sociology essay

NYU Press

Chapter Title: Conclusion: #BlackLivesMatter

Book Title: Muslim Cool Book Subtitle: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States Book Author(s): Su’ad Abdul Khabeer Published by: NYU Press. (2016) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4sbr.10

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Conclusion

#BlackLivesMatter

It is fairly common wisdom that death punctuates life. It causes the liv- ing to reevaluate and reconsider just about everything, particularly that deep existential question: what the hell am I doing with my life? This question became quite palpable for me in the years since 2012 as the movement for Black lives, popularized by the hashtag #BlackLivesMat- ter, grew in response to a highly televised spate of state- sanctioned and extrajudicial violence against Black men and women. While in Black communities the problem of state violence is so well known it is almost banal, the broadcast of Black deaths through cell phone- captured video, dash cams, and surveillance tapes gave Black activists the evidence they needed to bring these concerns to the national stage. As young Black activists and their allies took to the streets, faced the police, and suffered the consequences, I had to ask myself how my story of young Muslims and Muslim Cool related to this movement. How did the project, and I myself, respond to the fierce urgency of now? The answer to that ques- tion is simple: fundamentally, the story of Muslim Cool confirms that yes, Black Lives Matter.

Existence at the Intersection of Power and Inequality

The broad Black Lives Matter movement (now represented, inter alia, by an organization of the same name as well as by events such as the Movement for Black Lives in July 2015) has shaken a mainstream U.S. American assumption about race to its core. Black Lives Matter has undermined the belief that race and racism are things of the past in the United States. This belief became increasingly trenchant after the inau- guration of the first Black president of the United States, whose election was interpreted as proof of a postracial America. This utopia is defined

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by the presumption that the country’s institutions and the majority of its citizens “don’t see race,” and thus when racism does rear its ugly head, it is an anomaly precipitated by the lone- wolf actions of White suprema- cist outliers, such as grandparents stuck in a pre– civil rights mentality, or of mentally disturbed young White men.

By the summer of 2015, young Black activists had become increas- ingly effective in pushing back against this narrative. They marshaled citizen journalism and community- based research to document the reality of state violence. For example, young Black activism made the finding of the report Operation Ghetto Storm, namely, that a Black per- son is killed by state- sanctioned violence every 28 hours, an oft- quoted statistic.1 Although their work gained momentum from this particular form of state violence, the focus of young Black activists was ultimately on articulating the multiple ways in which Black life does not matter in the United States. These include disproportional incarceration rates: more than half of the two million persons in U.S. prisons are Black and Latin@, which, according to legal scholar Michelle Alexander (2012), has resulted in another startling statistic: there are more Blacks in the prison system today than were enslaved in 1860. The devaluing of Black lives is also reflected in income and wealth: Black unemployment levels are twice the national average, and the number of Black children in poverty is more than three times that of White poor children. Thus, while the emergence of crowdfunding campaigns for White men accused of kill- ing Black men and crusades in support of the confederate flag (which inspired its own hashtag, #HeritageNotHate) provided further evidence of the insidiousness of anti- Black racism in the United States, Black ac- tivists’ focus was not on these familiar interpersonal forms of racism but rather on how anti- Black racism lies at the core of social, political, and economic life in the United States.

As the mantra “Black Lives Matter” suggests, Blackness at the in- tersection of power and inequality is also fundamentally about life— inequality at the level of life and race as a structural condition of U.S. sociality. In his 2014 book Habeas Viscus, the African American Studies scholar Alexander Weheliye offered a long- awaited (at least by me) cri- tique of a popular body of social theory. He took to task theorists such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben for failing to adequately account for race as central to our ideas of the human. In his critique of Agam-

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ben, Weheliye points out that while Agamben theorized the concept of “bare life” as a human experience that is prior to racial categorization, the real- life example Agamben cited was the “muselmann”— a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was close to death; severely emaci- ated, listless, and resigned. As Weheliye notes, the very term Agamben used to describe life prior to racial categorization was in fact a deroga- tory, racialized label— a German word for “Muslim.” Agamben’s unin- tentional admission reiterates that race is a fundamental condition of life— of what it means to be a living human— in the modern world. The identification of race as an existential reality is not meant to reify it as biological truth but rather to highlight how racialization is embedded in the state’s management of life (biopolitics, in Foucault’s term) and death (necropolitics, in Mbembe’s).

Blackness at the intersection of power and inequality is the contextual backdrop from which Muslim Cool emerges. Muslim Cool is an articu- lation of Islam, as religious belief and practice, through social justice. The collective action in which my teachers engage begins with these questions of life and the work of the self. Race, Blackness, and systemic inequality frame the activism of my teachers and the work of institu- tions such as IMAN. They learn how to understand systemic inequality through hip hop epistemologies, and this learning motivates them to “do something” as Muslims. Hip hop motivates them to be Muslim ac- tivists, because when they turn to hip hop they are in fact (re)turning to Black Islam. The (re)turn to Black Islam is made by traveling the loop of Muslim Cool, a journey that begins with knowledge of self, an ethic of the self, and action that is fundamental to hip hop epistemologies. Grounded in the belief and practice of U.S. Black Muslims, knowledge of self gave my teachers the tools to locate themselves in time and space, do the interpretive work of understanding their present conditions, and then get to the work of changing the world around them.

Hence, Muslim Cool is about self- making, about identity and sub- jectivity, about the way in which young Muslims see, experience, and interpret themselves in the world. Muslim Cool constructs and “shores up” social identity as a religious performativity that is raced and gen- dered. Muslim Cool is the engagement of Blackness as a blueprint for the Muslim self. It thus constitutes a direct challenge and a counterdis- course to the anti- Blackness of broader U.S. American society as well

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as the ethnoreligious hegemonies of U.S. American Islam. Moreover, by engaging Blackness as a way of being Muslim, from food choices to scarf styles, suiting, youth organizing, and hip hop performances, Mus- lim Cool is an embodiment of the notion that Black Life Matters; it is a demonstration that Blackness is invaluable to our collective existence. Yet because our collective existence in the modern world is shaped by race, power, and inequality, Muslim Cool has varying consequences for my multiethnic teachers. A young Pakistani American Muslim woman can look “so ’hood” while interning at an elite educational institution, whereas for the young Black Muslim woman and the Muslim dandy, “looking ’hood” inspires religious incrimination and, in the context of state violence, could result in death.

Dressing the Part: Gender, Style, and Performance

I was invited to participate on a panel about U.S. American Muslim cul- ture at the ISNA convention in 2014.2 It was the first main session of the weekend, and the other panelists were Dr. Sherman Jackson and Imam Zaid Shakir, well- known religious scholars in the Muslim community; Alexander Kronemer, the founder of Unity Productions Foundation, an independent company that specializes in films centered on the Muslim experience; and Brother Ali, an acclaimed hip hop artist. The event took place a little more than two years after the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager whose murder initiated mobilization around the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag; and less than a month after the Fergu- son, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Mike Brown, another unarmed Black teenager.

This was my first time speaking at ISNA, and the invitation placed me in front of a fairly large audience.3 I decided to use that visibility to make a statement through more than my words. I went online, found a T- shirt making service, and ordered a navy T- shirt that read, in simple white script, “Black Lives Matter.” Well aware of the circulation of anti- Blackness in Muslim spaces in the United States, I chose to wear the T- shirt during my presentation because I wanted to remind the audience that what was happening to U.S. Black Americans beyond the Detroit convention center mattered and should matter to them as Muslims. It is precisely because I was aware of the prevalence of anti- Blackness in U.S.

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Muslim communities that my decision, as a Black woman, to wear such a casual clothing item as a T- shirt on a panel with community luminar- ies was a risky proposition. To assuage that concern I paired the T- shirt with a navy suit jacket and a lime green headscarf, tied to the side in an Afrodiasporic style, and matching pleated palazzo pants. I made these other fashion choices just as intentionally as I had chosen the T- shirt. I chose a scarf style and a color that followed a Black aesthetic that is often unwelcome in spaces such as the ISNA convention. Taking cues from the Muslim dandy, I used dress as a means to push back on white supremacy and on Arab and South Asian U.S. American Muslim hegemonies.

While many consider dress to be fluff, “mere husk, the wrapping, the sugar- coating on the pill,” in Black expressive cultures style is in fact the “stuff ” or, as Stuart Hall (1998, 28) more eloquently put it, “itself the subject of what is going on.” As “the subject of what is going on,” dress is a site at which we can map not only policies but ways of thinking and being in the world that devalue Black life. The hoodie worn by Trayvon Martin is a prime example of this. Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, defended his actions by claiming that Martin looked “suspicious.” Ger- aldo Rivera, the talk show host turned pundit, famously cosigned this claim by declaring that Trayvon Martin was “wearing thug wear,” which made him as responsible for his own death as Zimmerman was (Rivera 2012). In contrast, many others, from churchgoers and state senators to the entire Miami Heat basketball team, donned hoodies as a public act to reject the idea that an article of clothing could justify the murder of an unarmed teen.

The debate over Martin’s hoodie highlights the problem of the crimi- nalization of Black people in the United States. Criminalization binds race to crime by advancing the false idea that Black people commit more crime than do other racial and ethnic groups. Black crime is seen to reflect a predisposition to criminality as a result of biology or culture. Criminalization sees potential for criminal behavior in everything a Black person does. Trayvon Martin wore a hoodie to the store. Renisha McBride knocked on a door for help. Eric Garner verbally challenged harassment. Freddie Gray made eye contact with a police officer. Aiyana Stanley- Jones was sleeping.4

Young Black men like Trayvon Martin are prime targets of the dis- course of criminalization, which has ramifications for the gendered

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performances of Muslim Cool. In U.S. Muslim circles, Muslim dandies use suiting as a form of resistance and redemption. They counter the politics of pious respectability by articulating alternative notions of piety through styles whose value comes from their roots not in the Islamic East, but in U.S. Black and U.S. Black Muslim sartorial traditions— advancing a redemptive value of Blackness. The Muslim dandy is a gen- dered performance of an explicitly heterosexual Muslim masculinity that resists broader white supremacist tropes of Blackness as surplus, excess, and lack— the Black man as the Uncle Tom, the Buck, the Old Man, and the Thug. Hence, Muslim dandies’ competing politics of pious respectability reflect broader class tensions in U.S. Black American com- munities that are gendered and sexualized.

While Black men have been specific targets, Black women are also victims of state violence and the attendant discourse on Black criminal- ity. Likewise, the female performance of Muslim Cool also reflects the intersections of race and class. Specifically, the ’hood in the ’hoodjab can conjure the “über-’hood,” in which the Black experience is reduced to a mythical and one- dimensional narrative of ruin and pleasure. The ’hood in the ’hoodjab can also be a form of erasure, making the autho- rial agency of Black women invisible and reifying a female politics of pious respectability in which the sole acceptable type of headscarf for a Muslim woman is the hijab, worn in one non- Black, hegemonic form.

Black criminality and related tropes of Black underclassness and hypersexuality have become facts of Blackness, and these facts animate the disavowal of Blackness within U.S. Muslim communities, as de- scribed in this book. As we have seen, forms of policing that repudiate an unadulterated Blackness are undergirded by broader ummah- wide anti- Black sentiments. These facts are institutionalized and endow eth- noreligious hegemony with the power to push Black music in particular and Blackness in general outside the realm of “tradition” and “proper” Muslim practice.

Yet as we have also seen throughout this book, Blackness is polyse- mous— it carries multiple meanings simultaneously. Accordingly, the ’hood and the ’hoodjab can be part of an architecture of the Muslim self that is not an authenticated performance but a racially sincere em- bodiment through which Black Muslims can reaffirm the value of Black life, most particularly their own. Indeed, one of the main arguments of

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this book is that Muslim Cool underscores how critical Blackness is to the self- making of U.S. American Muslims. The U.S. American Mus- lim’s choice to engage or disavow or instrumentalize Blackness in the construction of the self is fundamentally shaped by the politics of race, class, and gender in the performance of identity in the United States. Those Muslims who do Muslim Cool seek to counter prevailing ideas within and outside the U.S. Muslim community that devalue Black life. Their suits and headwraps are embodied forms of resistance that, like my T- shirt, defiantly declare: Black Life Matters.

The Question of Appropriation

In mainstream U.S. American society, Black expressive cultures are the epitome of cool. However, this fact of Blackness— that it is essen- tially cool— is the outcome of a process of objectification. Black styles and Black bodies are rendered into objects— stand- alone signifiers of transgression with style— appropriated for the use and the profit of others. In April 2015 Amandla Stenberg, a young U.S. Black American actress famous from The Hunger Games movie, released a video called Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows. The video, a high school project Sten- berg created with a friend, details these processes of objectification and appropriation. She cites the use of stand- alone signifiers— watermelons, gold teeth, cornrows, and Black women themselves— in music videos, movies, and the personal styles of White actors and musicians.5

Stenberg argues that while the line between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation can be blurry, what many members of the White U.S. American cultural elite do is undoubtedly cultural appropriation, because the cultural forms chosen are typically drawn from entrenched racialized stereotypes, such as cornrows as a sign of Black underclass- ness (Stenberg 2015). These styles are transferred out of Black communi- ties and donned to be cool, for parody, for profit, or for all of the above. The connection to racial myth is not eliminated in this move; rather, it is punctuated— racial stereotype is what makes the appropriated cultural form or artifact valuable in its new context. I do not know whether Ms. Stenberg has read Fanon, but her analysis echoes Fanon’s theorization of the transformation of Black people from subjects into objects based on myths woven by “the White man . . . out of a thousand details, anecdotes,

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stories” (Fanon 1967, 111). As an object, Black life does not matter— it is disavowed— or it matters only when it can be instrumentalized— made useful for non- Black life. Accordingly, Ms. Stenberg ends her video with a haunting question: what would America be like if we loved Black peo- ple as much as we love Black culture?

The manner in which Blackness is policed in U.S. American Mus- lim communities begs the same question: what would U.S. American Muslim communities be like if they loved Black people as much as they love Black culture? The performative context of U.S. American Islam is an echo of the broader society in which Blackness, in its fullest expres- sions, is disavowed, leaving as the only sanctioned Blackness that which is objectified— turned into an instrument. Disavowal and instrumen- talization are extensions of Fanon’s early analysis: the Muslim Negro is bad (religiously suspect) as well as badd (cool). Black expressive cultures are bracketed out of Islamic practices or, when included, they and the bodies that perform them are policed in such a manner that, as the poet Amir Sulaiman put it, “what makes you Black and American is haram.” This kind of engagement with Blackness is grounded in a U.S. context in which unequal power relations among U.S. American Muslims are tied to racialized claims of proximity to the “tradition.” However, the move to disavow and instrumentalize Blackness also takes its cues from a lon- ger history of ummah- wide anti- Blackness, which renders claims to the Islamic tradition that are tied to Africa tenuous at best and fully negated at worst. These facts of Blackness, namely, disavowal and instrumental- ization, are different techniques that do the same work, the opposite of Muslim Cool, by declaring that Black lives don’t matter.

It is in this fraught context that Muslim Cool intervenes. Muslim Cool does not see Blackness as a break with the Islamic tradition that needs to be policed into conformity. Instead, Muslim Cool identifies the interconnections and intersections between the “Black” and the “Mus- lim” as a pathway to connect to the Islamic tradition. Critically, in this identification Blackness is embraced on its own terms— unpoliced and uncoded. Muslim Cool is a powerful intervention by young Muslims across race and class who are moving toward Blackness by using hip hop to form their Muslim identities in a U.S. American Muslim community whose perspective is colored by the lenses of anti- Blackness. Therefore, to answer my rephrasing of Ms. Stenberg’s question: if we, U.S. Ameri-

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can Muslims, loved Black people as we love Black culture, we would look a lot like my teachers. We would look like a community that binds itself to the Islamic tradition by binding itself to Blackness. We would look like Muslim Cool.

The Challenges and Potentials of Solidarity

In July 2015 the Movement for Black Lives held its first national conven- ing. Event organizers invited “all Black people invested in this movement to join the convening to shape our present and chart our future” (Move- ment 2015). For the conveners, the creation of a space by Black people for Black people was critical for mobilization as well as for healing and recharging in order to organize against the many forms of violence that specifically target Black people. But their decision was not without con- troversy. One Palestinian journalist tweeted “Segregated organizing?” as she questioned the wisdom of “organizing along racial lines” (Rania Khalek, @RaniaKhalek, July 22, 2015). Detailing that debate is beyond the scope of this discussion, but the event is pertinent here because the choice to create a space that privileges Black people is directly related to the aforementioned problem of cultural appropriation. If the pattern in society is to objectify Blackness in order to appropriate it, then it makes sense that Blacks would want spaces where their self- determination is not compromised. Moreover, the creation of this kind of space is also a practice of racial sincerity, in which race is not about authenticity but about sincere bonds between people that enable collective liberation.6

Muslim Cool and its techniques of Blackness also reiterate race’s sincerity; it is unsettled and unsettling and it is a tie that binds. High- lighting the links between race, gender, and religious subjectivity in the United States, Muslim Cool illustrates that while religion may seek the Divine, religious identity is not transcendent but rather is produced through intersubjective relationships charged by the complexities of race. Critically, these complexities can challenge cross- racial solidarity. While Muslim Cool seeks to intervene in the facts of Blackness at play in wider American society and in the specific contexts of many eth- nic Muslim spaces in the United States, the practice of Muslim Cool is not completely disentangled from the quagmire of appropriation. In the field, engagements with Blackness were always trailed by the specter of

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minstrelsy— for the non- Black Muslim, is Muslim Cool just a means to be edgy?

As we have seen, when Muslim Cool is done across race, it is in- formed by the racial politics of Black cool as youthful rebellion. On some level, what makes Blackness attractive to young non- Black Muslims is that it diverges from the hegemonic Muslim Desiness and Arabness of their home communities. However, for my teachers, prac- titioners of Muslim Cool, the relationship to Blackness does not begin and end there, as is often the case with the appropriation of Blackness, particularly through hip hop. Whereas hip hop’s rebelliousness has now become mainstream, for my teachers hip hop remains an alternative to mainstream popular culture, whose values they see as the antithesis of who they should be as Muslims. Moreover, their relationships to Black- ness are not only constructed through the adoption of styles initiated by Black Muslims but also through interactions with real- life Black people through activism that directly confronts the violence of rac- ism. As Esperanza remarked (quoted in the Introduction to this book), Muslim Cool consciousness is something my non- Black teachers “had to fight for” and continue to fight to maintain, because while the ghost of minstrelsy does not determine the meanings of Muslim Cool, it is nonetheless ever- present.

Just as important, however, racial complexity can provide the ele- ments that make cross- racial solidarity possible. Accordingly, Muslim Cool is also a way of being Muslim that extends the legacy of cross- racial solidarities in the United States. Specifically for my non- Black teachers, the ways in which they see and align their own experiences as racialized minorities mimic earlier traditions of Afro- Asian and Arab- Black U.S. American solidarity. In particular, hip hop’s reiteration of the Black radi- cal tradition enabled my teachers to reject notions of race and ethnic- ity that mark immigrant U.S. Americans as model minorities and Black U.S. Americans as the “anti- model” minority. Muslim Cool thus offers a way to disrupt narratives of division among Arab, Asian and Black U.S. Americans.

My non- Black teachers extend these legacies of solidarity through their activism but also in the way they challenge the boundaries of Mus- limness within their ethnic Muslim communities. When they travel the loop of Muslim Cool and (re)turn to Black Islam, they take on knowl-

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edge of self as an ethical epistemology as Muslims. When they undo nar- ratives of anti- Blackness in the way they think about and perform their Muslimness and encourage others to do likewise, they open up a new space for solidarity between differently racialized Muslims. For them, Muslim Cool is, then, both a means to critique their position as racial minorities in the United States and a means of intervention in intermi- nority relations among U.S. Muslims.

We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains . . . We Gon’ Be Alright

One organizational aspect that has come to define the Black Lives Mat- ter movement is its leadership style. The civil rights and Black Power movements had many leaders, whose biographies we continue to learn, yet the period, or more specifically our memory of it, is defined by the singular and charismatic leadership of individuals such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. In a compelling contrast, while many people around the United States could easily recognize the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and were mobilizing around it, it was unlikely, for better or worse, that those same people would recognize the names of the three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who started it.7

The movement, like its civil rights predecessor, also took to march- ing in the streets and, like the uprisings of the past, also resulted in the destruction of private property— the kind of resistance that polite com- pany likes to call rioting. The stance of the old guard civil rights estab- lishment toward this form of rebellion has been to call for calm and to reassert the necessity for demonstrators to protest peacefully. The di- verse body of young Black leaders at the helm of the Black Lives Matter movement has taken a different position. Although they did not call for rioting, they did call for the disruption of business as usual, for example, during “die- ins” at a mall in St. Louis, by the Water Tower in Chicago on Black Friday, and in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, along with many other locations.8 They also called for the valuing of “people over profit,” pointing to the irony that outrage over damage to private property often outweighed outrage at the loss of Black life from state violence.

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I read the style of the Black Lives Matter movement and its divergence from that of the older civil rights tradition as a creative effort to subvert a state that has become adept at administering dissent. The domestica- tion of racial politics is a hallmark of the post– civil rights and post– 9/11 United States. Domesticated racial politics narrow the concerns of U.S. communities of color to their rights to legal and affective citizenship. This is a move away from internationalist and transnational frameworks of belonging to a right that only the state can endorse. Therefore, the very demand for rights reinforces the authority of the state. The post– civil rights and post– 9/11 era is defined by the ways in which this desire for belonging is taken up by the state, which coopts dissent through its administration of dissent. To put it more plainly, the state and the Black political establishment would like the movement for Black lives to pro- test through approved channels, but the movement has chosen to resist on its own, Black terms.

The contours of this debate map the limits of Muslim Cool. Through- out this book I have argued for Muslim Cool’s bona fides as a coun- terdiscourse and a counter- performativity of Muslimness in which, in contrast to dominant paradigms, Blackness is central. Yet in the pres- ent context Muslim Cool’s alterity is also constrained by and entangled with the state. Entanglements with the state are particularly pertinent to Muslim Cool, because as Muslims my teachers are subject to both the post– civil rights multicultural state and the parallel post– 9/11 surveil- lance state. On the one hand, the state seeks to “include” U.S. American Muslims as a multiracial U.S. minority group like the African Americans (to use the official term) as proof of American exceptionalism. On the other hand, the category “Muslim” stands as a signifier of a threat to the state, and Muslims are thus frequently questioned as to their belonging. These parallel state discourses create a political landscape in which U.S. American Muslims, in order to contest claims that they do not belong to the nation, must cut a hard bargain with the state. Accordingly, Mus- lim Cool is also a timely illustration of the very real constraints on the political imaginaries of a critical racial and religious minority. These constraints are significant but as the movement for Black lives has dem- onstrated, they are not insurmountable.

At the Black Lives Matter protests I attended while preparing this manuscript, it was common for organizers to lead demonstrators in

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chanting a mantra composed by the U.S. Black woman revolutionary activist Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” It was reported on social media that in a confrontation with the police at the conclusion of the Movement for Black Lives convening (which I did not attend), demonstrators also chanted “We Gon’ Be Alright,” the chorus of a song with the same name by the hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar. I think these verses, Shakur’s and Lamar’s, point to what the future may hold for Muslim Cool. The future of Muslim Cool, and of Muslims in the United States more broadly, lies in its investment in its alterity— the ability to imagine, articulate, and participate in alternate choices for resistance and political vision. This is a prospect that comes at high risk; but we have nothing to lose but our chains . . . we gon’ be alright.

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