Islam Takes Root in America alongside Racism

Abstract

According to current-day demographic projections, Islām is poised within the next half-century to become the world‘s fastest growing faith tradition and, with this religious particularity in mind, ―American-born Black Muslims stand out from other U.S. [immigrant] Muslims in several ways ... fully two-thirds are converts to Islām, compared with just one-in-seven among all other U.S. Muslims ... [approximately] three-quarters of U.S. Muslims are immigrants or the children of immigrants‖; a religious expansion that draws much needed race, religion, culture and ethnicity attention upon the discrete ―color line‖ saturating Muslim identity and membership. The post-1965 immigration of Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia dramatically transmuted the previous American social imagination concerning Islām—in its infancy it was known as a religio-cultural phenomenon exclusively associated with America‘s indigenous Black community—to a new highly contested and racialized domain that dramatically underscores the fraught relationship between Black and non-Black immigrant Muslims.