Abstract
In this paper, I insert the importance of teaching race through Middle Eastern America and Muslim America. By bringing in critical analysis of Middle Eastern America and Muslim America, I offer theoretical insights and pedagogical strategies in the education curriculum to teach race that will deconstruct, destabilize, and interrogate the dominant White-Black racial logic in the United States. While my theoretical engagement with Critical Race Theory complicates how we theorize race in the United States, I couple the theory with transhistorical, transnational, embodied, performative pedagogical strategies to enable a wide assortment of ways to engage with the dynamism, fluidity, and constantly shifting nature of race and Whiteness through an engagement with scholarship on Middle Eastern America and Muslim America. I present a way to teach race that enriches the curriculum on race in the education program while preparing future educators with resources to support students and expand the conversation on race and racism during this time of the “global war on terror” and rising Islamophobia.
Ethnic Studies, as an educational and social formation (Ferguson, 2012), emerged in the late 1960s as an important site to discuss histories of race and racism, provide counter-narratives to White settler-colonial histories, acknowledge the uneven histories of capitalism, and interject the lives of ethnic and racial others into the U.S. history curriculum (Abelmann, 2009; Banks, 2008; Montez de Oca, 2013). However, there have been obstacles to Ethnic Studies across the high school and college curriculum. Conservative educational pundits devalue Ethnic Studies as not a legitimate (read as White) field of study; rather these conservative pundits label Ethnic Studies as lacking the “objectivity” that undergirds Western epistemologies. We even see this in the present day with President Donald Trump’s demands to take out diversity training in public institutions and eliminate any classes that employ critical theories of race. Thus, there have been cases, especially in that state of Arizona, of White conservative political actors pulling or attempting to pull out Ethnic Studies and histories of people of color from the high school curriculum (Davila, 2012).
One of the reasons for this devaluing of Ethnic Studies and the histories of BIPOC communities is that most of the high school teachers are White teachers who are trained to teach White students (Milner, 2007). Instead of expecting critical theories of race just in the Ethnic Studies classes, Norma Marrun (2018, p. 288) suggests that “We need to look more closely at how diversity courses offered by departments outside ethnic studies are being taught, and we need to assure that ethnic studies faculty participate in approving and evaluating diversity courses taught in other departments.” Thus, it is of utmost importance to insert Ethnic Studies into the Education curriculum that foregrounds Middle Eastern and Muslim America in order to prepare future teachers in their conceptualization, understanding, and teaching of race K-20. 1
With regard to teachers of color in the classroom and the teaching of critical theories of race, there is a serious inadequacy impacting the field of Education: “half a percent (0.5%) are American Indian and Alaska Native, two percent (2%) are Asian American, seven percent (7%) are African American, and eight percent (8%) are Latinx.” (U.S. Department of Education, 2016; see also Marrun et al., 2019) If the majority of teachers K-20 are white, we need to critically interrogate the quantitative data. Thus, we must consider how “In the absence of a critical race-conscious perspective, quantitative analyses tend to remake and legitimate existing race inequities.” (Crawford et al., 2018, p. 126). The classification of Arabs, Middle Easterners, and South Asians as “White” on the census at different historical moments do not translate into the “wages of Whiteness” (Roediger, 1991) or their structural power (Gualtieri, 2009; Jamal & Naber, 2007). As David Roediger (2004, 1991) details, the Irish and Italians racialized Black communities, structured their labor in prestigious terms in relation to Black labor, had the power of unions, were able to buy property, and had rights to bodily integrity that were not available for non-White communities like Arabs, Persians, Armenians, Kurds, and other Middle Eastern communities (Harris, 1993). In order to correct this omission and examine White supremacy in its broadest context, we must account for race in expansive ways besides just the Black-White normative racial logic.
By centering the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT), 2 I offer this syllabus as a way to understanding the expansiveness of race and racism across U.S. institutions, including the field of education (Gottesman 2016). Instead of falling into the trap of “post-racialism,” “color-blindness,” and a utopic vision of the university in the United States (Bonilla-Silva, 2007), I argue that racism in engrained in the fabric of U.S. society and its institutions of socialization. While dominant binary conceptualizations of race can posit the Black-White racial binary as the only site to theorize race and account for racism, following CRT’s focus on the contemporary and historical registers of race and racism, I question fundamental assumptions about race and foreground race through strange racial figures in U.S. history—Middle Easterners and Muslims. In this paper, I offer a syllabus, with various pedagogical strategies, that foregrounds Ethnic Studies in the education curriculum on race through teaching Middle Eastern and Muslim America that complicates the dominant Black-White dichotomous understanding of race. It is important to utilize pedagogical tools to understand how religion is racialized in service of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism in the United States (Alsultany, 2012; Naber, 2012). I argue that teaching race through a syllabus on Middle Eastern America and Muslim America provides future educators with the tools to equip K-20 students with the analytics to comprehend and confront racism in their daily lives (Marrun, 2018, p. 276).
Marrun et al. (2019, p. 841) explain, “The climate and culture of teacher preparation programs are racist, and continue to reproduce Students of Color’s racial isolation and marginalization.” The instruction in schools for teachers is to prepare them to teach Christian White students; it does nothing to engage with the needs, histories, and heterogeneity of the student body at the school, such as the Muslim Americans in our schools (Ahmad & Szpara, 2003; Haddad et al., 2009; Milner, 2007). Azusa Callaway (2010, p. 219) explains, “Muslim students felt that most of their teachers and classmates knew little about Islam and had misconceptions and negative stereotypes about Islam and its values, which affected Muslim students.” To further complicate matters, the solutions proposed by the research in education essentializes the experience of Muslim American students through the prism of religion. What goes missing is a critique of how race, Christianity, and Whiteness structure education and the experiences of Muslim students (Beaman, 2017; Keaton, 2010).
As CRT alongside Ethnic Studies have historically developed self-awareness and given students the tools for political action, teaching race in the education curriculum must attend to the lived experiences of race for the growing Muslim immigrant communities, African American Muslims, communities of color interpellated as Muslim, and Muslim refugee communities in the U.S. college classroom. Teaching race by invoking only the Black-White binary limits theorizing the ever-expanding and dynamic nature of the White/non-White binary and its corresponding racisms (Tarasawa 2012, 2013; Khoshneviss, 2018, 2019).
The class syllabus is organized in ways that offer critical theory, expansive historiographies, and nuanced pedagogical strategies to counter the dominant and simplistic national narrative on race. By highlighting first the histories of Muslims and Middle Eastern subjects in early 1900s United States, this historicity underscores CRT’s emphasis on storytelling to challenge U.S. epistemologies of race by highlighting the dynamicity and instability of race through the racial ambiguity of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and non-White “Others” (Ho, 2015; Maghbouleh, 2017; Thangaraj, 2015a). Next, by engaging with the social scientific literature concerning the contemporary moment of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, I interrogate the post-9/11 racial hysteria and its spatialization across the national landscape to foreground how race impacts specifically communities interpellated as “Muslim” and as “Arab.”
The following section explores Middle Eastern America, Muslim America, and race through popular culture. Taking seriously CRT’s call to engage in interdisciplinarity, challenge dominant ideologies, and realize the presence of racism in mainstream representations, this section examines the ways that Muslims are encoded and decoded in and through popular culture. Following this project, the final section brings together scholarship on Black Muslim America to understand how the Whitening of Muslim America leads to the foreclosure of the lives of Black Muslim Americans and the intersection of Blackness, Islam, anti-Black racism, and rising Islamophobia. Studying race through Middle Eastern America and Muslim America is vital to understanding racial formations in the United States and finding ways to teach race from K-20 that serves to interrogate, critique, engage, and exceed the Black-White racial logic during a time of rising Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Such strategies provide educators and students with an expanded understanding of race that equips them with comprehensive tools for social justice.
Research Positionality
It is important to acknowledge researcher positionality to account for how our autobiographies, our social locations, our relations to power, and our epistemologies inform our research and teaching (Marrun, 2018; Milner, 2007). As a cis-gendered, male, Christian, heterosexual, middle-class, ethnic Tamil South Asian American scholar studying Muslim Pakistani America and Muslim Kurdish America (Thangaraj, 2015a, 2019), I understand the ways that I am both folded into and pushed out of tropes of Muslim-ness on a transnational scale. As a higher caste Christian, I have access to caste and religious power as a result of anti-Muslim rhetoric both in a Judeo-Christian White America and in a high-caste Hindu India (Thomas, 2018). As my racial identity is sutured through transnational pathways of race and race-making, my labor for Muslim civil rights in the United States must also include fighting for sovereignty for Kashmiris against the on-going Indian Hindu upper-caste coloniality of Kashmir (Patel, 2019).
As Rich Milner (2007, p. 388) states, “Moreover, it is important that researchers possess or are pursuing deeper racial and cultural knowledge about themselves and the community or people under study.” In fact, the US-led “global war on terror” campaign captures a wide assortment of actors as “Muslim” and “terrorist” including Middle Eastern diasporas, South Asian diasporas, Latinx communities, and African American communities (Rana, 2011). As a scholar, I work with these communities to battle xenophobia, fight back against Muslim bans and refugee bans, advocate for BlackLivesMatter, and help immigrant and refugee students prepare for higher education. By assembling a syllabus for Middle Eastern America and Muslim America and race, I critique the very ways that Area Studies and U.S. imperialism have governed our cartographies of race, our spatialization of race, and our epistemologies about migration. I am offering theory and pedagogies, through this syllabus, that challenge the racial stereotyping of Muslim and Middle Eastern America while attending to the multiplicity and contradictions of race (Lowe, 1996; Milner, 2007, p. 388). Therefore, I begin by interjecting scholarship on the early histories of people from the Middle East and those interpellated as “Muslim” to offer a wider scope for understanding race in early U.S. History that does not privilege the Black-White racial logic as the only way of understanding race and racism in the United States.
Inserting “Muslims” in Early U.S. History to Theorize Race
This section will delve into the emerging scholarship to review histories of Middle Eastern and Muslim communities in the United States in order to lay out a historical landscape that accounts for racial Others to the Black-White racial logic. By employing these early histories of Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants in the United States, I utilize CRT to interject these as counter-narratives to the Whitened, Christian history of the United States that erases non-Christians from this history while dismissing their claims to racism (Harris 2002). It is a pedagogical move that is necessary to equip future teachers with a realization of the longer histories of Middle Eastern and Muslim subjects in the United States and how these communities have been racialized as the Other to dominant Whiteness, subjugated Blackness, and abjected Asian-ness.
In the last three decades, there has been a slow but steady rise in scholarship concerning Middle Eastern diasporas in the United States (Gualtieri, 2009; Naff, 1998, 1993). By teaching race through Middle Eastern and Muslim America, I provide one key site to examine racial normativity that is structured as White, middle-class, fit, male, heterosexual, and Christian whereby excluding a wide swath of religious, racial, sexual, gendered, classed, and (dis)abled Others (Lorde, 1984). To add, the minimal discussion of race, Middle Eastern diasporas, and Muslim communities is part of a colonial legacy where Muslims are spatialized outside Western nations, Western epistemologies, Western modernity, and bound in “anachronistic time” (McClintock, 1995). Thus, it is important to excavate longer histories of the racialization of Middle Eastern subjects and Muslim subjects in early U.S. history.
I begin the class by teaching the work of Sarah Gualtieri (2009) to showcase how migrants from Greater Syria (the area encompassing Lebanon and Syria) came to the United States in the early 1900s and had to situate themselves within a dominant Black-White system of racial citizenship and increasing anti-Chinese racism. Through Gualtieri’s scholarship, students are able to grasp how Greater Syrians utilized Christianity, claims to civilization, and difference from Persians, Chinese, and African Americans to make claim their Whiteness (Gualtieri, 2009; Maghbouleh, 2017). In particular, with the rise of “Yellow Peril” racial formation and anti-Chinese racism in the United States (Omi & Winant, 1994), African Americans and Greater Syrians sought to distance themselves from the supposed barbarity, religious difference, and racial non-Whiteness of the Chinese as a way to claim racial belonging in the nation (Jun, 2011). Greater Syrians claimed “Semitic-ness” and “Asiatic Whiteness” as a strategy to create distance from the Chinese, oscillate away from Blackness, and gain the rights of property ownership, marriage to White women, voting rights, and rights to one’s self and identity (Gualtieri, 2009; Lipsitz, 1998). As we can see, this racial category of “Asiatic White” created an alternate Whiteness through “Asiatic-ness” that destabilized the hegemonic geographies of Black-White epistemologies while introducing students to the power of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism in managing Whiteness and Blackness in the United States. Such scholarship allows future teachers to realize the expansiveness of race in early U.S. history and how the production of racial difference did not rely solely on the Black-White racial paradigm.
By including such scholarship in the Education Curriculum, future teachers K-20 are able to also understand that these multiple and contradictory diasporic productions of race did not always align with the dominant racial epistemologies in the United States. Rather, the White/non-White binary collapsed Persians, Arabs, and South Asians as non-White and as racially ambiguous subjects in the Black-White racial landscape (Maghbouleh, 2017; Thangaraj, 2015a; Thangaraj et al., 2016). Such racial ambiguity meant that some communities were theorized outside the frame of race entirely. The mandate of CRT requires that we acknowledge race in the structure of U.S. society and thus racial ambiguity does not mean a refusal to engage race but rather a deep examination of how such ambiguity operates within and against the confines of the hegemonic Black-White racial logic.
While Middle Eastern and Muslim subjects were racially ambiguous, which allowed mobility within the national landscape and within these systems of racial classification, Blackness was racially over-determined (Arnaldo Jr, 2019; Brooks, 2009). The structures of governance during Jim Crow from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s included ever-expanding police forces and the legitimation of the Ku Klux Klan, which meant that racial difference was enforced brutality for African Americans (Alexander, 2010; Hale, 2016; Ortiz, 2004). While illustrating how Middle Eastern diasporas exceeded the boundaries and policing powers of the Black-White system of racial governance in the United States, it is necessary to interject simultaneously the scholarship that acknowledges the agency of African Americans through their engagement with Middle Eastern and Muslim difference. For some African Americans, passing phenotypically as White and performing proper class respectability provided one strategy, be it dangerous, for social mobility. Yet, there is little in the scholarship on racial passing outside the Black-White racial binary. For example, African Americans took on identities as Muslims and Arabs as a means of shifting the external White gaze away from being raced to being seen through a lens of (racialized and exoticized) religion (Bald, 2011).
The racial ambiguity of Muslims, as a completely unintelligible racial “Other” outsides the territorial, corporeal, and symbolic boundaries of the Black-White racial boundary offered opportunities and performances of “Otherness” without the same state and social violence directed toward African Americans (Naber, 2000). Therefore, African Americans in the 1910s and 1920s donned turbans and used “Middle Eastern” accents as a means to move through Whitened spaces that were otherwise not available to them (Bald, 2011; Ngo, 2014). The East was a mysterious and desirous place that was part of the American performances of cosmopolitanism and modernity (Ngo, 2014). Unlike the “Orientalism” practiced by Europeans to distinguish the Occident (Europe) from the Orient (Said, 1978), Orientalism in the U.S. involved forms of consumption and mimicry of the foreign exotic “Other” (Prashad, 2000). Here we are able to see how African Americans managed their Blackness and mobility in and through Muslim-ness and Middle Eastern-ness. African Americans using religious markers of racialized difference as “Arabs” and “Muslims” is an example of the limits of theorizing race and racism through only a Black-White binary. Their passing as religious Others demonstrates the flexibility, instability, and unboundedness of the Black-White racial logic that co-exists with a desire for the exotic Muslim Other in the United States.
Bengalis in the US and Muslim America
Alongside the theorization of Islam in the American racial imagination and the experiences of African Americans, I introduce students to the experiences of Bengali 3 Muslims as a way to see how “Muslim-ness” opened and closed spaces for mobility both within and outside the dominant Black-White dichotomy. Through understanding the racial positioning of Bengali Muslims in the early 1900s U.S. South and U.S. East Coast, the relationships between Muslim identity, mainstream racializations, and the relationships to Whiteness surface. In particular, I teach Vivek Bald’s (2011) chapter in Bengali Harlem (Harvard University Press) on Bengalis in early 1900s New Orleans to demonstrate how the category of Muslim, while limiting one’s ability to claim Whiteness in full, allowed for certain embodiments of difference that were more palatable than Blackness for White Americans.
The “Hindoo” racial formation was part and parcel of constructing a racial ambiguity for Bengalis as a result of their immigrant status, religious practices, phenotype, and accent that exceeded the confines of the hegemonic Black-White dichotomy (Bald, 2011; Thangaraj 2015a). These Bengalis were classified as “Hindoos” in the early U.S. census records that conflated Hinduism, Islam, South Asia, and racial “Otherness” that located South Asians as always foreign to the language of citizenship in the United States. In the early 1900s United States, especially the southern United States, where segregation and Whiteness operated through law (Haney-Lopez, 1994) and through racial discourses (Goldberg, 1993), Bengalis, as a result of their representation in the Black-White binary as exotic others (Hindoos) and as a result of the White desire for foreign “Otherness”, spent considerable time in White spaces selling their wares during times of de facto (by social practice) and de jure (by law) segregation. African Americans were not able to move through segregated spaces like the Bengali traders.
Yet, Bengali mobility was possible only during the day. Time, seasons, and space intersect in important ways in the racialization of spaces (Burdsey, 2016). Bengali non-Whiteness opened opportunities during the day for sociality with White locals but they lived in the Black quarters with African American women. These working and living arrangements mirror Historian James Loewen’s (2006) account of sun-down towns across the United States. These sun-down towns opened their borders for Black labor only within the confines of the day. Thus, with the sun setting, all African Americans were expected to leave the town or face state and/or White vigilante violence. Nighttime opened up anxieties that expose the very hegemonic visual regime of race that demands clear visibility of the body to consolidate racial epistemologies (Hesse, 2007). Night becomes a time of danger and the unknown, which is ever more connected to how Black bodies are understood as danger and risk to themselves and to other communities (Hartmann, 2016). Here we see how Bengalis traversed White America in different ways temporally and yet could not escape their rightlessness and marginality. These historical excavations provide valuable information on racial Otherness that was fundamental to race-making in U.S. history while offering us a way to see the permanence and flexibility of the hegemonic Black-White racial logic and its systems of governance. These histories of Muslim Bengalis and Christian Greater Syrians are pivotal counter-narratives to the dominant Black-White racial history of the United States.
Contemporary Period, Art, Muslim Terror, and Whiteness
When moving to contemporary examples, I utilize social science and Cultural Studies scholarship to offer an interdisciplinary analysis to examine how anti-Muslim and anti-Middle Eastern racism infiltrates numerous aspects of our lives in the present day. Additionally, it is important through such an interdisciplinary toolkit to disentangle, deconstruct, and destabilize universalist and monolithic understandings of race and racism in diverse Muslim American and Middle Eastern American communities. Since a wide swath of ethnic and racial communities are folded into the category of “Muslim” (Rana, 2011), these communities are brought into subjectivity through the categories of ethnicity and religion that precludes the longer history of race and anti-Muslim sentiment in U.S. society. To engage with race through Middle Eastern America and Muslim America, one names White supremacy, racism, colonialism, and U.S. empire whereby “re-situat[ing] these phenomena as key shaping forces of the contemporary world, in a context where their role has been systematically effaced from view.” (Bhambra et al., 2018, p. 2). By inserting Middle Eastern America and Muslim America to discuss race, I acknowledge the U.S. nation-state’s response following the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent intensification of state violence toward Middle Eastern America and Muslim America (Cainkar, 2009; Jamal & Naber, 2007; Naber, 2012).
The post-9/11 racial hysteria consolidated the “Muslim-looking” (Ahmad, 2004) racial formation where certain non-White communities were hailed as Muslim, Arab, and “terrorist” (Puar, 2007; Thangaraj, 2014, 2015b). Furthermore, the U.S. initiated an unlimited “global war on terror” campaign to fight terrorism globally, which led to the increased state surveillance, deportation, detention, and marginalization of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Muslim American communities as evident through the rise in Islamophobia, Muslim bans, and refugee bans (Maira, 2017, 2009; Paik, 2020). The ostensibly outward-looking global rhetoric of the war on terror is actually a camouflage and justification for increasing measures to subjugate the internal “Other” as much as the external one (Burdsey, 2016; Rana, 2016). Although Muslims make up roughly 1% of the US population, “Three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) overestimate the size of the U.S. Jewish or Muslim populations, incorrectly stating that one or both of these groups make up more than 5% of the U.S. population.” 4 The post-9/11 racial hysteria lead to the inflating and exaggerating of the number of Muslim Americans. These exaggerated numbers serve the purpose of depicting Muslim America as an imminent and infinite danger. In this instance, future teachers can easily utilize the ACLU websites to capture the increased incarceration, detention, and deportation of people deemed as the “Muslim danger.”
While the racializations of “Muslims” often locate them as always foreign and outside the political, cultural, and affective parameters of modernity imagined for Western White Christian subjects (Inhorn, 2012, 2018), rich ethnographic work on Muslims in urban sites in the United States proves instrumental to challenging such racializations. I teach Ahmed Afzal’s (2014) intricate ethnography of Pakistani Americans in Houston, Texas alongside Su’ad Khabeer’s (2016) important work on Muslim style and Black Muslims in Detroit, MI, Junaid Rana’s work on Pakistani Brooklyn (2016), and Jamilah Karim’s (2009) scholarship on South Asian and Black Muslim communities in Chicago and Atlanta. Through such ethnographies, one can see the lateral connections between various communities of color whereby racialization and identity formation transpire across minoritized communities and not only in relation to the dominant White center (Hong & Ferguson, 2011; Thangaraj et al., 2016).
Art and Theorizing Race
As the figure of the “Muslim” and “terrorist” appears in so many textual venues and discourses (Alsultany, 2012; Shaheen, 2014), I request that my students utilize art to theorize “Muslim-looking” (Ahmad, 2004) racial formations. What I am demonstrating through this art project is the ability to train students to capture larger social phenomenon and theorize racial formations of Middle Eastern America and Muslim America through art. Historically, social movements have used art to challenge dominant and oppressive powers (McCaughan, 2012). Furthermore, through art we can see how the racial boundaries of belonging, intimacy, and affectivity surface (Bracey et al., 2014).
For this project, students must represent the main theme(s) in our readings using any medium of art. Since students are forced to work outside the traditional academic paper, they are often anxious and worried about such an endeavor. Before students assemble their art projects, I inform students that they are not graded on artistic quality. Rather, they are graded on the time and labor they put into the project. One of the outcomes of this project is that students from a variety of social locations can use their own experiences and embodied ways of being in the world to translate theory into art. Art becomes a medium to realize one’s own analytical voice and perform deeply the materialization of race in everyday life.
I utilize the art project because I believe in the multiplicity of mediums for both teaching and learning. Traditional academic papers by themselves can perpetuate the normative ways of thinking and normative ways of assessment that foreground dominant White epistemologies while refusing to acknowledge the expansiveness of race, racism, and racialization. Contra dominant Western viewpoints, writing is not necessarily or ever the best means to express affect, emotion, feeling, anger, and other experiences. Art opens up spaces to capture the nuances and complexity of the social world in ways that are performative, involving active engagement, and exceeding the structure and discourse of academic papers. By using the artistic forms, which have included collage, painting, charcoal, live musical performances, dance, short films, and spoken word poetry, students translate social theory into artistic mediums while engaging in interactive mediums of learning that allows them to embody the expansiveness and contradictions of race through artistic productions. Two Kurdish American artists, who I am familiar with, Nuveen Barwari and Beizar Aradini, are spotlighted in the syllabus as resources so that students have access to art used by Middle Eastern and Muslim communities that address the transnational registers of race-making. 5 Their art proves useful in providing models and perspectives for students in organizing their own art projects.
On the day the project is due, students bring their artistic pieces to show in class. Other than spoken word poetry, musical performances, and choreographed dance which require students first perform in front of class, the other art projects are put across the walls of the classroom. This becomes one key element of students learning from and through each other by witnessing the multiple, complicated, complex, and contradictory renditions of race and racial formations through art. For example, a student painted the twin towers with Muslim-expressing faces to highlight how the coming down of the towers was also a sign of the future destruction of Muslim American life. When I taught Junaid Rana’s (2011, Duke University Press) Terrifying Muslims, one of my undergraduate students played her harp to dictate the changing musical themes in Hollywood cinema that represented Western epistemologies and ideological construction of “Arabland.” Rana’s book captures the ways that the colonial legacy of race continues to structure ever-expanding categories of the “Muslim” and vague “Arabland” that is part of the U.S. nation-states surveillance of Middle Eastern and Muslim communities both within and outside the nation.
In the early 1900s till the early 1980s, the representation of people from the Middle East was that of an exotic, desiring racial “Otherness” (Jarmakani, 2015; Ngo, 2014). As a result, the background music for Hollywood movies included slow and exotic tunes that were instrumental in representing the desirable “Other.” My student, accordingly, started her presentation with the slow beats that foregrounded a mysterious and exotic “Arabland.” However, since the 1980s and especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the background music changed to much faster, harder tones and higher pitches that laid the work of marking Middle Eastern space, time, and bodies as danger and as always in danger (Shaheen, 2014). The student switched seamlessly from the desirable exotic tones to the ones of danger to signify the changing racializations of Muslims and Middle Eastern communities whereby Middle Eastern men became the danger and Middle Eastern women were signified as in danger (Inhorn, 2012).
Popping Cultural Productions of Muslim America
Theorizing the politics of representation proves critical at this juncture in order to see how racial meanings infiltrate taken-for-granted social realms such as popular culture. As we saw above, the student’s engagement with Rana’s (2011) book was also an engagement with “Muslim-looking” (Ahmad, 2004) racial formations in popular culture. Marrun et al. (2019, pp. 852–853) state, “race matters and primary and secondary schools, school districts, teacher education programs, educators, teacher educators, and educational administrators and policy makers are woefully ill-equipped and unwilling to meaningfully confront, much less begin to effectively address, issues of race, racism, racial microaggressions, and the persistence and pervasiveness of White dominance in education.”
Additionally, Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade (2004) stresses the importance of using popular culture in the curriculum as a way to connect with student experiences, showcase larger systems of representations, address racializations in popular culture, and illuminate the ways that popular culture weaves into the classroom. Popular culture is an important pedagogical tool and resource in addressing race in expansive, sophisticated, and nuanced ways that allow future educators to also initiate active and self-reflective learning in their classrooms. Therefore, in this section, I shift my pedagogical focus to enable students as critical readers and producers of popular culture.
As popular culture becomes a taken-for-granted site for creating commonsensical and stereotypical representations of Middle Easterners and Muslims, the next reading is the theoretically sophisticated monograph by Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media (New York: NYU Press, 2012). In this book, Alsultany covers the polyvalence, fluidity, and contradictions in U.S. mainstream entertainment that create both positive and stereotypical presentations of Muslims in order to ingrain Western democracy as racially progressive at the same time these representations simultaneously mark the dangerous Muslim for the White gaze. To train students to read popular culture with nuance, I additionally assign Stuart Hall’s (2001) important piece on “encoding and decoding.” Hall deconstructs mainstream discourses and popular culture to showcase how racial meanings are encoded. In the process, Hall makes the important intervention that while popular cultural discourses are encoded in particular ways, there are multiple ways that these discourses are decoded by audiences. Thus, through Hall’s article, we can decipher the many ways that the Black-White racial language and anti-Arab racism are both encoded through popular culture but then decoded and appropriated in multiple ways by the audience.
Accordingly, simplistic binary portrayals of “Muslims” in popular culture offer an expanding racist vocabulary and the continued negligence surrounding anti-Muslim racism in our schools as Muslims are presented as unassimilable into American-ness. Thus, it is important to illuminate how the “Muslim” as a figure appears and does the work of race in U.S. popular culture. Alsultany’s (2012) work forces us to interrogate how U.S. imperialism needs both the figure of the “good” Muslim along with the “bad” Muslim to salvage the U.S. as a site of racial democracy while justifying U.S. state violence against “Middle Eastern,” “Arab,” and “Muslim” communities (Mamdani, 2005). The production of the “good” and “bad” Muslim is a geopolitical investment in creating notions of the good global subject on the international scene and the good citizen domestically (Balogun, 2020; Thangaraj, 2015b, 2019). Popular culture forces students in education to unpack what they take for granted with the racialized representations of communities of color. As future educators, they can utilize popular culture as pedagogy and as one set of important archives in their social studies and history classes to teach about race in the United States.
For these readings on the politics of representation in popular culture, students are required to work in groups of three or four. Their project is to make a popular cultural product to share in class. When students assemble and share their popular cultural product (be it a video they make, a song they write, Instagram post, Tiktok video, or any other popular culture form), the students must engage with the readings for that day and invoke the main stereotypical, hegemonic, and problematic set of representations of Middle Eastern communities and Muslim America while providing important counter-representations and critical counter-narratives. As one of the central tenets of Critical Race Theory foregrounds counter-narratives and storytelling, the assignment falls in line with such principles of Critical Race Theory by simultaneously illustrating both the mainstream depictions of Middle Eastern and Muslim communities and offering a rebuke to such racialized portrayals (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Milner et al., 2013). Additionally, it also challenges aspects of Critical Race Theory which have, arguably, reinforced the Black-White binary.
As Rich Milner (2007) stresses the narrative and counter-narrative component of Critical Race Theory, this syllabus offers students and future educators a chance to understand, conceptualize, and produce a counter-narrative through popular culture within the Education curriculum. The stories of activism and daily lived experiences of race, racialization, and anti-Muslim racism provide important points in structuring the counter-narratives and the counter-stories to the mainstream discourse on Muslim America (Maira, 2017, 2009; Naber, 2012; Peek, 2010). These ethnographies on the activism of Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities post-9/11 give a vital roadmap to understanding how these racialized communities respond to, manage, and challenge their own racialization. Through these readings, students grasp an understanding of the voice of the community and acts of agency. By engaging with both hegemonic representational practices and the nuanced scholarship, students create a much more expansive, complicated, and non-essentialized portrayal of Middle Eastern America and Muslim America that attends to the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” (Lowe, 1996) within these communities. Furthermore, through such a project, students gain the skills to work with various media, technology, and archives in the service of critically engaging with race, racism, and racial justice. Since practicing social justice is a critical part of CRT, the popular cultural counter-stories enable students to be cultural producers and take active roles in knowledge production centered on social justice. These are important pedagogical skills where future educators gain a sense of fluency with various forms of technology. At the same time, these future educators can pass along these skillsets to their middle school and high school students.
Racing the Body, Blackness, and Performing Difference
Another important project I utilize in my classes is the “Bodywork” project. Whereas the previous projects provided critical reading practices of race through art and popular culture, the pedagogic focus in this section emphasizes the body as a site of representation, agency, structural articulation, and racialization. The “Bodywork” project critically inserts the body, embodiment, and bodily comportment as sites of power to highlight Black Muslim heterogeneity and the lived experiences of race and religion that deal with both recent histories of Islamophobia and longer colonial and national histories of anti-Black racism. For this portion of the class, students are asked to think and go beyond the Whiteness and non-Blackness that often govern Middle Eastern American Studies and Muslim American Studies. In a way, the project attends to the politics of the body during this period of the “global war on terror” (Nguyen, 2011; Thangaraj, 2014) and time of anti-Blackness and BlackLivesMatter (Taylor, 2016). With the hegemony of the visual in suturing racial difference (Hesse, 2007), the bodywork project with visual displays, the observable body, and bodily performances of the reading material open a space to engage with, understand, and challenge the visual epistemologies and technologies of race and religion.
Religion constitutes one way to mediate the body, race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging (Thangaraj, 2020). In the United States, Middle Eastern and South Asian communities are conjured as the foreigners and antithetical to Western forms of social life through stereotypical decoding of Islamic religious practices of self—such as the long beards, their accent, their ethnic garb, and the calls to prayer—as non-western and backward (Najmabadi, 2004). Such discourses also have the power to erase and elide Black and African American claims to Islam, refuse Black Muslim agency, and interpellates African American communities as Christian (Besteman 2015; Hussain, 2017; Khabeer, 2016).
Black Muslims are of various ethnic, national, and Islamic backgrounds and are just one segment of a very heterogenous Muslim community in the United States (Karim, 2009). Black Muslim Americans are racialized at the intersections of anti-Black racism and anti-Muslim racism. Therefore, it is important to understand the relation between Black Muslims, race, and their particular experiences of racialization. Black Muslims must navigate the hegemony of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in deriving, constructing, and policing the boundaries of Muslim-ness. For example, many African Americans, especially when affiliated with the Nation of Islam, have been denigrated by mainstream international Muslims as not Muslim enough and there is a refusal to acknowledge the ways Black Muslim communities influence mainstream Muslim practices (Khabeer, 2016; Rouse, 2004).
For the bodywork project, I require students to utilize only their bodies, bodily comportment, and movement as a critical way, instead of the spoken word, to express how bodies are not neutral sites but rather performative spaces and quintessential sites for spatializing race (Farnell, 2009; Ferguson, 2004; Johnson, 2003). For example, when reading Mimi Nguyen’s (2011) article on the biopolitics of beauty, Western NGOs, U.S. empire, and the Global Feminist desire to “free” hijab-wearing Muslim women in Afghanistan alongside Su’ad Khabeer’s (2016) book, Muslim Cool, the group of students who presented incorporated the larger Western discourse and anxiety around the hijab/veil/headscarf as emblematic of Muslim patriarchy and women’s subjugation. They also attended to the Black Feminist politics within Black Muslim America and Black (Muslim) women’s acts of world-making (Nash, 2019). Two students played the part of the Global Feminist Western NGOs, via two White women. These White women who embodied cosmopolitanism through their dress and bodily comportment tried to pull the headscarf of the Afghan woman, played by another student, and replacing it with a United States flag—the sign of proper femininity and modernity. Another Afghan woman looks at the Afghan flag in nostalgic ways while her friend’s scarf is being pulled off. Her skepticism and nostalgia are forms of critique of racist Western humanitarian-industrial complex and a yearning for a time without Western presence. In the background is a Black Muslim woman in the United States with a hijab worn over her ears, with beautiful hoop ear rings, who is styling up for a night out (Khabeer, 2016). Her agency, her desires, and her acts of world-making disappear with the appearance of both the White global feminists and Afghan women.
This project highlighted the ways that the racial logic of the oppressed Muslim woman, with the case of Muslim women in Afghanistan, justified White feminist presence, U.S. foreign policy, and Western military presence as the only way to liberate native (Muslim) women. Thus, the bodywork project underscored how the body and comportment of the Muslim woman is read by the West as always foreign and always in need of saving (Abu-Lughod, 2013). Thus, it fails to account for the agency of Western Black Muslim women since mainstream representations utilize simplistic binary oppositions of East/West whereby Western modernity and agency is represented by the White global feminists while Muslim women are presented as non-Western and, thus, without any agency.
Such discourses spatialize the Muslim as always outside our borders whereby eliding, denying, and silencing Black Muslim Americans (Ferguson 2011). Therefore, in the students’ project above, Muslim men and Islam are racialized as foreign, Black Muslim women are denied subjectivity, and the domestic surveillance of Muslim America and the increased military presence in the Middle East are denied any racial analysis. Black Muslim women’s long historical struggle with racism and sexism in the United States and sexism in the Black community become the backdrop but denied a voice (hooks, 1999; Lorde, 1984; Pierce-Baker, 2000). Without a critical evaluation of intersectionality and how communities stand in different relations to power (Crenshaw, 1991), the policing powers and hegemony within Blackness and within Muslim-ness goes unexamined. Thus, we must be attentive to how Black Muslim women’s agency disappears even though there are long histories of their activism and their important role in shaping American Islam (Chan-Malik, 2018).
Furthermore, the bodywork project forces students to re-conceptualize the normative regimes that govern how they even take for granted the meanings imbedded onto racialized Muslim bodies as well as their own bodies. 6 To prepare students for this project, I ask students to think critically about how the body becomes the site to represent race, the process of racialization, and racism in both spectacular and taken-for-granted ways. As the body is such a powerful visual signifier, I suggest that the students use ways of moving, facial expressions, multiple bodily comportments, certain clothes, and other non-verbal gestures to flesh out how bodies come to do the work of signifying race and racial difference. With this project, I aim to help students comprehend the normative regimes that govern how they read, interpret, and understand racialized bodies.
In the same context, it also opens up a chance for students to see their discomfort with their own performances and embodying racial difference. It makes them come face to face with their own social histories of bodily comportment and performance (Balogun, 2020; Hoang, 2015). With that in mind, I encourage students to write a short paper highlighting first what they had taken-for-granted about their bodily comportment as well as how the preparation for the project pushed them to rethink their own bodily integrity and bodily performances of self. Such a task enables students to see how their own comfort with their body and their discomfort with the exercise illustrates how race and racial difference are woven into both individual and communal bodies. With regard to this exercise, students have written in their student evaluations that this project forced them to come to grips, through their bodily performances, with their relationship to regimes of power along the intersections of White supremacy, Judeo-Christian normativity, heteronormativity, middle-class respectability, and (dis)ability. Students grasp an understanding of how they have naturalized certain bodily ways of being in the world as well as normalized certain readings of bodies that involve the racialization of Muslim bodies and Black bodies in divergent ways. The very Judeo-Christian ethos and Whiteness that students might have consented to unknowingly with regards to comportment and legibility are pushed and destabilized through their bodily performances.
Conclusion
This article challenges the epistemologies grounded in the Black-White racial dichotomy by bringing in strange racial figures whose racial ambiguity and non-Whiteness exceed the hegemonic racial logic. One key aspect of inserting Middle American Studies and Muslim American Studies in the education classroom is to offer sites of critique and equipping future teachers to challenge the dominant binary racial logic both in and outside of the university by creating innovative, non-traditional, and politicized projects in and for the classroom (Chatterjee and Maira, 2014; Ferguson, 2012). Through an extensive introduction to race through “Muslim-looking” (Ahmad, 2004) racial formations, students in education classes will have an expansive understanding of race and Whiteness that engages with Ethnic Studies and challenges the Black-White racial binary.
A class equipped with Critical Race Theory proves critical in not only challenging the racial status quo of the university but also in equipping young leaders with the critical skills to address anti-Muslim racism and understanding the power of the Judeo-Christian-based White-Black racial logic. In the process, pedagogical strategies are offered to engage students in education classes and give them tools for teaching K-20. The syllabus provides an expansive, transnational, and transhistorical study of race in the Education curriculum that is not bound to U.S.-centric and diametric conceptualizations of race that are territorialized within U.S. borders. Accordingly, “one of the main objectives of ethnic studies courses remains to decolonize knowledge and power by incorporating non-Western epistemologies and pedagogies into the classroom.” (Marrun, 2018, p. 276) Not only will this curriculum allow us to open spaces to theorize race broadly, it foregrounds understudied, local, non-Western, and non-White epistemologies of race in the service of deconstructing the Black-White racial logic. The lives of South Asian diasporas, Middle Eastern diaporas, Black diasporas, and African American Muslims prove vital in deciphering race across many locales, through many epistemologies of race, and in relation to transnational forms of social justice against global White supremacy (Gupta, 2006; Rana, 2011).
By engaging the present geo-political context through rich ethnographies and multiple innovative class projects, I situate CRT in the Education curriculum as an intellectual conversation with Middle East Studies. This class syllabus attempts to converge these interests by scrutinizing the interconnectedness of race, class and gender not just in the Black-White Western contexts, but also in the Middle Eastern and Muslim diasporas, where the racial hierarchies and other forms of structural inequalities are produced, practiced and sustained through religion, ethnicity, and state power. Finally, by offering such classroom projects to students of Education, we can equip future teachers as cultural producers, activists, and scholars who realize the power of their bodily comportment, their words, and their artistic mediums in relation to the larger society.
As diversity courses are required at the undergraduate educational level but not at the graduate educational level, making this course as a requirement at both the undergraduate and graduate level would serve both the university and future educators by preparing them to engage race in complex ways. Additionally, with the growing number of Hispanic-serving institutions and Asian American and Pacific Islander-serving institutions along with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the time is now more than ever to center such theoretical frameworks to reach a wide segment of future educators and leaders in this country. What and how we teach is a political act that gives future educators the tools to address the expansiveness and contradictions within race (Shahzadi, 2018). Engaging with the important and foundational scholarship on Critical Race Theory and education (Milner, 2017a, 2017b), students will have an opportunity to theoretically and pragmatically open possibilities for collaboration for social justice in the most expansive of ways. In this time of explicit White supremacy and the Trump-era of state and vigilante violence against communities of color (Thangaraj et al., 2018), we need our classrooms more now than ever to be the sites to produce radical democratic learning practices that center multiple socio-historical contexts and methodologies of protest in the service of justice (Hale, 2016).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewers and Rich Milner whose theoretical interventions have greatly shaped this article. Dr. Sarah Gualtieri and Dr. Pauline Vinson encouraged me to write the first draft of this article. I am indebted to Norma Marrun, Daniel Burdsey, and Jon Hale for their insightful suggestions and I learn so much from them. I thank my college, graduate school, and professional mentors and teachers: Robert Brown, Benny Hary, Kathryn Kozaitis, Rich Milner, Nancy Abelmann, Martin Manalansan, Junaid Rana, David Roediger, Brenda Farnell, Helaine Silverman, Mimi Nguyen, Andy Orta, Arthur Spears, Daniel Burdsey, Angie Reyes, Jeff Montez de Oca, Evelyn Alsultany, and Scott Brooks. I want to recognize my high school teachers who were so supportive of me as a newly arriving immigrant child from India: Mrs. Lucille Calligan (English), Mr. Leonard Howard (Civics), Senora Magda Del Aguila (Spanish), Mrs. Geraldine Simmons (Geometry), Mr. Phil Bates (Art), and Mrs. Dorothy Day (Computer Science). Luther Smith, Helen Pearson, Houston Baker, and Charlotte Pierce-Baker model for me complex pedagogy, commitment to social justice, and compassionate collaboration; I love them and am lucky to have them in my life. My parents, M. Thomas Thangaraj and Cecelia Thangaraj, have never stopped teaching me about how to be in this world with a commitment to justice. I learn so much every single day from my partner Alena Thangaraj and our amazing children, Jeya Evelyn Thangaraj and Louis Abraham Thangaraj.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
