Can America Ever Move Past Racism?

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The mere fact that this question has been asked since the election of

President Barack Obama speaks to the changing role of race in our society. Although no one could reasonably deny the sociopolitical reality of race in America today, it is widely accepted as a socially construct-ed (rather than a biological) category and an increasingly enigmatic one at that. Since the 1980s, mixed-race Americans as well as Americans of Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian and Caribbean ancestry have challenged what histo-rian David Hollinger called the government’s “ethno-racial pentagon” of African Ameri-can, Euro-American, Asian American, Native American and Latino. The 2010 census sought to catch up with the reality of American demographics by allowing individuals to identify their “first race or origin” or to self-identify with a race or origin beyond the crude ethno-racial pentagon of black, white, yellow, red and brown.

How far the Census Bureau needs to evolve to catch up demographically with America would be comical were these categories not operative in public policies, institutions and debates dealing with issues of

social justice. In the 1980s, I attended a high school in East Los Angeles where half the teachers were white, but whites were a miniscule minority in the student body and entirely absent from the administration. My closest friends were Pakistani American, Filipino American, Chicano and Vietnamese Ameri-can. I remember crushes involv-ing African-American girls, Chicanas and Euro-Americans. Attending an advanced Ameri-can History class with this co-hort, we had very little patience for debates about the nature of American national identity that manifested itself in the form of an English-only movement that sought to limit bilingual educa-tion for immigrant children. What was much more instruc-tive were our debates between Loyalists and Patriots or wheth-er W.E.B. Dubois or Booker T. Washington held a better solu-tion to America’s “race prob-lem.” We role-played as indus-trialists and union organizers and debated women’s suffrage. My experience as an Angelino may have differed widely from the experiences of Americans in more homogenous regions of the United States, but it was by no means unique. Eboo Patel, a Muslim interfaith activist, notes the stark contrast between the stilted adult conversations

about racial and religious diver-sity and the reality of his high-school lunch table in the 1980s, which included “a Cuban Jew, a Nigerian Evangelical, and an Indian Hindu.”

The fact that we could today ask whether a post-racist America can exist is in large part the result of Americans of vary-ing backgrounds coming of age and learning what it means to be American alongside one another. America for us was not a given but a fraught, incom-plete experiment. It was fraught because our diversity reminded us that none of us, not even my white “minority” classmates, truly belonged; it was incom-plete because, even though we all believed in the ideal of “equality and justice for all,” we did not see it in our neigh-borhoods nor in the debates of the adults and the media, which tackled complicated questions of social equity through racist images of “the welfare queen” and “the freeloading immi-grant.” We teach our children how they ought to see America, forgetting that, for better or worse, they experience it as it is.

The tragedy of racism in AmericaIn his monumental 19th-century

Can America Ever Move Past Racism?by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

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exploration of Democracy in America, Alexis de Toc-queville recounts meeting a white Southerner who fathered children with one of his slaves. His offspring were legally his slaves as soon as they entered the world, and he was unable to set them free because of the color of their skin. As he neared the end of his life, “he imagined his sons dragged from market to market, exchanging a stranger’s rod for a father’s authority.” In seeing the Southern slave owner delirious and “prey to the agony of despair,” Tocqueville tells us he “understood how nature can revenge the wounds made by the laws. … They first violated every right of humanity by their treatment of the Negro and then taught him the value and invio-lability of those rights.”

The betrayal of America’s founding ideals by its racist

laws and institution is one of the tragedies of American his-tory. Tocqueville personalized this tragedy through the white Southerner whose desires and parental instincts were betrayed by laws that assured his so-cial status and wealth, but we could see this tragedy writ large in American history. Racial slavery, as a mode of produc-tion, allowed white America to advance economically dur-ing the colonial era, but it also condemned America by binding white Americans’ economic in-terests to the institutionalization of racism. We still feel these tragic effects when we debate whether a post-racist America is possible, even though the American colonialists declared their independence based on the principle of equality, and even though civil rights legislation has outlawed racial discrimina-tion in employment, housing,

education and elections. Our challenge has not been to imag-ine a post-racist America but to realize it in a society in which social, political and economic interests have long been closely tied to race.

The history of Muslims in America in the early 20th century shows how closely progress and race were tied together. Early immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia found their citizenship status challenged because the Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizenship only “to aliens being free white persons.” Later, Congress ex-tended citizenship “to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” Uncertain-ties regarding the racial status of “Turks,” “Indians,” and “Syrians” — categories ap-plied to immigrants from West and South Asia at the turn of

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the 20th century — resulted in challenges to their citizenship. They responded, in part, by ally-ing with people of color. Ben-gali Muslims settled in black neighborhoods in New Orleans and married Puerto Ricans in Harlem. Punjabi Muslims settled down with Mexicans in Central California, and Ahmadi and Sudanese Muslim mis-sionaries proselytized among African Americans throughout the Midwest and Northeast. At the national level, however, American Muslims responded — not by challenging the racist underpinning of exclusionary citizenship and immigration laws nor by pointing to their accomplishments and contribu-tions as American citizens — but by relying on contemporary ethnological classifications of race to argue that they should be considered “white.”

The ties between social and economic interests and race were also significant in how minorities weathered the Great Depression. As Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in their seminal study of ethnic and racial minorities in New York, Beyond the Melt-ing Pot, immigrants, many of whom had become owners of small businesses in the city, developed a network of patron-age based on ethnicity. “The Chinese restaurant uses Chinese laundries, gets its provisions from Chinese food suppliers, provides orders for Chinese noodle makers. The Jewish store

owner gives a break to his rela-tive who is trying to work up a living as a salesman.” Since the jobs provided through these net-works came with meager pay, this system of ethnic patronage provided ethnic businesses with an inexpensive labor pool that helped them make it through the Great Depression.

It could be argued that groups that formed during the Great Depression, such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, similarly sought to use Islamic symbols and prac-tices as a means of establish-ing a distinctive ethnic identity among African-American mi-grants to northern metropolises. Their business ventures as well as their message of economic self-reliance (“buy black”) were intended to provide a means for African Americans to weather the Great Depression. And they were, for the most part, success-ful. University of Michigan so-ciologist Erdmann Beynon, who wrote the first academic study of the Nation of Islam, reported in 1938 that at the time of their first encounter with the teachings of the Nation of Islam, nearly all its members were “recipients of public welfare, unemployed, and living in the most deterio-rated areas of Negro settlement

in Detroit, [but at] the present time [August 1937], there is no known case of unemployment among these people.” Some of their employment was no doubt the result of post-Depression hir-ing, but because of their new re-ligion, members of the Nation of Islam saw themselves as socially different from other black Ameri-cans in a way that gave them an economic advantage. They reported that they “secured work much more easily than have oth-er Negroes. They offered thanks to Allah for this evidence of his favor.” And, Beynon observed that “their claim appears to be justified. … Through the Nation of Islam they have gained a new status and a new confidence in themselves.”

Racial self-identification and solidarity have thus played a significant role in how Ameri-cans of all races have negotiated their social, political, economic and civic lives since colonial times. The tragic consequence of this has been that the man-agement of competing social, political and economic interests has also been dependent on race and has taken such nefarious forms as slavery, segregation, nativism and institutional-ized discrimination. Fear and violence were instrumental in


our challenge has not been to imagine a post-racist America but to realize it in a society in which social, political and economic interests have long been closely tied to race.


maintaining these racist poli-cies and institutions, and as such, they also shaped racial experiences in America. As James Baldwin wrote regard-ing the Nation of Islam’s theol-ogy in 1962, “one did not need to prove to a Harlem audience that all white men are devils. They were merely glad to have, at last, divine corroboration of their experience.”

Pluralism as a contentious idealTo recognize that race, state violence, social identity and political and economic interests have been intertwined in Ameri-can history is to acknowledge that pluralism is a contentious ideal. No articulation of national purpose nor idealization of an American national identity today can capture the multitude ways in which Americans have experienced and envisioned what it means to be American. We have different national memories based on our racial and ethnic backgrounds. No celebration of American ideals nor of American civic life could get us beyond the legacy of racist policies and practices. To overlook this enduring legacy is to deny the roles that racial minorities have played in shap-ing America. To see America solely through its racist legacy,

however, also runs the risk of trivializing the ideal of equal-ity in shaping American society and politics. “[T]here are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than Ameri-can Negroes; … we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smart-ness,” W.E.B. Dubois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Indeed, many racial minorities have condemned the American government and society for rac-ism by holding them account-able to the founding ideals of equality. Even when Malcolm X declared, “American democ-racy is hypocrisy,” he did so by pointing out that America cannot rightfully self-identify as a democracy when freedom, justice and equality are denied to black Americans. He asked audiences: “If democracy means freedom, then why don’t we have freedom? If democracy means justice, then why don’t we have justice? If democracy means equality, then why don’t we have equality?”

The problem we face today as we strive to get beyond racism in America is that while we know that the ideal of equality has been experienced varyingly by Americans of different back-grounds, we cannot abandon it

as part of our national memory nor do we have any national narratives of America that envi-sion equality as a contentious problem from which a plural-istic society could emerge. We continue to have before us two primary paths of inclusion into a mainstream American society. One requires the performance of loyalty to the United States and its founding documents, requiring minority communities to read themselves into a trium-phalist sacred history of Ameri-ca as a union of diverse peoples with “equality and justice for all.” The other participates in American society by holding it accountable, not by its own founding principles, which have been tainted by the violence of racism, but through ethical judgment of its history, policies and institutions.

It should be noted that it was not until the late 1960s that one could participate in American society by holding it account-able for racial discrimination. Prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, state laws impeded the equal participa-tion of racial minorities in many parts of America. As such, racial minorities had no reason to celebrate the state as they found their footing in America. The state was often their problem even if it, as Tocqueville ob-served, touted the inviolability of equality for American de-mocracy. In a telling example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt


to see America solely through its racist legacy, however, also runs the risk of trivializing the ideal of equality in shaping American society and politics.

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announced the establishment of the predominantly Japanese-American 442nd combat team during World War II by assert-ing that “no loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of citizen-ship, regardless of his ancestry. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been gov-erned is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ances-try. A good American is one who is loyal to his country and our creed of liberty and de-mocracy.” Ironically, the 442nd combat team was a segregated unit in a segregated army, and many Japanese-Americans con-tinued to remain in internment camps and were denied vot-ing rights because naturalized citizenship remained restricted to whites and people of African ancestry.

Pluralism and equality have been contentious ideals through-out American history but public discourse on American national identity has rarely acknowl-edged them as such.

Pluralist contentions among American MuslimsAt the turn of the 20th century,

W.E.B. Dubois identified “How does it feel to be a problem?” as the question that captured Amer-ica’s outlook on its black citi-zens. “A century later,” Mousta-fa Bayoumi, conflating Arab and Muslim identities, writes in his book titled after Dubois’ ques-tion, “Arabs and Muslim Ameri-cans are the new ‘problem’ of American society. … [S]ince the terrorist attacks of September 11

and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Arabs and Muslims … now hold the dubious distinction of being the first new communities of suspicion after the hard-won victories of the civil-rights era.” What Bayoumi does not point out is that American Muslims are also the first racially diverse religious minority whose inclu-sion has become a problem for American society. Historically, the inclusion of white religious minorities had been facilitated by the First Amendment, which prohibited the state from estab-lishing a religion in the country


American Muslims are also the first racially diverse religious minority whose inclusion has become a problem for American society.

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and guaranteed individuals and groups the right to free exer-cise of religion. This allowed religious outgroups to organize and establish themselves long before they came under national scrutiny. When they became a source of national concern — as the Catholics did in the middle of the 19th century, or the Jews in the early 20th century, and the Muslims at the turn of the 21st century — they had the financial and human resources to fight back and defend their right to practice their religion by appeal-ing to the U.S. Constitution and defining the scope of America anew by calling Americans back to the founding principles. Racial minorities, as I stated above, could not appeal to the state or celebrate American laws to earn their inclusion; rather they had to fight for their rights by overcoming racist laws and structures. As such, racial and

religious minorities have had different national memories, which in turn affected the ways they integrated into American society and politics. Religious modes of integration allow for the celebration of America and its freedoms while racial modes of integration make a claim on the state and seek protection from it to overcome the legacy of racism.

Given the racial diversity of American Muslims, it is not surprising that these differing modes of integration manifest themselves in American Muslim politics along racial lines. The differing visions of America as a bastion of religious freedom and as a polity with a dark history of racial inequality could be seen in a recent debate between two American Muslim intellectuals — Vincent Cornell and Sher-man Jackson. Cornell accuses

Jackson of ignoring the uni-versality of American political values, which granted religious freedoms to all Americans, thus paving the way for the inclusion of Muslims in contemporary America. He writes that Jack-son purports a “soft version of Shari‘a fundamentalism” when he states, “It is emphatically not my aim to vindicate the Consti-tution by conferring upon it the status of law (or even a source of law) that is binding on the Muslim moral/religious con-science on a par with shari‘ah (the Sacred Law of Islam).” In contrast with Jackson, Cornell aligns himself with Muslim leaders such as Feisel Abdul Rauf, author of What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America (2005) and founder of the Cordoba Initiative, who seek to use public reason to attain an “overlapping consen-sus” of political rights and


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religious values. According to this view, “the United States is a polity whose ethics emanate from universal moral principles that are grounded in the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” Envi-sioning an explicit overlap be-tween the U.S. Constitution and Islamic values, Cornell travels the well-trodden path of social and political integration through religion in American history.

Jackson, however, critiques what he perceives as Cornell’s desire to “apotheosize the American nation-state” through an “ap-peal to a would-be panacean liberalism, the poverty of whose freedom, equality and toler-ance is painfully demonstrated and repeatedly confirmed.” He reminds Cornell and other white Americans that the same Constitution that promised religious freedom also con-demned black Americans to slavery. He pointedly asks, “If Cornell wants to make the substance of the Constitution … binding on my moral/religious conscience as an expression of some sort of ultimate truth, I should like to ask when the Constitution acquired this proud preeminence: When it declared me three-fifths of a human? When it was constitutionally

legal for him to enslave me? … Of course, all of this ultimately changed. And this is precisely my point: what changed was the substance, which everybody recognized as not transcendent but changeable.” Jackson does not disregard the binding nature of the Constitution, but rather than celebrating it as Cornell and Abdul Rauf would suggest, he calls for an acceptance of its legal provisions that guarantee freedom of religion in exchange for the protection of civil rights. In other words, he accepts the le-gal authority of the Constitution while relying on Islam to hold it ethically accountable to a higher source of moral reasoning.

Democratic anxietiesWithin the Cornell-Jackson debate lies a significant clue to the underlying anxieties sur-rounding American Muslims. The question is not whether American Muslims can be loyal citizens — they have been for decades — but how loyalty to American democracy ought to be constituted. This is an old question. At one level, the question has been asked in seemingly neutral ways in terms of who could be trusted to act democratically. Can Catholics and Muslims be trusted to hold elected office? Could blacks and women be trusted with the vote? How about the poor or the convict? But when we exam-ine of whom these questions have always been asked, we see they have always been asked of non-white, non-male, non-Prot-estant groups. In other words,


The question is not whether American Muslims can be loyal citizens—they have been for decades—but how loyalty to American democracy ought to be constituted.

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they have always been asked of groups without access to the spheres in which legal and political decisions are made in America. As that sphere has ex-panded through the struggles of women and minorities, America has been forced closer toward its political ideals of equality in spite of its democratic anxieties.

Today, we continue to see American anxieties about the fragility of democracy — a political institution that has to be protected against itself — playing out in relation to American Muslims. Wide-spread fears about shariah law belie anxieties about Muslim citizens undermining American democratic structures. Discus-sions of whether Islam and democracy are compatible — as though any religion in the world is inherently compatible

with democracy — similarly demonstrate anxieties about democratic choice. Can Mus-lims be trusted with political choices in a democracy? These fears reveal a deep mistrust in American democratic processes and institutions at one level and anxieties about the loss of cultural and political hegemony among white Protestants at an-other. That settling these anxi-eties is the work of the post-9/11 generation is evident in the election of the first Muslim congressmen, Keith Ellison and André Carson in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and the election of an African-American president who, though unequivocally Christian, was born to a secu-lar Muslim father who named him Barack Hussein Obama. These elections signal that most Americans wish to reinforce their belief in the transfor-

mative power of democracy that allows for the inclusion of people of different racial and religious backgrounds in American society, even as they remain so suspicious of Islam and Muslims that they are not greatly troubled by increased government surveillance nor by the erosion of due process (recall the assassination of the militant American Mus-lim leader Anwar al-Awlaki). Although I focus here on race, anxieties about who can be considered an equal citizen and can participate in democ-racy are also anxieties about gender and class. It is hard to realize a post-racist America if we continue to indulge these democratic anxieties and treat American democracy as a sys-tem that has the seed of its own undoing embedded within it.


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American Muslims to the rescue? If American Muslims repre-sent the new “race problem” in American society, they are also looked to for the solution. As a racially diverse religious minority whose history in the United States dates back to the colonial era, inclusion of Ameri-can Muslims in the mainstream American identity could mark a new beginning in the conten-tious history of pluralism in America. The centrality of the ummah in Islam, which ideal-izes a universal community founded on faith rather than na-tional or ethnic identity, further makes American Muslims ideal for embodying a post-racist American identity. We could see attempts at constructing this American identity, at home and abroad, in the most recent version of the Department of State’s representation of Ameri-can Muslims’ lives in a booklet titled American Muslims. As evidenced by the following cita-tions, this publication depicts America through the eyes of select Muslim citizens to dem-onstrate for American Muslims how they ought to participate in American democracy and to reinforce, for all Americans, the promise of democratic values and processes.

– “When American Muslims work to improve their coun-try by helping it grow to include all of its members, they are strengthening a

time-tested American tradi-tion, a custom of choosing participation over preju-dice. … It was this tradition that so many ethnic groups called on to gain acceptance in America’s mainstream.”

– “Like the rest of the nation, we were horrified and out-raged by the loss of innocent life [after the attacks of 9/11]. We were also scared, not knowing how we, as Mus-lims would be perceived and treated by our new neighbors. … Instead of encountering hostility from the wider com-munity, we found that half of the people at the mosque that day were Americans of other faiths who had come to express support and solidar-ity. This story is a testimony to the courage and compas-sion of ordinary Americans who chose pluralism over prejudice.”

– “While stories of how dispa-rate peoples become Ameri-cans are not always free of conflict and tragedy, the on-going narrative of America is the continuous unfolding of unity through diversity.”

– “Like other Americans, U.S. Muslims welcome some of their government’s policies and disagree with others, do-mestically and international-ly. And like other Americans, Muslim Americans express their approval and dissent by writing opinion editorials

in newspapers, appearing in news programs and speak-ing publically in universities and think tanks. They join organizations that work for change, and start new ones. Despite some challenges, Muslim Americans largely believe in America’s promise of justice and equality. Most say they trust the fairness of elections and have confi-dence in the judicial system. Most U.S. Muslims also say they identify strongly with both their country and their faith, and like other Ameri-cans, see no contradiction between these identities.”

– “My experience has shown that the Muslim community has an extraordinary amount to offer when it comes to building communities that better exemplify America’s higher and still not fully realized ideals.”

– “Today American Muslims are among the most edu-cated, entrepreneurial and hardworking faith com-munities in the U.S. They are more likely than the average American to have an advanced degree and to be business owners. Ameri-can Muslims are on aver-age younger than any other faith group, with an average age of just 35 years old as compared to 54 or older in other communities. This means that they are more likely to be employed and



contributing to the growth of America’s economy as workers and job creators.”

What is missing from such cel-ebrations of America and Ameri-can Muslims are memories of the struggles of American Mus-lims as slaves, as immigrants of color with limited rights, as subjects of racial prejudice, as a community that also has inter-nal class and racial conflicts. It remains to be seen whether the success of American Muslims, as a racially diverse religious minority that has come under suspicion in the 21st century, can overcome memories of violent racial conflicts and struggles. But what is clear — and the State Department seems to agree with me — is that no vision of a post-racist America is possible with-out active participation, for we are at a moment in U.S. history where Muslims stand at a unique position as a racially diverse religious minority to embody not only the ummah but also the ide-als of American democracy.

First Boston, then New York … now Los AngelesWe all know the narrative of America that pivots around Bos-ton. It begins with the Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in search of religious freedom. They worked to build “a city upon a hill” to serve as a “beacon to

the world.” As they progressed, they saw divine providence at work and moved west to cover the middle rim of the continent in what they perceived as their “manifest destiny.” Beginning in the mid-20th century, when Catholic and Jewish Americans from Eastern and Southern Europe came to write histories of the U.S., this narrative started to seem foreign, and they began to look into the history of im-migration and ethnic relations. Their efforts shifted the munici-pal pivot of America’s narrative to New York. Ellis Island, the “melting pot,” “nation of im-migrants” became central to the narrative of America. This does not mean that Boston or other parts of the nation were not affected by immigration and ethnic diversity. New York simply marked the social and demographic shifts taking place in American history in general.

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I lamented its lack of character. The world associ-ated it with Hollywood and Disneyland, but those of us who lived there knew that there was much more to its multibillion-dollar economy than movies and shallow entertainment. Wealthy, expansive and diverse, to me Los Angeles was a bunch of towns looking for a city. Driving on its asphalt arteries, I would

go through Irangeles, Little Tokyo, Chinatown and Olvera Street, where the Mexican roots of the City of Angeles has been memorialized. This sort of di-verse coexistence is not unique to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles is remarkable for being a major metropolis that came of age in the dawn of new civil rights and immigration laws that prohib-ited discriminatory practices based on race. While migrants from other parts of the United States had long populated Los Angeles, since the mid-1960s, it has become a magnet for im-migrants from all corners of the world, and the percentage of its white population has gradually diminished. As such, the city has historically been at the forefront of the demographic changes we are beginning to see in the United States as a whole. There is, however, no distinct narrative of America that pivots around Los Angeles, showing how people of varying backgrounds have learned to be American in relation to one another in one of the most economically and cul-turally vibrant cities in the na-tion. Do not get me wrong; Los Angeles is no model city. The 1992 riots are a stark reminder of how diversity and vibrancy require careful management, and how class differences haunt America even as we beat back institutional racism.

Nonetheless, my encounters with “diversity” since I left Los Angeles for graduate school often leaves me nostalgic for the


We live with diversity while we ponder how we ought to deal with diversity.

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messy diversity of my East Los Angeles high school, where we took differences for granted as a fact of life. Recently, I saw a version of myself that I did not recognize projected on a screen on a diversity chart at one of our college faculty meetings as a statistically “underrepresented white minority.” Was I prized or a problem? Racial, ethnic and religious diversity is increasingly becoming a fact of life in Amer-ica as a whole. While we strive for national consensus around American values and identity — e pluribus unum — we manage and negotiate diversity in our

civic lives on a daily basis. We live with diversity while we ponder how we ought to deal with diversity. If a new shift in America’s national narrative occurs, pivoting on Los Angeles and its contentious pluralism, it will remind us that integration occurs through our encounters and exchanges with one another. It took me a long time to appreci-ate Los Angeles as “a fragmented city.” If people of all races are to have equal access to civic rights and privileges in America, we should expect fragmentation in our civic spaces, and we should encourage denizens of the city to

not only learn from but also take pride in their diverse encounters and relations. As the Quran aptly states: “O people, We have cre-ated you from male and female, and appointed you races and tribes that you may know one an-other. Verily, the noblest of you before God is the most godwary of you.”

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is an Associate Professor of Religion and Humanities at Reed College and the author of “A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order.”

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