encounters with anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior can serve as an example of what many Muslims in the United States experience with some regularity—and my research certainly suggests that this is the case—then maybe we can begin to imagine the toll this might take on people’s lives, both as individuals and as members of a broader American Muslim community. Individual experiences of anti-Muslim hostility affect those individual lives. But the knowledge that anti-Muslim hostility is a more general phenomenon, that Muslims across the country are encountering hateful speech and behavior as well, reinforces and deepens the entire community’s expectation of further encounters with hostility.
This is how fear seeps into the heart.
How does this fear affect life for Muslims in the United States? Maheen’s story helps us begin to answer to this question. All of the moments she describes as having contributed to the fear in her heart took place in public—they are very much part of the conditions of her public life. Our work begins, then, by looking at this idea: the conditions of our public lives.
The Conditions of Public Life
In perhaps the most famous paragraph in the history of our country, the Declaration of Independence establishes three rights as the building blocks of life in the United States. The words are profound, and their formulation seemingly straightforward: All people have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Despite the apparent simplicity of this formulation, however, we know that in reality there are lots of different ways that people understand what the words mean.
Something key was missing from my presentation of this famous phrase. In the Declaration itself, a creator God endows all people with these rights. What this means exactly has been at the center of debates for quite some time. It could mean that the people creating a new and experimental form of government intended for religion, or Christianity more specifically, to be at the heart of national public life. Or it could mean that they were underscoring the inalienable nature of these three fundamental rights by referring to a creator God who was nonetheless distant from the everyday life of its creation. The way we interpret this phrase has significant implications for our public lives.
Other parts of the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” formulation require a fair amount of interpretation as well.
The pursuit of happiness means different things to different people. Some of the philosophers from whom the authors of the Declaration borrowed their ideas would argue that this means we should be free to pursue our own interests with minimal interference. But a “happy” life might also require guaranteed access to some basic building blocks. Identifying just what they are—and who is responsible for providing them—and then balancing this with freedom from interference in our lives is no small task.
Defining happiness, in turn, is fundamentally tied to the way we understand liberty. Prioritizing the ability to pursue our own interests means that we define liberty as negative freedom, or freedom from interference. In contrast, prioritizing access to basic building blocks of a happy life means that we define liberty as positive freedom, because without these essential elements we aren’t able to pursue a meaningful life.
How we define life itself, and what it means to protect life, isn’t any less challenging. There are very few subjects in the United States today that are more divisive than this. Debates about reproductive choice, so-called stand-your-ground laws, and police shootings all relate in a fundamental way to what happens when one person’s right to life appears to conflict with another person’s right to pursue their own interests.
The words in the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” formulation are entirely common. Yet trying to define them is very difficult once you dig just a little bit below the surface—difficult, but crucial. Very rarely do most of us actually engage in debates about defining abstract concepts like liberty or happiness. Instead, we often implicitly define these ideals through the policies and programs we support. Participation in the political system is an important way to demonstrate this support. Voting, though, is only one way that we might express what these abstract ideals mean to us.
We can also attend school board meetings and local planning board hearings; run for office; write letters to the editor or otherwise contribute in some way to public discussions; join a school club, religious institution, or civic organization that addresses pressing needs in our local communities; organize or participate in a protest; or contribute financial resources to national organizations advocating around a particular cause or issue. These are just some examples of the many, many different ways we might go about working toward what we believe to be in the best interests of our communities.
Taken together, all of the different ways that we participate in and support our communities constitute our public lives. By extension, public life consists of all the opportunities we have to work with others to figure out how to move forward as a community on a given issue or set of issues. Public life thus often requires us to work through some pretty hairy disagreements. Given our country’s enormous diversity, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that disagreements are a big part of public life. Disagreement isn’t something we can step back from or wish away. It is our reality, an outgrowth of how our country came to be and how it continues to change, just like everything else around us.
Mediating differences about big ideals and the smaller details in which they play out in our lives is an ongoing process. Our political and civic institutions are all tools we can use to do this work. It is certainly an imperfect process. And so part of our responsibility is to try and make sure that things are working as well as they can in any given moment. All of this mediating and striving—this is the stuff of public life. Mediating our differences is how we end up giving meaning, or definition, to ideals. It’s our life together.
Our life together doesn’t unfold in the abstract, of course. It unfolds in and through what we can call the conditions of public life.
The conditions of public life are all of the things that affect how much we feel like we belong where we live. Lots of factors contribute to this feeling. To help unpack all the different elements of the conditions of public life, I want to present some concrete examples that might affect whether someone feels like they belong in the public spaces in which our lives play out. I imagine that most of us can connect these examples to our own lives, even if our answers are very different. From there, we can reflect a little on the concept more generally.
Our physical environment certainly plays a role in whether we feel like we belong to the town or city we live in. We notice what the parks look like in our neighborhood and how they compare to others in our town or city. We notice whether the town or city takes care of the streets in our neighborhood. As parents or students, we notice what the schools look like inside and out. The conditions of these elements of our physical environment reflect degrees of belonging to broader communities.
One of the biggest determinants of whether we feel like we belong is interaction with other people. Take, for example, how we experience the ways people respond when we enter public space. Responses can be more or less subtle. Someone could, for example, say nasty or off-color things to you because of who you are (or who they think you are). Or they could say things about you to others just loud enough for you to hear. Sometimes responses can be nonverbal. Police officers and other security personnel might be suspicious about me as I just go about my business and follow me around. Maybe people in my local community have harassed or assaulted you or people you know because of who you are.
At times, other people’s behavior that isn’t necessary directed at us specifically can still deeply affect whether we feel like we belong in our local communities. For example, when people who live in my local community do things that are meant to make me or people like me feel unwelcome, such as vandalizing a house of worship or a particular business, that affects me personally. When
