Yet, all too often, Americans have a picture in their minds that Muslims look a certain way and are from the same area of the world. Many assume a man with a turban or a woman with a head covering is Muslim and from the Middle East. But men who wear turbans could be Sikh. Orthodox Jewish women, like many Muslim women, also wear head coverings.
The truth is, in America especially, every Muslim has their own unique experience dealing with Islamophobia—defined as a dislike or prejudice against Islam or Muslims. Many American Muslims like me experience additional layers of discrimination and deal with many things at once: Islamophobia, racism, and gender discrimination.
I have often heard that Islamophobia sprouted as a response to the 9/11 attacks. Yet the surveillance of Black Muslims by law enforcement in the United States started decades before 9/11. Islamophobia and racial discrimination go hand in hand, and to say the 9/11 attacks caused Islamophobia rewrites history.
Since I was young, I have been asked, “How does it feel to be a triple minority?” as if I could know a different reality than the one I am living. But I have always been an African American. I have always been a Muslim. And I have always been a woman. I have experienced discrimination yet had no idea which aspect of my identity was causing the harm. It did not matter. The effect of discrimination is the same, regardless of why. One thing is definite: there is an intersectionality of being a woman lawyer who is both a religious minority and a racial minority in the United States.
Identity Is Complicated and Often Intersectional
During COVID, I was part of a Muslim women’s storytelling project. I wrote a poem titled “Ain’t I a Muslim Woman,” paying homage to the famous Sojourner Truth poem. I wanted to “prove” that I am a Muslim woman and have used the poem’s framework in different settings, refining it to express my identity. But I often wonder why I need to prove that I am Muslim enough to experience Islamophobia. I don’t feel a need to prove that I am Black enough to experience racism or woman enough to experience gender discrimination.
I have concluded that my need to prove myself as Muslim might be because America, as a society, has not fully acknowledged Islamophobia as a unique type of discrimination.
When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Muslim Ban in Trump v. Hawaii, the Court was telling the world that, in America, discriminating against Muslims was justifiable. The Court essentially relied on the trope that Muslims are terrorists. The parallels between the Supreme Court decision on the Muslim Ban and the decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, are obvious. The Court just swapped out Japanese Americans with Muslim Americans. And while discrimination for being Muslim is bad enough, added layers of discrimination based on sex and race make fighting such discrimination more difficult.
For example, there are differences in how men and women experience Islamophobic attacks. I experience Islamophobia differently than an Arab American Muslim man even though I wear a head covering and am more identifiable as a Muslim than most Muslim men. One might think that because of this, Muslim women would be more susceptible to attacks and hate crimes. I was flabbergasted when I saw Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics which indicated that Muslim men were more likely to be victims of hate crimes than Muslim women.
I met with the FBI about my concerns to discuss these statistics yet was told that I was wrong and to basically stop being a victim. I had to point out to the FBI representative that other African American women at the table who were not wearing head coverings were Muslim for the FBI representative to recognize their bias and that they had made assumptions based on how someone looked.
The truth is racial discrimination and gender discrimination have even crept into the reporting of hate crimes against Muslims. The prevalence of both has created a new term: gendered Islamophobia. It is unacceptable that in twenty-first-century America, where the freedom of religion was one of its founding principles, America discriminates against Islam and Muslims, men and women, and communities of color in such myriad ways.
Please note: The views expressed herein have not been approved by the House of Delegates, the Board of Governors, the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice or the Human Rights Editorial Board of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed as representing the policy of the American Bar Association. They are the views of the individual authors themselves in their personal capacities.
