muslim, the race

by brett newell-woods

At the Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance a video installation asks an audience of impressionable youth: “Most of the recent acts of terrorism have been committed by Islamic extremists, which raises the issue of racial profiling… Should racial profiling be allowed?” Teachers nod their assent and students walk away with the debate raging in their minds. The issue of racism is addressed and discussed.

This question, and the many like it utilized in middle education, is clearly intended to elicit a resounding ‘no!’ at the most, or at the least a debate which would move the argument in that direction. It is typical of the post September 11th discourse on assimilation, of the limits we as Americans should set for our fellow country-men and women. But plunging a little further into the statement’s semantic depth we hit our head on a sharp stone. Muslims are not a race.

In fact, the notion of race, which has its provenance in the advances in biological sciences made during the European Enlightenment, has been discredited in many of those very European countries. Yet here, in the United States, we still refer to ‘race’ as if it existed. It is still the division and definition of peoples according to an imagined conflation of culture and ethnicity into an unassailable mass, impermeable as it is monolithic. Traditionally, these divisions and definitions have revolved around ethnicity: any characteristic which is not inflected by the color of one’s skin (or even the tint and shade of that color) is considered perverse. All are expected to play their biologically assigned roles.

In our country today there is little room for multidimensional identity. The legacy of Enlightenment racial discourse, with its monolithic pronouncements on ethno-cultural groups, is a legacy of absolutes. When the question of assimilation is raised there can be only two responses: you either are or you aren’t. You are either American or with the terrorists. Supposed diversity runs on caricature alone.

I remember 9-11. I remember the terror I felt that my godfather, an Arab, a Muslim, a Palestinian, the man whom I call father, would be swept away in a techno-war combine of righteousness. I myself am neither Arab nor Muslim, but my godfather was and is a permanent fixture in my childhood, my adolescence, my adult life. Before that day I had no sense of ‘Arabness’ or ‘whiteness.’ At age fifteen, the full psychological impact of America’s racialism had not hit me. In the days, weeks, months, years after that event I felt an odd relief at still being able to kiss my godfather’s cheek, at being able to bus tables in his restaurant with the reassurance that his grumpy voice would still bark with paternal cadence. He is everything a poor boy could ask for in a father.

illustration by nadia abou-karr

That odd relief I felt, that attempt at convincing myself of continued normality, was finally unraveled with my introduction to the post 9-11 curriculum of tolerance, encapsulated by the quote above.

It goes without saying that Muslims are not a race, even in the antiquated sense of the term. Islam, like Christianity or most any religion, is cast over a plethora of languages, cultures and ethnicities. It cannot be whittled down and defined as one monolithic block of hijabs and beards. Every fundamentalist, whether Muslim or Christian, desires to uphold this very fiction of permanent division between monolithic powers: fundamentalist Muslims wish all of the faithful to fall under the yoke of a rigorist interpretation of ‘Ummah,’ on whose definition they hold a monopoly, and fundamentalist Christians who, like their Muslim counter-parts, make up only a tiny fraction of the world’s Christian population, tout themselves as the only true believers.

However, I do not wish to speak expressly about fundamentalists. The racializing of Muslim citizens is just as prevalent in the secular main stream as it is on mega-church pulpits; in fact the dovish sweet-talk of the former is more worrisome than the blistered shouting of the latter.

In much of the American main-stream, Left and Right, there is plenty of support for such insidious teaching. School-children the country over are presented with the yes or no question of racial profiling without there being any reference to the fallacy of this sort of terminology. The next generation is inculcated with a concept of race even more peculiar than ours: a race-cum-religion.

The European Enlightenment was presented with a pertinent conundrum: what to do about the Jews? Certainly they, with their religion which was decidedly un-Christian, un-European and Oriental, should be required to either assimilate completely or face alienation. It was simply impossible for one to be Jewish and European.

In hind-sight we see the catastrophic error in judgment with 20/20 vision, and history is constantly being reborn.

The era of nation-states has ended. With countries as diverse as they are now we cannot afford that concept. The diversity of cultures must not rely on caricature, and the differences of people must not be the measure of their worth; that statement may seem axiomatic, even trite, but it still begs to be followed. We are witness to the consequences of the past; and we are responsible for the consequences of the future.

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Brett Newell-Woods is a writer in Alameda, California.