Why "the Muslim thing" plays with ignorant white people (attempt at serious non-partisan post)

Kurt_and_Hunter

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Thu Mar-13-08 07:06 PM
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Why "the Muslim thing" plays with ignorant white people (attempt at serious non-partisan post)

Edited on Thu Mar-13-08 07:52 PM by Kurt_and_Hunter

I am not an expert on Islam, NOI and traditional black churches. I know a little. So I hope people will offer productive contributions to this thread that exceed my understanding. But this is my take on why "the Muslim thing" is such a durable problem.

I have never considered American Black Muslims (Nation of Islam) to be Muslim in the traditional sense. The NOI adoption of Islam was born of romanticizing of Islam as the least white great religion, and aspects of Islam were added to a distinctly American black empowerment, black nationalist mix of religion and social movement. NOI is as American as Mormonism... a truly American religion.

But most Americans are not very sophisticated about Islam. A lot of white people know there are a lot of African-Americans who call themselves Muslims, and that's about as much as they know.

And they know that Muslims, whatever the heck a Muslim is, are "bad" and blow up our buildings. I do not equate NOI and the Islam that we are supposed to be scared of, but many people do.

And something that clouds the issue is that the traditional black church is also part church, part social movement. Many black Christan churches are friendly with NOI and do things in the community with the NOI.

Obama has nothing to do with NOI, but he is called on to answer Tim russert's rude questions about Farrakhan because his church is allied with Farrakhan on matters that have nothing to do with anti-semitism or Islam... like anti-drug programs in the community and such.

When Jeremiah Wright praises Louis Farrakhan as the "epitome of greatness" he is praising a Muslim, albeit not a "muslim-muslim" And when he says 9/11 represented the chickens of white American violence coming home to roost he is precisely quoting Malcom X's description of 1960s riots. And Pastor Wright, in one of the clips, echoed Malcom X's famous "apple pie" quote. (And Malcom X was a Muslim, though of the NOI variety, not the traditional variety.)

From an unsophisticated perspective, Obama's church honors Muslim leaders and his pastor quotes "anti-American" sounding Muslim words.

To understand the durability of the "Muslim thing" you have to recognize the popular conflation of Islam and NOI, and that it is not at all weird for an American black man to describe himself as a Muslim. (I think Representative Ellison, our first Muslim congressman, is more of an American Black Muslim than a traditional follower of Islam, though I may be wrong about that.)

So the "Obama is a Muslim" thing doesn't sound as implausible to many folks as it should. Many, many white Americans could not begin to differentiate Islam and NOI. They have seen a lot of black American men self-identified as Muslim on TV. They know that Muhammad Ali (the most famous black American in the world from 1965 to whenever Micheal Jackson took over) is a Muslim... whatever that means.

That's why this stuff is so complicated, and so hard to bat down.

(I cannot stand religion in politics, but I try to cut Obama some slack on that front because he's the first politician with a good excuse to keep proclaiming his Christianity. Actaully, the second... I forgot Mitt Romney.)