about people like me, whether in public or on social media, this affects me personally.
All of these things, from our lived environment and the way that people respond to us when we enter public space to the way that others talk about or treat people like us, constitute the conditions of our public lives. If we don’t feel like we belong in our community, we are less likely to actively participate in public life, or at least to participate in ways that are entirely of our own choosing. This has tremendous implications for our everyday lives.
We might be less likely to speak up if our kids aren’t getting what they need in school. We might be less likely to attend or speak up at school board meetings or to attend town or city council meetings to voice concerns about something. We might be less likely to report threats or crimes.3 We might be less likely to run for public office of any kind, whether the school or zoning boards or the town council or county attorney. We might still do some or all of these things, but the reaction from others might range from nothing to nasty looks or comments to harassment or death threats. The experience of American Muslims running for political office, which I will touch on a little later in the book, underscores this last point.
Even when the conditions of public life are challenging for people, this doesn’t mean that everything about public life is negative. As we have seen significant rises in anti-Muslim sentiment and activity over the past few years, for example, non-Muslims have also reached out to or publicly say things in support of American Muslim communities.
There are many, many instances of such compassion and empathy. These are good and important moments. But they don’t necessarily cancel out the bad. When things are happening to us—or to people we know—that make us feel like we don’t belong, our public lives can become uncertain and uncertainty can produce fear. Fear, in turn, will most certainly affect how we live our public lives.
Think back to Maheen, who talks about censoring herself when she disagrees with someone so that she will appear amicable and nonthreatening. Her public self (at the time she wrote her article) is the result of fear, and her fear results from her own experiences and what she assumes others think about her (as a Muslim). These are the conditions of her public life. For Maheen, being what every parent wants for their children—unapologetically confident, empowered, and passionate about who she is and what she thinks—requires an act of courage.
This means that there is a serious problem in the conditions of our public lives. This problem is taking particular shape today, but it has a long history in our country.
Histories and Contemporary Realities of Belonging
Who gets to fully participate in this life together has, from the moment of our country’s founding, been a matter of contention. In fact, it’s reasonable to argue that the story of our country is 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
