Billboard Muslims

By Manzoor Cheema

“Don’t License Terrorists, North Carolina” read proposed billboards in our sleepy Tar Heel state, featuring a militant in an Arab garb and a rocket launcher. The news for such billboards electrified civil rights bodies and before you knew, the xenophobic billboard campaign backed down.

Is North Carolina a hotbed for Muslim extremists? Did the 9/11 hijackers reside in North Carolina? Many of the Muslims are in fact professionals and well integrated in the North Carolina society. Then who was the real target for such billboards? Answer: the other brown folks, i.e., the Mexican immigrants. A lobby group opposed to Mexican immigrants receiving driving licenses supported such a campaign. Thus, some of the racist attacks against Muslims are used to further disenfranchise and marginalize many in the Mexican immigrant community.

With hundreds of billions spent on war in Iraq, communities starved of resources, and social safety crumbling; Mexican immigrants are a convenient punching bag for many to vent frustration over the loss of great American way of life. The predominantly working class status of Muslims in Denmark and the rest of Europe also makes them an easy target of racism. The same Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, that published the cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad is linked to a right-wing ruling Venstre Party that has promoted xenophobia against Muslims in the past.

While a considerable number of Muslims in the U.S. are African American, and most of the African Americans are engaged in limited income jobs, Muslim immigrants in the US have relatively higher household incomes – partly, a consequence of liberalization of U.S. immigrant policies in the 60s that opened the doors to skilled and educated immigrants. Consequently, many in the immigrant Muslim population did not face the same level of economic, political, and institutional discrimination termed “structural racism”, as faced by many in the African American and now predominantly in the Mexican immigrant communities in the U.S.

Here, then, lies a promise in the recent spate of racist attacks against Muslims in the US. There is a parallel in racism meted out to Muslims, African Americans, and Latino immigrants. It is hoped that many in the American Muslim immigrant community will use the present climate of Muslim xenophobia to challenge the trap inherent in their own class privilege and the status as a high achieving “model minority” that often creates a distance from those less privileged in the community. The concept of model minority is a huge fiction, since a few highly successful immigrants do not represent most of their own native country populations. An Indian American writer, Vijay Prashad, asserts that the immigrant “model minority” myth was created by the US establishment to embarrass and attack the civil rights movement that was demanding equal opportunities for African Americans in the 60s.

After 9/11, this false sense of privilege has been shattered for many Muslim immigrants and the conditions are ripe for them to integrate themselves with social justice movements that fight not only for the rights of Muslims, but for the rights of all the oppressed communities in the West and abroad.

Manzoor Cheema is an activist and a journalist based in North Carolina. Contact him at m_a_cheema@yahoo.com