​2010/​Jun/​25/​candidate_​denounces_​murfreesboro_​mosque_​pro- posal.html. 11. Transcript of “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door,” CNN Presents, first aired April 2, 2011, 20:00 ET, accessed February 2, 2015, http://transcripts.cnn.com/​ ​ TRANSCRIPTS/​1104/​02/​cp.01.html. 12. Paradis, Upon This Granite, 67–​68. 13. John T. McGreevy, “The Jesuit role in the emergence of a Catholic modernity” (an address delivered at the public launch of the University of Notre Dame’s Contending Modernities research project, New York City, February 8, 2010, accessed January 25, 2015, http://​blogs.nd.edu/​contendingmodernities/​2010/​12/​09/​19th-​century-​jesuits-​ the-​unlikely-​emergence-​of-​a-​catholic-​modernity/​). 14. From the online version of the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress: “WHITNEY, Thomas Richard, a Representative from New York; born in New York City May 2, 1807; pursued classical studies and engaged in newspaper work; member of the State assembly in 1854 and 1855; elected as the candidate of the American Party to the Thirty-​fourth Congress (March 4, 1855–​March 3, 1857); died in New York City April 12, 1858; interment in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, N.Y.” United States Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 279

Congress Biographical Directory, WHITNEY, Thomas Richard,” accessed February 5, 2015, http://​bioguide.congress.gov/​scripts/​biodisplay.pl?index=W000425. 15. Thomas R. Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy, as Opposed to the Encroachments of Foreign Influence, and Especially to the Interference of the Papacy in the Political Interests and Affairs of the United States (New York: DeWitt and Davenport, 1856). 16. Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy, 78. 17. Henry de Courcy, The Catholic Church in the United States: Pages of Its History, trans. and ed. John Gilmary Shea (New York: T.W. Strong, 1856), 411. 18. De Courcy, The Catholic Church in the United States, 414–418.​ Reminiscent of the arguments put forward by the US Catholic Bishops in opposition to provisions for artificial birth control in the Affordable Care Act, Hughes asked the New York City Common Council: “Will you compel us to pay a tax, from which we can receive no benefit, and to frequent schools which injure and destroy our religious rights in the of our children, and of which in our consciences we cannot approve! [?]”‌ (416). 19. The apostolic brief of Pope Pius VII, Non Sine Magno, instructed the US American lay trustees of Catholic parishes to yield to the local ordinary all ultimate control over Church property and the assignment of priests. In fact, a number of local parish priests tried to use their trustees to insulate themselves from the power of their local ordinaries (e.g., Fr. William Hogan of Philadelphia who in the 1820s attempted to leverage the power of his lay trustees to defy his bishop’s attempt to remove Hogan for allegedly mocking the bishop). See John R. Dichtl, Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), loc. 678/3079.​ 20. Dichtl, Frontiers of Faith. 21. Cf. Whitney’s citation of evidence from Freemen’s Journal (a Roman Catholic pub- lication) touting the benefits of the Roman Catholic Church for the welfare of the republic, 82. 22. Whitney quotes Lennox as having once remarked, “The Church of Rome has a design upon that country [i.e., the U.S.], and it will in time be the established religion, and will aid in the destruction of that Republic. I have conversed with many of the sover- eigns and princes of Europe, particularly with George III, and Louis XVIII, and they have unanimously expressed these opinions relative to the government of the United States” (80). 23. Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy, 79. 24. See, for example, Cornell West’s discussion of the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and West’s argument regarding the ways in which “racial reasoning” thwarts “moral reasoning,” thus allowing the aspirations of African Americans for greater justice to be coopted by the prevailing system of racial injustice. Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003) Kindle edition, ch. 2, “The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning,” 22–​31. 25. Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: , 2008) Kindle edition, loc. 171/11437.​ 26. Meacham, American Lion, 32. Meacham recalls that, on January 23, 1815, “the city’s ranking Roman Catholic priest thanked God for Jackson: ‘It is Him we intend to 280 Overcoming Orientalism

praise, when considering you, general, as the man of His right hand. . . . Immortal thanks be to His Supreme Majesty, for sending us such an instrument of His bountiful designs!’ ” 27. Meacham, American Lion, 206. 28. Meacham, American Lion, 206, my emphasis. 29. I am referring here in particular to the In supremo apostolatus promulgated by Pope Gregory XVI on December 3, 1839 (three years into Taney’s tenure as chief justice) which effectively condemned at least the slave trade, if not slavery itself (there is a vexing ambiguity in the document on this issue), as “unworthy of the Christian name.” Ultimately the moral force of this was skillfully neutralized by the US bishops through the application of a bit of casuistry and a great deal of concession to political expediency. 30. See Timothy S. Huebner, “Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond—​ and before—​Dred Scott,” The Journal of American History 97, no. 1 (June 2010): 17–​ 38, 25. Huebner recounts, in Taney’s own words, what the former characterizes as “the heart of [Taney’s] antislavery argument: “A hard necessity, indeed, compels us to endure the evil of slavery for a time. It was imposed upon us by another nation, while we were yet in a state of colonial vassal-​age. It cannot be easily, or suddenly removed. Yet while it continues, it is a blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom, confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away; and earnestly looks for the means, by which this necessary object may be best attained. And until it shall be accomplished: until the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language held in the [Declaration of [Independence, every friend of humanity will seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery, and better, to the utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave.” My emphasis. 31. Simon, James F. Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library, 2006), Kindle edition, 9. 32. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 4. 33. US Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sanford 60 U.S. 393 (1856) at FindLaw.com, accessed March 15, 2015, http://​caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/​scripts/​getcase.pl?court=US&vol=60 &invol=393. 34. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” Springfield, IL, June 26, 1857, accessed March 25, 2015 through http://teachingamericanhistory.org/​ library/​ ​docu- ment/​speech-​on-​the-​dred-​scott-​decision/​. 35. It is worth pointing out that the primary reason for this is not his refusal to comment on his rationale for deciding Dred Scott v. Sanford in the way he did outside the text of the decision itself (see Huebner, “Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue,” 34). Rather, it is that such “direct evidence” (i.e., reflections by an historical actor on the reasons for her or his action), even when they do exist, tend to be less reliable than the pertinent contextual (i.e., “circumstantial”) evidence. As behavioral science well documents, human actors are often unaware of the bio-​contextual causal infrastructure of their actions. For example: there is no guarantee that, had Taney commented on his motiv- ations in deciding Dred Scott the way he did, he would have been any more accurate than Rudy Giuliani, Chris Darden, or Irving Kaufman in commenting on their own Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 281

motivations for their own “Us/​Them-​ing” behavior in the context of the US judicial system (see later). 36. E.g., Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), Kindle edition, especially chapter 11,­ “Us versus Them,” 387–​483. 37. Sapolsky, Behave, 393–​394. 38. Sapolsky, Behave, 396. 39. Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report, Spring 2012 (no. 145), accessed April 2, 2015, http://​www.splcenter.org/​get-​informed/​intelligence-​report/​browse-​ all-​issues/​2012/​spring/​fbi-​dramatic-​spike-​in-​hate-​crimes-​targetin. 40. Tyler Anbinder, “Nativism and Prejudice against Immigrants,” in A Companion to American Immigration, ed. Reed Ueda (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011). Kindle edition, 179. 41. Although it is premature to predict at the time of writing this essay in June 2019, there may well be a third similarity. Just as the populist nativism of the Know Nothings played a major role in the demise of the Whig Party, the Tea Party and its immediate successor in the Trump movement may one day be seen as having brought about the demise of the Republican Party in almost every respect but its name. 42. Kate Zernike, “Tea Party Set to Win Enough Races for Wide Influence,”The New York Times, October 14, 2010, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2010/​10/​15/​us/​politics/​ 15teaparty.html?_​r=2&hp. 43. Alexandra Moe, “Just 32% of Tea Party Candidates Win,” NBC News First Read blog, November 3, 2010, http://​firstread.nbcnews.com/​_​news/​2010/​11/​03/​ 5403120-​just-​32-​of-​tea-​party-​candidates-​win. 44. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings & the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Anbinder points out that the “Know Nothings . . . reminded Northerners that not one Catholic priest had signed the well-​ publicized anti-slavery​ petition submitted to Congress in 1854 and endorsed by thou- sands of New England ministers. Massachusetts Congressman Anson Burlingame contended that the Catholic Church supported slavery because ‘Slavery and Priestcraft . . . have a common purpose: they seek [to annex] Cuba and Hayti and the Mexican States together, because they will be Catholic and Slave. I say they are in alli- ance by the necessity of their nature—​for one denies the right of a man to his body, and the other the right of a man to his soul. The one denies his right to think for himself, the other the right to act for himself’ ” (45). As rife with prejudice and bigotry as these Know Nothing claims obviously were, it is interesting to note that, as recently as 1838, the Georgetown Jesuits sold 272 slaves in order to keep their fledgling university afloat fi- nancially. See Rachel L. Swarns, “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?”The New York Times, April 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.​ com/​2016/​04/​17/​us/​georgetown-​university-​search-​for-​slave-​descendants.html?_​r=0. 45. Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin, “Some Aspects of the Know-​Nothing Movement Reconsidered,” South Atlantic Quarterly 39 (1940): 213–234,​ 217–218,​ and Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, 1852–1857​ (New York: Scribner, 1947) in Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery. 282 Overcoming Orientalism

46. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8–39.​ 47. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 3. 48. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7. Skocpol and Williamson write: “ ‘I want my country back!’ one Massachusetts man told us in 2010. ‘We need to take our country back,’ echoed a Virginia woman the following year. This plaintive call is perhaps the most characteristic and persistent theme in grassroots Tea Party activism. As Mark Lloyd of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots explains, people gravitate to the Tea Party when they anguish about ‘losing the nation they love, the country they planned to leave to their children and grandchildren.’ As a new president of diverse heritage prom- ised to ‘transform America,’ perceived threats to the very nature of ‘our country’ spurred many people, and particularly older people, to get involved with the Tea Party.’ ” 49. Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2010), Kindle locs. 2595–2600.​ Italics mine. 50. Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 70. 51. Christopher S. Parker, principal investigator, University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality (WISER)’s 2010 Multi-State​ Survey of Race and Politics, accessed April 4, 2015, http://depts.washington.edu/​ ​uwiser/​racepolitics. html. 52. Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 69. 53. Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 71. 54. Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 70; emphasis mine. 55. 10.02.2005; 15th on the “Paperback Non-Fiction”​ list. 56. 10.29.2006; 31st on the “Hardcover Non-​Fiction” list. 57. See one of many of Geller’s websites (as well as the page), which bears the title “Refuge from Islam: There Is Help,” accessed April 6, 2015, http://freedom​ - defense.typepad.com/​sioa/​. Geller’s sites have been identified as hate sites by the Southern Poverty Law Center. See “Extremist Files: Pamela Geller,” SPLC, http://​ www.splcenter.org/​get-​informed/​intelligence-​files/​profiles/​pamela-​geller, accessed April 6, 2015. 58. In November 2014, Alabama became the eighth state (along with Arizona, Kansas, , North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee) officially to “ban Shari`a law” with all but sixteen states having proposed similar measures over the past five years. See Liz Farmer, “Alabama Joins Wave of States Banning Foreign Laws,” last modified on November 4, 2014, accessed on April 18, 2015, http://www.​ governing.com/​topics/​elections/​gov-​alabama-​foreign-​law-​courts-​amendment.html. 59. On January 10, 2012, the US Court of Appeals of the Tenth Circuit struck down an Oklahoma ballot initiative to “ban Sharia law” explicitly. The court ruled: “Given the lack of evidence of any concrete problem, any harm Appellants seek to remedy with the proposed amendment is speculative at best and cannot support a compelling Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 283

interest. ‘To sacrifice First Amendment protections for so speculative a gain is not warranted . . .’ Columbia Broad. Sys., Inc. v. Democratic Nat’l Co., 412 U.S. 94, 127 (1973).” See Awad v. Ziriax et al. 10–​6273, 32 (2012), accessed April 18, 2015, http://​ www.ca10.uscourts.gov/​opinions/​10/​10-​6273.pdf. 60. Liz Farmer, “Alabama Joins Wave of States Banning Foreign Laws,” Governing, November 4, 2014, accessed April 18, 2015, http://​www.governing.com/​topics/​elec- tions/​gov-​alabama-​foreign-​law-​courts-​amendment.html. 61. See Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 62. See Wajahat Ali et al., “Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” Center for American Progress (2011), accessed April 21, 2015, https://​cdn.american- progress.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​issues/​2011/​08/​pdf/​islamophobia.pdf. For a more recent report focusing on the funding of Islamophobic projects in the United States, see “Hijacked by Hate: American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network,” Council on American Islamic Relations (2019), accessed June 14, 2019, http://​www. islamophobia.org/​images/​IslamophobiaReport2019/​CAIR_​Islamophobia_​Report_​ 2019_​Final_​Web.pdf. 63. Todd H. Green, Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). 64. The homily was preached at Old St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, IL, on Sunday, November 13, 2016, and may be read in its entirely in Pray Tell: Worship, Wit, & Wisdom; “Ed Foley’s Homily for the Thirty-Third​ Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C,” http://​www.praytellblog.com/​index.php/​2016/​11/​13/​ed-​foleys-​homily-​for-​ the-​thirty-​third-​sunday-​in-​ordinary-​time-​cycle-​c/​. 65. “Ed Foley’s Homily for the Thirty-Third​ Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C,” Pray Tell: Worship, Wit, & Wisdom. My emphasis. 66. In his groundbreaking Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 2010), Bryan Massingale recounts the history of White supremacy in the US Catholic Church. Among some of his more memorable sources is the 1975 statement of Br. Joseph Davis, then executive director of the National Office for Black Catholics: “In analyzing the church’s own documents, it is obvious that the church has always per- ceived . . . its primary constituency as the white, European immigrant community. On several significant occasions, when the Catholic Church had the opportunity to de- part from the structures of racism so rigidly imposed by the dominant society [and] to affirm the humanity and dignity of black people . . . it has invariably backed off in deference to the sensitivities of the white Catholic community. There are no com- plex, unfathomable, complicated reasons why there are so few black Catholics in this country. . . . It does not take a great deal of analysis to understand why the church has had such a minimal response by black people to its initiatives. Documentable his- tory does not demonstrate the credibility of the institution, especially if interpreted in the light of the gospel. Among the Christian institutions of this nation, the Roman Catholic Church has the poorest record of promoting indigenous leadership among blacks, or allowing the cultural adaptation which could produce the greatest harmony between the church and the people” (63–64).​ 284 Overcoming Orientalism

67. It is worth noting that The Washington Times is owned by the Unification Church and has regularly featured the writings of , whose Center for Security Policy has been categorized as a leading anti-​Muslim “” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to the SPLC, the CSP “has gone from a respected hawkish think tank focused on foreign affairs to a conspiracy-​oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim​ movement in the United States.” For the full SPLC evaluation, see “Extremist Files: Center for Security Policy,” accessed April 4, 2017, https://www.​ splcenter.org/​fighting-​hate/​extremist-​files/​group/​center-​security-​policy. 68. Ed Sherwood, “Obama and Liberation Theology,” The Washington Times, May 2, 2008, http://​www.washingtontimes.com/​news/​2008/​may/​2/​obama-​and-​black-​liberation-​ theology/​. 69. Ed Sherwood, “Obama and Liberation Theology.” My emphasis. 70. In the second chapter of his New York Times bestseller What’s So Great about America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002)—a​ chapter he entitles “Two Cheers for Colonialism”—D’Souza​ argues that, although many of the intentions of the European colonial project were immoral, the results made it all worthwhile, “im- measurably enriching the lives of the descendants of colonialism.” In a strikingly in- congruous attempt to blend his voice with that of the American boxer and civil rights icon Muhammad Ali, he acknowledges that “slavery was a grave moral crime that inflicted incalculable harm to the slaves. But the slaves are dead, and the truth is that their descendants are better off as a result of slavery. Jesse Jackson is vastly better off because his ancestors were enslaved than he would have been if that had never hap- pened. If not for slavery, Jackson and others like him would be living in Somalia or Ethiopia or Nigeria” (59). 71. Dinesh D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011) Kindle edition, loc. 18/​4030. My emphasis. 72. D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, loc. 26/​4030. 73. D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, loc. 35/​4030. 74. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), passim. 75. Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly (September 1990), 47–​60. 76. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilization?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–​49. 77. The “All Lives Matter” rhetorical and political rejoinder to the “” movement is one of the more recent and most memorable examples of this dynamic of attempting to discredit challenges to White supremacy by branding these chal- lenges as forms of “”—a​ concept which is inherently oxymoronic by the standards of nearly every widely accepted definition of “racism” as requiring a core element of the subject’s power over its object. 78. Khaled Beydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), Kindle edition, 50. 79. Obama’s first known visit to Muslim house of worship in the United States was on Wednesday, February 3, 2016—​just over eight years after his inauguration—​when, at the Islamic Society of Baltimore in Catonsville, Maryland, he stood beneath panes of Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 285

glass with calligraphic etchings of al-asma’​ al-husna​ or “beautiful names” of God in the Qur’an, and delivered a speech about the “hugely distorted impression” of Muslim Americans. 80. Meet the Press transcript for Oct. 19, 2008, accessed April 10, 2017, http://www.​ nbcnews.com/​id/​27266223/​ns/​meet_​the_​press/​t/​meet-​press-​transcript-​oct/​ #.WOwTAVKZPdQ. 81. Meet the Press transcript for October 19, 2008. My emphasis. 82. William Charles “Bill” Ayers was a cofounder, in 1969, of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), a US radical left-wing​ domestic militant organization in- volved in a number of bombings and classified by the FBI as a domestic terror group. 83. Meet the Press transcript for October 19, 2008. 84. See “Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism,” Pew Research Center—​U.S. Politics and Policy, August 30, 2011, accessed April 8, 2017, http://​www.people-​press.org/​2011/​08/​30/​muslim-​ americans-​no-​signs-​of-​growth-​in-​alienation-​or-​support-​for-​extremism/​. 85. Meet the Press transcript for September 20, 2015, accessed April 10, 2017, http://www.​ nbcnews.com/meet-​ the-​ press/​ meet-​ press-​ transcript-​ september-​ 20-​ 2015-​ n430581.​ 86. Jenna Johnson, “Trump Calls for ‘Total and Complete Shutdown of Muslims Entering the United States,’” , December 7, 2015, video clip, accessed April 10, 2017, cliphttps://​www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​post-​politics/​ wp/​2015/​12/​07/​donald-​trump-​calls-​for-​total-​and-​complete-​shutdown-​of-​ muslims-​entering-​the-​united-​states/​?utm_​term=.38230658daca. 87. Perhaps most notably, “I think Islam hates us”—a​ statement Trump made in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on March 9, 2016, just two days before Carson issued his endorsement or his one-time​ primary campaign rival. 88. Flynn substitutes “Islamism” for Islam in a similar speech he delivered to Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, in August 2016. See Andrew Kaczynski, “Michael Flynn in August: Islamism a ‘Vicious Cancer’ in Body of All Muslims That ‘Has to Be Excised,’”CNN Politics, November 22, 2016, accessed April 10, 2017, http://​www.cnn.com/​2016/​11/​22/​politics/​kfile-​michael-​flynn-​august-​ speech/​. 89. According to the Dallas Morning News, Flynn delivered this speech in Dallas, Texas, on Wednesday, August 10, 2016, to a meeting of ’s notori- ously Islamophobic ACT! for America. See Brian Tashman, “Trump Adviser Michael Flynn: Islam Is a ‘Cancer’ and ‘a Political Ideology’ That ‘Hides Behind Being a Religion,’” Right Wing Watch, August 12, 2016, accessed April 10, 2017, http://​www.rightwingwatch.org/​post/​trump-​adviser-​michael-​flynn-​islam-​is-​a-​ cancer-​and-​a-​political-​ideology-​that-​hides-​behind-​being-​a-​religion. For the rele- vant clip from the Dallas speech, see Miranda Blue, “Video: Likely Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn Calls Islam A ‘Cancer’ & ‘Political Ideology’ That ‘Hides Behind’ Religion,” Right Wing Watch, November 18, 2016, accessed April 10, 2017, http://​www.rightwingwatch.org/​post/​video-​likely-​trump-​national-​security-​ adviser-​michael-​flynn-​calls-​islam-​a-​political-​ideology-​that-​hides-​behind-​ religion/​. 286 Overcoming Orientalism

90. See William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books, 2009). 91. Sebastian Gorka, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2016) Kindle edition, loc. 795/2676.​ 92. Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 93. For more on the architecture of the “Green Peril” thesis, see Leon T. Hadar, “The ‘Green Peril’: Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat”;Cato Institute Foreign Policy Analysis no. 177, August 27, 1992, accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.cato.org/​ ​ publications/​policy-​analysis/​green-​peril-​creating-​islamic-​fundamentalist-​threat. 94. See Trump et al. v. Hawaii et al. (June 26, 2018). 95. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). 96. E.g., the results of a Pew Research Center study focusing on Black and White American perceptions on issues pertaining to race in US society indicate that “black and white adults have widely different perceptions about what life is like for blacks in the U.S. For example, by large margins, blacks are more likely than whites to say black people are treated less fairly in the workplace (a difference of 42 percentage points), when applying for a loan or mortgage (41 points), in dealing with the police (34 points), in the courts (32 points), in stores or restaurants (28 points), and when voting in elections (23 points). By a margin of at least 20 per- centage points, blacks are also more likely than whites to say racial discrimina- tion (70 percent vs. 36 percent), lower quality schools (75 percent vs. 53 percent) and lack of jobs (66 percent vs. 45 percent) are major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites. More broadly, blacks and whites offer different perspectives of the current state of race relations in the U.S. White Americans are evenly divided, with 46 percent saying race relations are generally good and 45 percent saying they are generally bad. In contrast, by a nearly two-​to-​ one margin, blacks are more likely to say race relations are bad (61 percent) rather than good (34 percent). Blacks are also about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues in the U.S. these days (58 percent vs. 27 percent). About four-​in-​ten whites (41 percent)—​compared with 22 percent of blacks—​say there is too much focus on race and racial issues.” See Pew Research Center—​Social and Demographic Trends; “On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart,” June 27, 2016, accessed April 5, 2017, http://​www. pewsocialtrends.org/​2016/​06/​27/​on-​views-​of-​race-​and-​inequality-​blacks-​and-​ whites-​are-​worlds-​apart/​. Some media pundits have suggested that the murder of George Perry Floyd, Jr. at the hands of Minneapolis police (May 25, 2020) and unprecedented support among Whites for the Black Lives Matter movement and widespread protests which followed may constitute an inflection point with respect to this perception gap between White and Black Americans on issues of race in the US Only time will tell. 97. An example which immediately comes to mind is that of Seinfeld star Michael Richards whose career suffered a precipitous decline in the wake of his racist rant Anti-Catholicism, Islamophobia, and White Supremacy 287

at The Laugh Factory in West Hollywood, California (11.17.06), including his use of the N-word​ in an exchange with an African American patron. See Paul Farhi, “Seinfeld Comic Richards Apologizes for Racial Rant,” The Washington Post, November 21, 2006, accessed April 10, 2017, http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​wp-​ dyn/​content/​article/​2006/​11/​21/​AR2006112100242.html. Other notable examples include that of Paula Deen and Mel Gibson. 98. Ashley Parker and Steve Eder, “Inside the Six Weeks Was a Nonstop ‘Birther’,” The New York Times, July 2, 2016, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.​ nytimes.com/​2016/​07/​03/​us/​politics/​donald-​trump-​birther-​obama.html. 99. See, for example, the brief online biography of , one of the principal organizers of the 2017 Women’s March, which describes her (among other things) as “most notably recognized for her focus on intersectional movement building” (my emphasis), accessed April 12, 2017, https://mpowerchange.org/​ about#linda-​ sarsour.​ 100. Shamar Hemphill, Youth and Organizing Director (Inner-City​ Muslim Action Network) and Clinical Adjunct Practitioner at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, November 17, 2017. 101. Originally known as the “Mid-Atlantic,”​ “Midwest,” and “West Coast” Dialogues. 102. E.g.: a pastoral guide for interreligious (i.e., Catholic-​Muslim) marriage; a state- ment on Catholic-Muslim​ spiritual and social solidarity entitled “Friends Not Adversaries,” December 23, 2003, accessed April 12, 2017, http://​www.usccb. org/​beliefs-​and-​teachings/​ecumenical-​and-​interreligious/​interreligious/​islam/​ friends-​and-​not-​adversaries-​a-​catholic-​muslim-​spiritual-​journey.cfm; and Revelation: Catholic and Muslim Perspectives (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005)—PDF​ available online at http://www.usccb.​ org/​beliefs-​and-​teachings/​ecumenical-​and-​interreligious/​interreligious/​islam/​up- load/​Revelation-​Catholic-​and-​Muslim-​Perspectives.pdf. 103. At the time, the Cardinal Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, DC, and not yet defrocked pursuant to highly credible sexual abuse allegations. 104. See Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign, “About,” accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.​ shouldertoshouldercampaign.org/​about/​. For the complete text of the campaign’s founding statement, see http://​www.shouldertoshouldercampaign.org/​2010/​09/​07/​ national-​religious-​leaders-​convene-​emergency-​interfaith-​summit/​. 105. Massingale writes: “It cannot be disputed that the U.S. Catholic Church has acted by omission and commission in ways that decisively allied it with the culture of racial domination and cause it to be identified as ‘white.’ It has done this explicitly (for ex- ample, the practice of slaveholding and refusing to admit persons of African descent to positions of church leadership and authority) and implicitly (such as its tacit ac- ceptance of legal segregation and refusal to actively evangelize African Americans). Thus the Catholic Church in the United States is a ‘white’ institution, insofar as it promotes, defends, and partakes—​however unwittingly—​of the culture of domi- nance. What makes the U.S. Catholic Church a ‘white racist institution,’ then, is not the fact that the majority of its members are of European descent (especially since in many places, they no longer are), nor the fact that many of its members engage in acts of malice or bigotry. What makes it ‘white and ‘racist’ is the pervasive belief that 288 Overcoming Orientalism

European aesthetics, music, theology, and persons—and​ only these—are​ standard, normative, universal, and truly ‘Catholic.’ ” Massingale, Racial Justice, 80. 106. Massingale, Racial Justice, 80. 107. The idea of convening a national dialogue in this vein originated among some of the Catholic participants and was received by the Bishop’s Committee on Interreligious and Ecumenical Affairs with great enthusiasm and unanimous approval. By con- trast, it was received by most Muslim participants in the dialogue with reactions ranging from what I would describe as polite enthusiasm to quiet resistance and in- dividual refusals to participate. 108. “Statement of Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, on the Executive Order on Refugees and Migrants,” January 29, 2017, accessed April 12, 2017, https://​ www.archchicago.org/​statements/​-​/​asset_​publisher/​a2jOvEeHcvDT/​content/​ statement-​statement-​of-​cardinal-​blase-​j-​cupich-​archbishop-​of-​chicago-​on-​the-​ executive-​order-​on-​refugees-​and-​migrants?inher. My emphasis. 109. “We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men, women and children as forces of fear rather than as children of God.” See Heidi Schlumpf, “Bishop McElroy: Discrimination against Muslims ‘Unconscionable’,” National Catholic Reporter, March 10, 2017, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.ncronline.org/​ ​news/​ justice/​bishop-​mcelroy-​discrimination-​against-​muslims-​unconscionable. 110. Schlumpf, “Bishop McElroy.” 111. FBI 2015 Hate Crime Statistics; “By Bias Motivation (Based on Table 1),” accessed April 12, 2017, https://​ucr.fbi.gov/​hate-​crime/​2015/​home/​topic-​pages/​victims_​ final. It is worth noting that, according to Pew Research Center analysis of this 2015 data, “71% of [the crimes motivated by anti-​Muslim bias] were crimes against people, as opposed to property. (Incidents can encompass more than one crime.) By contrast, crimes perpetrated against other religious groups more often involved property offenses, such as vandalism or theft. For example, 64% of anti-​Jewish and 51% of anti-​Catholic offenses in 2015 involved vandalism, compared with just 23% of anti-Muslim​ offenses.” See Katayoun Kishi, “Anti-Muslim​ Assaults Reach 9/11-​ ​ Era Levels, FBI Data Show”; Pew Research Center—​Fact Tank: News in the Numbers, November 21, 2016, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/​ fact-​ ​ tank/​2016/​11/​21/​anti-​muslim-​assaults-​reach-​911-​era-​levels-​fbi-​data-​show/​.

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