Beyond and Back to the Black-White Binary: Muslims and Race-Making in the United States

BEYOND AND BACK TO THE BLACK-WHITE BINARY: MUSLIMS AND RACE-MAKING IN THE UNITED STATES Atiya Husain A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Karolyn D. Tyson Charles Kurzman Andrew Perrin Linda Burton Matthew W. Hughey © 2017 Atiya Husain ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Atiya Husain: Beyond and Back to the Black-White Binary: Muslims and Race-Making in the United States (Under the direction of: Dr. Karolyn D. Tyson) Scholars tracing the history of the concept of “race” refer briefly to how religion was the primary way of conceiving of difference among peoples in the premodern era. Basic western binaries like Christian/heathen and civilized/savage coalesced into the contemporary black-white binary. Moments like 9/11 and the consequent “racialization of Muslims” have brought this historic relationship between race and religion to the fore. To understand the post-9/11 moment, Muslim racialization literature argues that a new de facto racial group emerged after 9/11, but does not examine how this group fits into the existing black-white binary based US racial structure. Literature on the black-white binary meanwhile offers valuable theory for analysis of racial structures, yet overlooks the role religion has played in building these structures. This study fills these gaps in the literatures on Muslim racialization and the black-white racial binary by situating Muslims in the US relative to the black-white racial order. I conducted an ethnography of a diverse range of Muslims in a metropolitan area on the west coast, including black, white, Arab, South Asian, East Asian, and Latina/o Muslims. I completed 68 in-depth interviews and 12 months of participant observation (August 2014-2015). I argue that blackness and whiteness are not only racial concepts, but also religious concepts. Race has long been studied in terms of black and white in the US, but our understanding of the scope of these concepts has been limited by the absence of religion from such scholarly work. In contrast, this work shows how religion iii continues to matter in the construction of race. The increased attention on Muslims as a “racialized” group, evoke and bolster longstanding racial structures like the black-white racial binary that have held scholarly attention for decades. iv To Nanna v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my dissertation committee for your guidance and pushing me in the right direction. A big thanks to Karolyn Tyson and Charlie Kurzman for their excellent training – you allowed me the intellectual room to explore while also asking the hard questions that kept the project in line. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Linda Burton, Carol Stack, Neel Ahuja, Juliane Hammer and Cemil Aydin (and their brilliant girls), Laura Lopez-Sanders, Aysha Hidayatullah, Mary Hovsepian, Matthew Hughey, Sara Smith, and Mosi Ifatunji have also all been important teachers and mentors. The good in this project is a result of their generosity and guidance. The Duke Race Workshop has been an intellectual home, and the UNC Race Workshop provided valuable feedback and space for discussion. I share this accomplishment with my writing group – Louise Seamster, Victor Ray, Trenita Childers, Divya Guru Rajan, Austin Ashe, and Inseo Son. This wouldn’t have happened without your friendship and our collective successes over the years. And the same goes for Courtney Boen, Brian Foster, Sarah Gaby, Kari Kozlowski, Allison Mathews, and Haj Yazdiha. Thank you to Maydha Devarajan, Manuela Nivia, Caitlin Sommerville, Lynn Ta, Nikhil Umesh, and Yuman Wang for your labor and contributions. Including many of those already mentioned above, friends in Chapel Hill and Durham over the years have made my time at UNC a gift: Zaid Adhami, Fatema Ahmad, Yousuf Al- Bulushi, Felicia Arriaga, Khadijah Bhatti, Madiha Bhatti, Jarron Bowman, Samah Choudhury, Chris Courtheyn, Rakhee Devasthali, Mabel Gergan, Julie Gras-Najjar, Katie Merriman, Danielle Purifoy, Alicia Reyes-Barrientez, Anusha Hariharan, Ahsan Kamal, Nabil Khan, vi Michael Muhammad Knight, Sadaf Knight, Stevie Larson, Snehal Patel, Nura Sediqe, Kriti Sharma, Haruna Suzuki, Pavithra Vasudevan, Saadia Yacoob, Batool Zaidi. And of course Eram Alam and Nafisah Ula. Armond Towns, thank you for your encouragement and understanding. Thank you for your chill and for your patience with my lack thereof. This project got here with your generous engagement with all my ideas, even ones that were obviously terrible and ultimately discarded. Thank you for providing an endless catalog of bad TV as a reprieve, and for being fun. Sairah, thank you for always being there, and Faiza, for taking care of business. Thank you Ammi and Nanna for getting me here. And finally, they don’t make words that accurately capture my father’s love and support. Thank you all for everything. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………………..ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………………….x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………...………1 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODS AND DESCRIPTION OF FIELD SITE……….…….45 CHAPTER 3: EVERYDAY DISSONANCE BETWEEN BLACK/WHITE AND MUSLIM………………………………………………………….……62 CHAPTER 4: THE SOMETIMES-WHITENESS OF BROWN MUSLIMS………………….110 CHAPTER 5: MARRIAGE, GENDER ROLES, AND THE ORIENT FOR BLACK AND WHITE MUSLIM WOMEN…….....…………………….........…………143 CHAPTER 6: THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION AND ISLAMOPHOBIA IN POLITICAL ACTIVISM…………………………………..……….….168 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION………………………………………………………...……….214 APPENDIX A: DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRE…………………………………….…228 APPENDIX B: INTERVIEW GUIDE…………………………………………………………229 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………232 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Interviewee Race/Gender Demographics……..………………………………………..55 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BPP Black Panther Party CLMA Civil Liberties for Muslim Americans ICSH Islamic Center of Stone Heights MVC Muslim Voices for Change NOI Nation of Islam WDCM Warith Deen Community Mosque x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION A growing body of literature is trying to understand what race has to do with Muslims’ experiences in the United States after 9/11. This dissertation began with the same general interest. I spent one year in racially diverse Muslim communities in a metropolitan area on the West coast that I call West City. I spent almost every day with my participants and accompanied many of them to the mosque, to school, work, doctor’s appointments, religious study groups, convert support groups, LGBT rights organization meetings, protests, weddings, funerals, arts and culture events, and a weekly soup kitchen. As an ethnographer, I was embedded in the field to the point that I filled many roles alongside my role as a researcher. I served as a babysitter, a shoulder to cry on, a driver, a dance partner, and a wingwoman. I was sometimes perceived as an undercover agent conducting surveillance. I was sometimes perceived as a daughter, sister, or a quick friend. I also volunteered for many things, including listening to the same story multiple times. While this research began with various questions on what race has to do with Muslims’ experiences, my time in West City drew me to a related question: what do Muslims’ experiences mean for “race” itself? My analysis is guided by the following questions: How are Muslims racially positioned in the US? What can their racial positioning tell us about the black-white binary based US racial structure? To address these questions, I examine the relationships between blackness, whiteness, and Muslimness. 1 I find that Muslimness in the US is positioned racially as brown and foreign relative to what it means to be American. Second, I find that Muslims’ racial positioning helps shape the boundaries of blackness and whiteness, which I argue are religious as well as racial concepts. While some social phenomena are called race and some are called religion, I show that they are actually entangled in one another. I illustrate the everyday life of this entanglement and its implications. Ultimately, I argue that we will not understand race until we understand religion. These findings and conclusions are best explained by my trajectory in the field. I went into the field thinking I would refine the “racialization of Muslims” thesis, which argues that “religion is racialized.” This thesis holds that Muslims have been racialized after 9/11, as per Omi and Winant’s (2014:13) definition of racialization: “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.” Studies on the racialization of Muslims consistently show that the racial meaning applied to Muslims is that they are foreign, un- or anti-American, unassimilable, violent (terrorists), oppressed if they are women, and oppressive if they are men (Bayoumi 2009; Elver 2012; Hammer 2013; Joseph, D’Harlingue, and Wong 2008; Love 2009; Naber 2008; Rana 2011; Selod 2014; Selod and Embrick 2013; Sheth 2009; Volpp 2002). However, these studies focus only on South Asian and Arab Muslims. Because of this focus, it is not clear whether the racialization thesis holds for other racial/ethnic groups among Muslims. According to some estimates, black people (African American and immigrant) are a plurality of Muslims in the US (Gallup Center for Muslim Studies 2009). Even in the absence of more confident estimates of how large this non-Arab and non-South Asian group of Muslims in the

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