Fear in Our Hearts. Caleb Iyer Elfenbein
further underscore this point when, as something of an afterthought, he extends the argument to those born and raised in the United States. This extension reinforces the idea that Muslims, wherever they are born, aren’t and perhaps never can be American simply because they are Muslim. The word “assimilation” is really important here.
Candidate Trump’s comments, and the broader attitudes they represent, are not about Muslims believing in the promise of hard work or wanting to be full participants in public life. According to the authors of the Democracy Fund report, the doubts that 50 percent of Americans have about American Muslim commitment to life in the United States reflect concerns about “cultural fit.”
Assimilation is a model of becoming—or being—American that emphasizes sameness. It reflects a particular moment in our history of immigration: the arrival of people from Ireland starting in the mid-1800s and from Southern and Eastern Europe a little bit later. These immigrants experienced extraordinary bigotry when they began arriving in large numbers during this period. Over time, however, this changed.
The idea of assimilation often serves as a popular model for thinking about immigration and the process of becoming American. The key element of this story is time. The idea is that eventually, even if they initially encounter bigotry, everyone comes to be accepted as part of the social fabric. However, it’s really important to remember that there have always been people in the United States whose ability to be or become truly American has been the subject of debate, often pretty vitriolic and violent. Most often, it’s been nonwhites who have been subject to the most extreme forms of doubt and exclusion. As hard as it might be to face, race has always been at the heart of what it means to be American.
From the earliest moments in the country’s history, people in positions of power tried to make sure that the boundaries between white and nonwhite were clear. Official efforts include the 1790 naturalization law I mentioned above (to establish the basis for citizenship at the time of the country’s founding) and various other laws relating to enslavement, anti-miscegenation, segregation, and immigration. These efforts were all very closely related to questions about who counted as white and who could be American.
It’s no coincidence, for example, that in the early twentieth century, just as understandings of what it meant to be white were expanding to include Irish and German immigrants and their descendants, courts were hearing cases about immigrants from South Asia and parts of the Ottoman Empire—including Christians and Muslims—who claimed to be white and, therefore, eligible for naturalization. These cases are especially interesting because what counted as “white” was unclear.11
There are a variety of ways judges and other officials determined race. Some looked at skin color. Others drew on biological sciences to make claims about race. Still others thought that “civilizational heritage” determined someone’s race. Religion was not allowed to be an explicit element in decisions because of the establishment clause, but it was often a factor in more implicit ways.12 What was very clear is that being white, or being able to make a reasonable claim to being white, was crucial to the success of those seeking to become American.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 changed that, at least officially, by moving away from race as a consideration in setting immigration quotas. If we add this to slightly earlier changes opening citizenship to people of Asian descent, we see that being white was becoming less and less an official requirement for becoming formally American.
In the context of the broader civil rights struggle that was flowering at the national level in the 1960s, these changes show that official policies explicitly linking being American and being white appeared to be coming to an end. As important as these changes have been to what it means to be American—and they have definitely been important—we also need to consider the other ways that communities signal who belongs and who does not. These can be more powerful than official policies.
The “melting pot” story of American immigration suggests that time is the most important factor in the process of becoming American—being seen as a “cultural fit” for the United States will happen for everyone eventually. Perhaps this view is understandable when we use European immigration as a model. After all, the arrival of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews, brought on much hand-wringing about whether these “races” could ever become truly American. For the most part, such debates about these particular communities were over by the 1950s and 1960s.
But it’s worth considering whether the melting pot is the best model for thinking about American Muslims today, many of whom came to, or were born in, the United States well after immigration reform in 1965 opened the door to immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
The experience of immigrants from China and Japan, who began arriving in the United States in the nineteenth century, might be closest to what post-1965 Muslim immigrants and their descendants are experiencing today. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1862 and the “Yellow Scare” to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, immigrants from East Asia and those of East Asian heritage long suffered from the effects of questions about “cultural fit,” or the capacity to be truly American.
There are most definitely echoes of these histories in today’s debates about the “cultural fit” of American Muslims. This is especially true regarding themes of loyalty and security. We have not seen detentions on the scale of Japanese American internment after Pearl Harbor, but mass detentions of Muslim men after the attacks of September 11, continuing surveillance of American Muslim communities, and efforts to restrict immigration of Muslims all suggest that the reasoning behind past behavior that many Americans view with considerable shame is more alive than we would like to admit.
The more I have studied anti-Muslim hostility, the more I have begun to think that there are other elements of American history that can provide very important insights into what American Muslim communities are experiencing today. Perhaps most important to this story are African American histories, especially when it comes to questions relating to American Muslims’ participation in public life.
African American and Muslim histories are deeply entwined in the United States. Many thousands—it is impossible to know the exact number—of those who arrived as enslaved peoples from West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were Muslim.13 African American Muslim communities and organizations became targets of FBI surveillance early in the twentieth century because of their open criticism of racism in American society. (The harrowing history of FBI surveillance of African American Muslim communities shows that contemporary relationships between American Muslim communities and law enforcement have deeply fraught roots.) Today, about 20 percent of American Muslims identify as black or African American.14
The significance of African American histories to our exploration of anti-Muslim hostility is not limited to African American Muslim history alone, however. African American histories show us that in order to understand the ability of a particular community—or individuals within that community—to most fully participate in public life, we need to look at more than official measures of belonging, like citizenship and the right to vote. Please don’t get me wrong: These kinds of measures are very important, but they aren’t the whole story. Not even close.15
Belonging in Public Space
On April 12, 2018, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson arrived at a Starbucks for a meeting about a possible real estate investment. Having arrived a couple of minutes early, they decided to wait for the person they were meeting before they ordered. Rashon asked to use the bathroom, which the manager informed him was for paying customers only. A few minutes later, Donte and Rashon were surprised to find three police officers asking them to leave because they were trespassing. When they did not comply because they were still waiting for a potential business partner, the officers arrested them. They waited in detention for nine hours before being released without authorities charging them with anything.
These are the bare-bones facts of the case. There are some other details in dispute. The manager who called the police claims that Donte and Rashon swore at the employee who refused them use of the bathroom. Rashon says that didn’t happen. Whatever the case may be when