A Call Against Anti-Muslim Racism in the U.S.

I was forwarded an email this past year from someone wanting to let me know what was circulating among some of the students at SFSU. We’ve all seen these emails before – the ones that take on a life of their own as they make their way through various list-serves. And this one I had seen before. About ten years ago. Right after 9/11.

Late one Saturday afternoon, a local west Texas cowboy had ridden his horse into the nearby town of Pecos and stopped at the local watering hole. While seated at the bar having a beer, in walked an old Indian and a devout Muslim, dressed with turban and all. Both persons went to the bar and took a stool on either side of the cowboy. Eventually, their conversation drifted around to their varying cultures of history and background.

The native American stated, "Once my people were many, but now we are few."

The Muslim then chimed in and said, "Once my people were few, but now we are many."

The cowboy glanced at the Indian a moment, then he looked directly at the Muslim and said with a sly grin, "That's cause we ain't played cowboys and Muslims yet."

The email had made me cringe ten years ago for a number of reasons, including the cavalier way that it refers to the historical genocide and violence against American Indians while romanticizing Texas cowboys (like George W.?) as America’s saviors against old and new threats perceived.

But jokes are easy enough to dismiss as jokes.

Not so funny is the way that the awe-inspiring ignorance in the United States of north African history and culture – and of Arab and Muslim people and beliefs in particular – is vividly exposed by news media and some public reactions to the current political movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and the Ivory Coast.

Ignorance folds easily into fear and anxiety which produce and are produced by uninformed federal officials' legislative proposals and hearings on the "radicalization" of Muslim people in America, public gatherings against Muslim organizations and places, and news' pundits and commentators stupid musings of all kinds of possible causes and consequences of the movements in Africa for the United States. These proposals, gatherings, and news coverage have extolled anti-Muslim sentiment as a political fact of threat and terror, justifying anti-Muslim ideologies that inform everything from the Patriot Act to the illegal detention and interrogation of Muslim Americans. In other words, racism is covering over a rash of human and civil rights abuses of Muslim people in the name of “homeland security.”

In Tennessee, Republican Senator Bill Ketron has proposed a bill that would criminalize certain practices of Shariah, a Muslim legal and religious code of behavior, as a felony worthy of up to 15 years in prison. The bill explains its severe penalties by asserting that Shariah poses an imminent threat to the United States because it advances jihad (or holy war) to overthrow the U.S. government. The bill is supported by several conservative groups on the right, including the Tennessee Eagle Forum, who promise that law-abiding Muslims peacefully practicing their religion have nothing to fear. But this is hardly reassuring given that the bill would require Tennessee’s Attorney General to classify any organization adhering to Shariah codes as a potential “terrorist group” and to freeze their financial assets. Organizations would not be able to appeal the classification for two years.

Republicans in 13 other states have introduced similar bills that would prohibit state judges from considering Shariah when making decisions about child-custody or divorce. A version of this prohibition passed in Oklahoma last fall but a federal judge blocked it from taking effect during appeal.


And, then there is Representative Peter King, a Republican from New York and Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, calling for hearings on Islamic "radicalization" in the United States (code words for the operation of al Qaeda). Many are saying it is his job, but his call parallels a fierce escalation of anti-Muslim Mosque rallies in NYC where Muslims and Arabs are being represented as the new, real, "homegrown," sleeper threat of U.S. society and national security.

These legislative proposals and hearings are concerning on their own, but even more so as they emerge from a public support of treating Muslims and Arabs like terrorists. This support has called for and rationalized the prison-and-information industrial complex that has willfully violated Muslim human and civil rights in the U.S. since 9/11 and in the name of national security.

I cannot help but think of Jack D. Forbes’ work (a Powhatan and Lenape scholar and activist). Describing the late 1800s state campaign of genocidal extermination of California Indians in Native Americans of California and Nevada (1982), Forbes emphasized that it was not merely officials who participated in it: “The sequence of events [are] all the more distressing since it serves to indict not a group of cruel leaders, or a few squads of rough soldiers, but, in effect, an entire people; for the conquest of the Native Californian was above all else a popular, mass enterprise” (69). As is the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States. Alarming not because it is new or policy-driven, but because it is participated within and supported by a growing number of people.


Just this past Friday, two elderly Sikh men in the Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove were shot – one to death and one still in critical condition. Both men—wearing beards and turbans—were taking a walk when shot.

These attitudes and actions are unacceptable. From anti-Muslim legislation, to public rallies against the NYC mosque, to hate crimes against men taking an evening stroll in their neighborhood, we cannot allow ourselves to grow numb or indifferent to racist violence and cruelty. Not within federal/state law and not within one another.