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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