Organizing

Organizations

Local, state, and national groups led by Muslims and people from other impacted communities are in the forefront of organizing against Islamophobia and racism.  We are listing below some of the many organizations doing powerful work for justice that focus on challenging Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism.  Their websites include valuable information and resources that can help guide us as we seek to be principled, ethical partners in our work. (list in formation)

Guides for Organizing and Curricula

In our work as partners against Islamophobia and racism, the following resources can help guide our thinking and action:

Resources for Organizing

MAKING THE CONNECTIONS: ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM, ANTI-BLACK RACISM, AND RACIAL JUSTICE

 We developed this resource below for groups we’ve worked with that, as they integrate Islamophobia into their work for racial justice and against anti-Black racism, have asked for background information and analysis that connect these issues. It consists of excerpts from our JAAMR resources that draw primarily on writing by a diverse group of Muslim Americans and those from other impacted communities who are challenging Islamophobia and other forms of racism.

A. Islamophobia as Anti-Muslim Racism

  • The scholars and activists who developed the #IslamophobiaIsRacism Syllabus reframed “‘Islamophobia’ as ‘anti-Muslim racism’ to more accurately reflect the intersection of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building. Conceptually, a focus on anti-Muslim racism is connected to an analysis of history and forms of dominance – from white supremacy, slavery and settler colonialism, to multiculturalism and the security logics of war and imperialism – that produce various forms of racial exclusion as well as incorporation into racist structures.” (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana, “ISLAMOPHOBIA IS RACISM: Resource for Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States”)

B. Muslim American Communities

Broadly speaking, Muslim Americans include: Black people who converted to Islam or whose Muslim ancestors can be traced back to enslaved Africans; Euro-Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans who, with few exceptions, converted to Islam; and Arabs, Blacks, Euro-Americans, Iranians, South Asians, and others who are immigrants or the descendants of Muslim immigrants.

An estimated 15-30% of enslaved Africans during the antebellum period were Muslims. Today, an estimated 28% to one-third of Muslim Americans are Black, a group that “comprises a complex subculture that includes Africans, Caribbean, and native-born African American Muslims.”  These subgroups include, for example, refugees whose African countries have been targeted by Trump’s Muslim Bans; and people whose heritage includes “fighting against oppression and systemic racism from the time of enslavement, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement to today.”  Although the media tend to associate African American Muslims with the Nation of Islam, the majority of them practice Sunni Islam.

C. Racialization

  • “Differently racialized populations in the United States—First Nations, Mexican, Asian, and more recently people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent—have been targets of different modes of racial subjugation. Islamophobia draws on and complicates what we know as racism.” (Angela Davis, “Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism”)

A key dynamic of Islamophobia is the process through which Muslims, who identify as members of various races, are racialized.  We may be far more familiar with an older form of racism that connects “race” to phenotype difference and genetic traits—skin color, hair texture, various facial characteristics, etc.

The process of racialization involves associating Muslims with certain “cultural” traits, such as: physical appearance (e.g., hijab, beards); language (e.g., Arabic, Urdu, Farsi); religious practices (e.g., mosque attendance, praying in a public space); or country of origin (e.g., countries included in Muslim Bans; the 28 countries—nearly all Muslim-majority—plus “American Black Muslims,” identified by the New York City Police Department as “ancestries of interest”).  Jews and other religious groups have also been racialized by association with their own religious and “cultural” traits.

D. Intersectionality

An intersectional perspective is essential for understanding and challenging Islamophobia.  For example: 

  • Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Racism: “[The] one-third of the U.S. Muslim population [that] is black . . . exist right at the intersection of these two forms of racism”—Islamophobia and anti-Black racism. (Donna A. Auston, “Mapping the Intersections of Islamophobia & #BlackLivesMatter: Unearthing Black Muslim Life and Activism in the Policing Crisis”)
  • Anti-Black, Anti-Immigrant, and Anti-Muslim Racism: “. . . at least nine hate incidents we documented in the [2016] post-election period involved Somali-American victims. Somali-Americans are racialized in the U.S. as Black and are therefore subject to both anti-Black racism and xenophobia. More than half of the incidents targeting Somali-American victims involved severe physical violence, including death. Somali Americans, who must face the intersection of anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and white supremacist ideology, have experienced disproportionate violence and harassment, even as many of them have entered the United States as refugees and asylees seeking protection from violence in their country of origin.” (SAALT/South Asian Americans Leading Together, Communities on Fire: Confronting Hate Violence and Xenophobic Political Rhetoric)
  • “At this moment, we need renewed calls for building transnational solidarity among Muslim women and with allies, rather than engaging in oppression olympics. We need a deeper examination of the multiple forms of structural violence Muslim women experience, such as anti-Black racism, anti-Muslim violence, patriarchy, classism, ableism, gender-based violence, war, imperialism, poverty, and how these forms of state violence, alongside others, intersect.” (Darakshan Raja, “Muslim Feminists Respond: On Headscarves and Interfaith Solidarity”)

E. Black Target/Muslim Target

We are mindful that, as Edward E. Curtis IV writes, “African Americans do not fit neatly into post-9/11 anti-Muslim narratives.”  Black Muslims born in the United States have been shaped by their experiences in this country, including enslavement, white supremacy, and pre-9/11 government surveillance. For them and for many Arab American and other Muslims, Islamophobia started well before 9/11.

  • To be a black Muslim today is to be part of [a] wide cross-section of U.S. Muslims of African descent, U.S.-born and immigrants, who are subjected to a double burden of state violence: as black people and as Muslims. They are subjected to the war on crime and the War on Terror, to surveillance, aggressive policing, and systematic civil rights violations.”  (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, “Islam on Trial”)

F. COINTELPRO, 1956-1971

Though COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram) was originally intended to disrupt the U.S. Communist Party, the FBI used it to target various domestic organizations (almost all on the left) that it considered “subversive.”  Among the alleged threats in the Black community were the Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam (NOI), and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  COINTELPRO’S stated purpose was “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”  The FBI engaged in such activities as wiretapping, paid informants, smear campaigns, burglaries, planting false information, grand jury subpoenas, and violence. 

  • “Profiling Black Muslim groups is absolutely nothing new.  Black Muslims have been monitored by the United States government since the 1930s. The Nation of Islam was a particular target of J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, established in the 1950s during the height of the Cold War. Driven by political ideology rather than fact, COINTELPRO cast a wide net that included not only communist groups—the explicit enemy of the period—but also other social movements and leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., who were deemed a ‘threat’ to national security by the FBI. COINTELPRO collected intelligence on domestic terrorism as a preemptive move. Its goals included the eradication of ‘black nationalist hate groups,’ making the Nation of Islam an imminent threat despite its proclamations of nonviolence and corroborating reports by government informants. The NOI was considered a threat because the Islam it preached was ‘un-American.’ Moreover, the NOI was feared for its potential to organize a marginalized black community with transnational ties. One of its most prominent members, who was also a COINTELPRO target, was Muhammad Ali.”  (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, “Islam on Trial”)

G. FBI Use of Informants and Sting Operations

  • “Since 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has greatly expanded the use of informants who, at the FBI’s behest, infiltrate communities and spy on the activities of millions of law-abiding Americans. In 2008, the FBI disclosed that it had 15,000 informants on its payroll, the most the agency has ever had in history. The FBI has targeted Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities for surveillance and investigation by informants. A vast number of the FBI’s informants are recruited to infiltrate mosques, businesses, and organizations within those communities and to report back on the activities of innocent individuals. The FBI frequently asks informants to monitor activities within the community without any reasonable suspicion that there is criminal activity afoot – a practice that is sanctioned by FBI guidelines.” (Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), “Suspicionless Surveillance of Muslim Communities and the Increased Use and Abuse of Muslim Informants”)

H. New York City Police Department

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) surveillance program has targeted Muslim, Arab American, and South Asian communities based on religion and ethnicity, not because of indicators of criminal activity.  A 2011-2012 series of Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press (AP) articles found that the NYPD had infiltrated about 250 New York mosques, targeted people (including Coptic Christian Egyptians and Iranian Jews) because they “look Muslim,” and monitored Muslim students in several Northeast states just because of their religion (documenting, for example, how often Muslim college students on a rafting trip prayed).  As a 2013 AP article reports, the NYPD has also designated mosques as “terror organizations,” placed informants in mosques, infiltrated at least one local Arab-American community organization, and videotaped and infiltrated the wedding of a young Muslim leader.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner consistently stood firm behind this program, which, according to a NYPD commanding officer in 2012, had “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation. . .”  (Along with the Muslim surveillance program, the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” program—targeting Black and Latinx young people—put Black and Latinx Muslims in the crosshairs of the NYPD for both their religion and their race/ethnicity.)

I. Countering Violent Extremism (CVE)

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), Obama’s signature “counterterrorism” program, based on government-private partnerships, provided a veneer of “community cooperation” to his overall strategies for fighting “terrorism,” which involved monitoring and surveilling Muslim communities.  While it continues to amp up aggressive policing and monitoring of Muslim communities, the current administration, which doesn’t share the “liberal” belief that there are “good Muslims” it can work with, eliminated this CVE program from its 2018 budget. The CVE task force currently “exists in name only.”

  • “A coalition of American Muslim and civil rights groups issued a joint statement in advance of the [White House’s 2015 Countering Violent Extremism] summit outlining concerns that community engagement ‘from a CVE standpoint sets American Muslim communities apart as inherently suspect’; that ‘CVE tasks community members to expansively monitor the beliefs and expressive or associational activities of other Muslims’ and ‘creat[es] a climate of fear and chill[s] constitutionally protected activity’; and that ‘mutual trust is difficult, if not impossible,’ given the FBI’s larger set of police practices, including ‘deceptively conducting intelligence gathering under the guise of community outreach,’ and relying on ‘law enforcement agencies [to] play the lead role in implementing CVE . . .’” (Amna Akbar, “National Security’s Broken Windows”)
  • “The emergence of the neoliberal carceral state entails that poor Black communities are increasingly managed and governed as criminals . . . and subjugated to aggressive Anti-Black forms of policing and surveillance . . . . As such, adopting theories and practices of anti-gang policing into counterterrorism programs and practices targeting the Somali community in the Twin Cities, who are already over-policed . . . , raises concerns around racial profiling and criminalization of Somali Muslims. Given that law-and-order policing informs the ways in which Black criminality is reinforced and inscribed on Black communities, institutionalizing Anti-Black forms [of] policing, such as anti-gang initiative[s], within the function and deployment of CVE programs demonstrates how the criminalization of Somalis is at the heart of domestic counterterrorism efforts in Minnesota.” (Zeinab A. Dahir, “Blurred Intersections: The Anti-Black, Islamophobic Dimensions of CVE Surveillance”) 

J. The Muslim Bans

The Trump administration has been trying to ban Muslims from the United States practically since the day he was inaugurated.  After widespread protests against his two earliest Executive Orders, which called for 90-day bans on people from seven majority Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), Trump issued a revised Executive Order in September 2017. This iteration indefinitely banned travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim countries (Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen), as well as North Korea, a country that “accounted for just 61 affected visas” in 2016.  Three of the six majority-Muslim countries identified are in Africa, another way in which Islamophobia intersects with anti-Black racism.

The list also barred from entry Venezuelan government officials and their families.  The addition of North Korea and a very small group of people from Venezuela was essentially a “fig leaf” to make it appear that the new Executive Order is not meant to be a “Muslim ban.”

In January 2020, almost exactly three years to the date of the initial Executive Order, a new Executive Order forbade permanent immigration to people from six additional countries: Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, and Tanzania. Almost all have predominantly or large Muslim populations, ranging from 30% Muslim in Tanzania to 86% Muslim in Kyrgyzstan. The exception is Myanmar (4% Muslim), where more than a million Rohingya Muslims have already fled the country to avoid an “ongoing genocidal campaign.”

Patrice S. Lawrence of the UndocuBlack Network puts the addition to the Ban of four African countries into context:

The attack on African migration isn’t a new tactic—from abruptly ending Temporary Protected Status, to the 2017 visa sanctions on Eritrea, and a 21% drop in Nigerians traveling to the US due to visa restrictions—this expansion will be a continuation of Trump’s white supremacist agenda seeking to end the migration of Black and Brown people.”

K. Video Resources

Rudy Francisco, Natasha Hooper, and Amen Ra, “Islamophobia“ (1:33), 2016 National Poetry Slam Finals in Atlanta, GA.

Bobby Rogers, “beingblackandmuslim” (1:04)