Fear in Our Hearts. Caleb Iyer Elfenbein
very much the story of people claiming the right—and struggling for the right—to be fully a part of public life.
It wasn’t simply a matter of language conventions that Thomas Jefferson begins the Declaration of Independence with the idea that all men are created equal. “Men” was not a generic term for men and women. It was deliberately restrictive. Nor was “men” a generic term for men of all kinds. In practice—and remember that it is in practice that the reality of ideals come into view—equality applied to white, Protestant, land-owning males. Although the 1790 Naturalization Law granted citizenship to all free white residents, this status certainly did not translate into full participation in public life for everyone who fell into this classification.
Written at a time when there were approximately seven hundred thousand enslaved individuals in what became the United States, the ideals animating the Declaration of Independence most certainly didn’t apply to Africans and people of African descent, even if a relatively small number were technically free.
The earliest nonwhite citizens in the United States were those living in territories annexed by the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Over time, other communities of color became eligible for citizenship without stipulations: formerly enslaved peoples with the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, indigenous peoples in 1924 with the Indian Citizenship Act, and all Asians and people of Asian descent in 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act.
Even still, citizenship typically did not translate into the ability to fully participate in public life. The history of the United States is littered with examples of groups becoming eligible for citizenship without the right to vote. White women did not become eligible to vote across the country until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 (well before women in other groups who were not yet eligible even for citizenship). It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that individual states were no longer able to restrict voting rights through discriminatory policies that most often affected African Americans.
Citizenship, now almost always linked with voting rights, is an important prerequisite for full participation in public life. The ability to vote in local, state, and national elections is an important formal measure of someone’s capacity to take part in the broadest possible range of activities relating to our common lives, to participate in discussions about what really is in the best interest of our communities.
Even recognizing the crucial importance of citizenship and voting, though, we can’t assume that these ways of belonging and participating in public life exhaust all possibilities. Plenty of residents of the United States who are not citizens and are not able to vote have very rich public lives, contributing in meaningful ways to their communities. Given that voter turnout for most elections across the country is less than 50 percent, there are clearly also lots of people who could vote who choose to participate in public life in other ways—or not really much at all.4
People hope that they can be a part of public life on their own terms and in the ways they want, to honestly and openly advocate for what they believe to be right for their communities and for the country in ways they find most meaningful. This is what Maheen is getting at in her article. She is saying that being able to participate in public life on our own terms, without limits set by other people, is a core element of what it means to be American. She makes it clear that she is committed to this ideal, that being American is an important part of how she thinks about herself and the life she’s trying to live.
The vast majority of American Muslims feel very similarly. In 2017, the Pew Foundation conducted a national survey of Muslims living in the United States.5 Ninety-two percent of respondents indicated that they are proud to be American. More than 60 percent said that they have “a lot” in common with other Americans. Eighty-nine percent reported taking great pride in being Muslim and American. A 2016 Institute for Social Policy and Understanding poll shows that 84 percent of American Muslims identify strongly with being American, a number in line with Protestant and Catholic sentiments on the same subject.6
These numbers suggest that American Muslims find being American really meaningful. A comprehensive 2017 survey from the same organization found that American Muslims are more satisfied with the country’s direction than any other religious group.7 The gap between Muslims and the general public on this question is quite significant (41 percent to 27 percent). Rates of satisfaction are even higher in individual terms, with nearly 80 percent of those responding to the most recent Pew Foundation study reporting being happy about how things are going in their own lives.
In perhaps the most American of all measures, the vast majority (70 percent) of Muslims in the United States continue to believe that it is possible for most people to get ahead with hard work. This is about 10 percent higher than the public in general.
American Muslim communities are diverse. Survey results certainly differ within and across these communities. African American Muslims, for example, are somewhat less satisfied with the direction of the country and less optimistic about the American dream, a position intimately tied to questions of race in the United States. A very small percentage of Muslims living in the United States see some contradiction between their religion and certain American ideals. This tells us that American Muslim communities are a lot like other American communities—that it’s incredibly hard to generalize across millions of people on the basis of one shared characteristic, in this case religious identity.
And yet. It’s hard to discount the data, which shows that on the whole American Muslims think of themselves—and live their lives—as Americans. We are on solid ground with this generalization.
Given all this evidence, why do so many non-Muslim Americans appear to doubt that American Muslims can be—or want to be—“really” American? And how does this relate to the kind of hostility that has left its mark on Maheen, affecting the way she participates in public life?
The Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan organization in Washington, DC, released a report about stereotypes—positive and negative—that the American public associates with American Muslims.8 Two points really stuck out to me when I read the report. Only 56 percent of respondents believe that American Muslims want to “fit in” in the United States. And only 51 percent believe that Muslims living in the United States “respect American ideals.” That means that nearly half the country thinks that Muslims aren’t fully committed to being part of life in the United States.
It’s hard to discern exactly what survey participants really mean when they respond to questions or prompts. The ambiguity of what it means to “fit in” or “respect American ideals” limits the conclusions we can reach. Still, as much of this book explores, there are very serious consequences that result from nearly half the country thinking that American Muslims aren’t fully committed to being American.9
Through my own research over the last couple of years, I have found that these sentiments—and the hostility they can lead to—have become part of public life as they never have been before. They show themselves in very local settings and on the national stage, all the way up to the highest elected office in the country.
Back in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity not too long after having advocated a freeze on Muslims entering the United States. In response to a question about whether non-Muslims could ever really know, in their hearts, that Muslims immigrating to the United States really wanted to be American, Trump said, “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost—I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation. They come—they don’t—for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”
A couple of things jump out in these comments. The default assumption at work is that American Muslims are all immigrants. It’s true that American Muslims are more likely than members of other religious groups to have been born outside of the country. A national poll of Muslims living in the United States found that 50 percent are foreign-born.10 Yet this means that 50 percent of American Muslims were born in the United States, meaning that this is the first and perhaps only home they have ever known. Conflating being Muslim with being an immigrant contributes to a sense of “foreignness”