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 it comes to details like this, it’s remarkable that it took only two minutes for Donte and Rashon to arrive at Starbucks, sit down, ask to use the restroom, and have the manager call police to report a case of trespassing.
Two minutes.
In January 2018, the Starbucks Newsroom 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
