Fear in Our Hearts. Caleb Iyer Elfenbein
published a piece called “No Office? No Problem. Meet Me at Starbucks.” The article talks about the virtues of using Starbucks as a space to come together, discuss ideas and possibilities, and develop the next big business idea. It quotes company executives talking about the different ways that Starbucks encourages people to use their thousands of locations this way, including offering free wi-fi. The executive is very clear that the company wants Starbucks to serve as a “third place” in communities across the country (and, increasingly, the world)—a space that is neither home nor an office. In other words, public space.
So what happened? Why did Rashon and Donte end up in handcuffs for doing what Starbucks encourages people to do?
The particular Starbucks location in question has a policy that employees should ask people who aren’t buying anything to leave the store and to call the police if they refuse. This is not a company-wide policy—in fact, it goes against the general idea of Starbucks as a third space—but locations have discretion to put such guidelines in place. It’s possible that the manager who called the police was simply acting on the basis of these guidelines and not because of anything particular about Donte and Rashon.
Starbucks executives seem to think it’s not quite that simple. They didn’t dismiss the incident as the result of one “bad apple” employee discriminating against certain customers. In the wake of the incident, Starbucks closed all its locations for one day so that employees could attend racial-bias education sessions meant to help prevent discrimination in its stores. Executives took the incident as an opportunity to help employees explore the different ways that discrimination makes its way into our lives, and especially the public lives of people of color. This includes the selective enforcement of policies and rules by businesses and the selective enforcement of laws by municipalities and law enforcement.
The Starbucks incident got a lot of attention in part because someone filmed from the moment police arrived and the video went viral and in part because Starbucks is such a huge part of American life at this point. Similar kinds of things happen all the time in public spaces, though, with significant effects on the ways that African Americans are able to be a part of public life.
Not long ago, I was listening to a podcast called Stay Tuned with Preet when a guest unexpectedly brought up the Starbucks incident. The guest, Sherrilyn Ifill, who is the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said something that has really stuck with me and helped me make an important connection between Rashon and Donte’s experience and the subject of anti-Muslim hostility as it relates to public life. It’s worth quoting her at length:
Most of us [African Americans] have had this experience in the public space, of being treated as though we don’t belong there, of being treated suspiciously, of being treated as though we were criminals. And it is deeply humiliating. It is an ongoing reminder that we are not regarded as full citizens in many ways, particularly in the public space. And I think many people who aren’t black don’t understand how the public space is fraught for us because we are always mindful of how we will be treated. And that a central part of the civil rights struggle has been about how African Americans are treated in the public space and the relationship between that and our citizenship.
The connection between citizenship and public space is so important. Ifill makes it clear that wondering how others will treat you when you leave your house and how people will respond to you when you enter public space makes it difficult to be a full participant in public life. It’s not just about being in Starbucks. It’s about how someone feels in public space and how this relates to their ability to participate in public life when, where, and how it is meaningful to them. This is at the heart of what it means to be a citizen. The connection between feeling a sense of belonging in public space and the ability to freely participate in public life is also at the heart of this book.16
Rashon and Donte’s arrest is not an isolated incident for African Americans. Public space does not become fraught for entire communities because of an occasional unpleasant experience. Public space becomes fraught over time, when people begin to expect something bad to happen based on their experiences as well as those of their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends.17 There is something amiss in public life when public space becomes fraught for entire communities.
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The two examples of Maheen and Rashon and Donte illustrate that there are important parallels between African American and American Muslim experiences of public space. These parallels leave us with serious doubts about using the “melting pot” history of American immigration to think about the present, and future, of American Muslim communities.
The melting pot metaphor suggests that eventually all the different ingredients become largely undifferentiated, with what historian Nell Irvin Painter describes as “symbolic ethnicity” remaining in place to celebrate cultural heritage. This model of becoming American is based largely on the story of European immigrants who became “hyphenated Americans”—Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. While the melting pot metaphor may work with regard to the experiences of some communities, history indicates that it hasn’t applied, and may not ever apply, to communities of color in quite the same way.18
If we think back for a moment to Maheen’s article, and especially her description of what it feels like to be at the mall, the above passage from Sherrilyn Ifill might very well be about her. I don’t mean to suggest that all African American experience is the same as all American Muslim experience. But the sense of feeling unsafe in public space, of being so aware of people looking at you with suspicion, and how these feelings relate to a fundamental sense that many others don’t feel like you belong—these are the things that made me immediately think of Maheen when I was listening to the podcast. It made me think of how fear in the heart is something that prevents people from being active in public life on their own terms—that is, from being citizens in the fullest sense of the term.
At the founding moments of our country, political leaders debated whether the full rights of citizenship could ever extend to Muslims. This was a thought exercise (notwithstanding the thousands of enslaved Muslims already present here). They were trying to imagine the outer limits of who could be fully American.19 They were also debating the same question regarding Africans and people descended from Africans. It is one of our greatest tragedies that these questions persist in our public life. The fact that they persist has a tremendous effect on the extent to which both African Americans and Muslims—or people who others perceive to be Muslim—can be fully citizens of their country.
In the next chapter, we will explore how fear and public hate contribute to conditions of public life in which American Muslims struggle for the right to enjoy full citizenship. We’ll focus on the years 2010–2015, a period of time which saw what I call the rehabilitation of public hate toward Muslims in the United States.
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