Читать книгу Fear in Our Hearts - Caleb Iyer Elfenbein - Страница 11

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 less optimistic about the American dream, a position intimately tied to questions of race in the United States. A very small percentage of Muslims living in the United States see some contradiction between their religion and certain American ideals. This tells us that American Muslim communities are a lot like other American communities—that it’s incredibly hard to generalize across millions of people on the basis of one shared characteristic, in this case religious identity.

And yet. It’s hard to discount the data, which shows that on the whole American Muslims think of themselves—and live their lives—as Americans. We are on solid ground with this generalization.

Given all this evidence, why do so many non-Muslim Americans appear to doubt that American Muslims can be—or want to be—“really” American? And how does this relate to the kind of hostility that has left its mark on Maheen, affecting the way she participates in public life?

The Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan organization in Washington, DC, released a report about stereotypes—positive and negative—that the American public associates with American Muslims.8 Two points really stuck out to me when I read the report. Only 56 percent of respondents believe that American Muslims want to “fit in” in the United States. And only 51 percent believe that Muslims living in the United States “respect American ideals.” That means that nearly half the country thinks that Muslims aren’t fully committed to being part of life in the United States.

It’s hard to discern exactly what survey participants really mean when they respond to questions or prompts. The ambiguity of what it means to “fit in” or “respect American ideals” limits the conclusions we can reach. Still, as much of this book explores, there are very serious consequences that result from nearly half the country thinking that American Muslims aren’t fully committed to being American.9

Through my own research over the last couple of years, I have found that these sentiments—and the hostility they can lead to—have become part of public life as they never have been before. They show themselves in very local settings and on the national stage, all the way up to the highest elected office in the country.

Back in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity not too long after having advocated a freeze on Muslims entering the United States. In response to a question about whether non-Muslims could ever really know, in their hearts, that Muslims immigrating to the United States really wanted to be American, Trump said, “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost—I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation. They come—they don’t—for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”

A couple of things jump out in these comments. The default assumption at work is that American Muslims are all immigrants. It’s true that American Muslims are more likely than members of other religious groups to have been born outside of the country. A national poll of Muslims living in the United States found that 50 percent are foreign-born.10 Yet this means that 50 percent of American Muslims were born in the United States, meaning that this is the first and perhaps only home they have ever known. Conflating being Muslim with being an immigrant contributes to a sense of “foreignness” around Islam and Muslims.

His comments further underscore this point when, as something of an afterthought, he extends the argument to those born and raised in the United States. This extension reinforces the idea that Muslims, wherever they are born, aren’t and perhaps never can be American simply because they are Muslim. The word “assimilation” is really important here.

Candidate Trump’s comments, and the broader attitudes they represent, are not about Muslims believing in the promise of hard work or wanting to be full participants in public life. According to the authors of the Democracy Fund report, the doubts that 50 percent of Americans have about American Muslim commitment to life in the United States reflect concerns about “cultural fit.”

Assimilation is a model of becoming—or being—American that emphasizes sameness. It reflects a particular moment in our history of immigration: the arrival of people from Ireland starting in the mid-1800s and from Southern and Eastern Europe a little bit later. These immigrants experienced extraordinary bigotry when they began arriving in large numbers during this period. Over time, however, this changed.

The idea of assimilation often serves as a popular model for thinking about immigration and the process of becoming American. The key element of this story is time. The idea is that eventually, even if they initially encounter bigotry, everyone comes to be accepted as part of the social fabric. However, it’s really important to remember that there have always been people in the United States whose ability to be or become truly American has been the subject of debate, often pretty vitriolic and violent. Most often, it’s been nonwhites who have been subject to the most extreme forms of doubt and exclusion. As hard as it might be to face, race has always been at the heart of what it means to be American.

From the earliest moments in the country’s history, people in positions of power tried to make sure that the boundaries between white and nonwhite were clear. Official efforts include the 1790 naturalization law I mentioned above (to establish the basis for citizenship at the time of the country’s founding) and various other laws relating to enslavement, anti-miscegenation, segregation, and immigration. These efforts were all very closely related to questions about who counted as white and who could be American.

It’s no coincidence, for example, that in the early twentieth century, just as understandings of what it meant to be white were expanding to include Irish and German immigrants and their descendants, courts were hearing cases about immigrants from South Asia and parts of the Ottoman Empire—including Christians and Muslims—who claimed to be white and, therefore, eligible for naturalization. These cases are especially interesting because what counted as “white” was unclear.11

There are a variety of ways judges and other officials determined race. Some looked at skin color. Others drew on biological sciences to make claims about race. Still others thought that “civilizational heritage” determined someone’s race. Religion was not allowed to be an explicit element in decisions because of the establishment clause, but it was often a factor in more implicit ways.12 What was very clear is that being white, or being able to make a reasonable claim to being white, was crucial to the success of those seeking to become American.

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 changed that, at least officially, by moving away from race as a consideration in setting immigration quotas. If we add this to slightly earlier changes opening citizenship to people of Asian descent, we see that being white was becoming less and less an official requirement for becoming formally American.

In the context of the broader civil rights struggle that was flowering at the national level in the 1960s, these changes show that official policies explicitly linking being American and being white appeared to be coming to an end. As important as these changes have been to what it means to be American—and they have definitely been important—we also need to consider the other ways that communities signal who belongs and who does not. These can be more powerful than official policies.

The “melting pot” story of American immigration suggests that time is the most important factor in the process of becoming American—being seen as a “cultural fit” for the United States will happen for everyone eventually. Perhaps this view is understandable when we use European immigration as a model. After all, the arrival of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews, brought on much hand-wringing about whether these “races” could ever become truly American. For the most part, such debates about these particular communities were over by the 1950s and 1960s.

But it’s worth considering whether the melting pot is the best model for thinking about American Muslims today, many of whom came to, or were born in, the United States well after immigration reform in 1965 opened the door to immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The 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