After the death of
Freddie Gray in April 2015, I recall seeing Marc Lamont Hill on CNN stating
that among the first protestors in the streets were members of a contemporary Fruit of
Islam (FOI) group. When I logged onto social media, I saw several users sharing a
video of the FOI marching down the streets in a militaristic manner, similar to
that of the popular hospital scene in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992). Shortly after this, some activists of the FOI
helped coordinate efforts to create a local peace treaty among local sets of
the Bloods and the Crips. Almost immediately, this reminded me of the 1992
Watts Truce, which was signed by four Los Angeles sets at Masjid al-Rasul, in
the aftermath of the Rodney King Verdict.
During summer of
2015, the hashtag #BlackMuslimRamadan emerged as a result of the frequent erasure
of Black Muslims from common narratives on Islam as well as the rise in
popularity of #BlackLivesMatter and the intersectional Black voices surrounding
this discourse.[1]
Eventually, these discourses expanded to hashtags such as #BlackoutEid and #BeingBlackandMuslim,
encompassing images of Blackness and Islam throughout the world. It also
created room for resisting the harmful caricatures of “thug” and “terrorist”
that have long threatened the livelihood of Black Muslims via the act of surveillance,
rendering the dilemma of “being Black twice.”[2] Moreover, through
capitalizing the “B” in “Black” when it proceeds Muslim is a form of resistance
to the stigmatic issues associated with the term “Black Muslim” itself since
1959[3] in both American public
discourse and Muslim communities.
ON A
LOCAL LEVEL.
While Sunnis have comprised majority of African-American Muslims since the mid-1970s[4] and African-American “folk”
Islamic movements have been stigmatized since the last quarter of the 20th
century[5], these hashtags have caused
some younger Black Sunnis to appreciate the legacies of this “folk Islam.”
However, most importantly, it has served as a force that encompassed Black
Muslims across the globe, mirroring the fashion in which the Black Muslim press
(via newspapers such as Muhammad Speaks and
Al-Jihadul Akbar) served as an
effective outlet to resist global White supremacy and colonialism in the 1960s
and 1970s. While Aminah Beverly McCloud notes that Muhammad Speaks (1960-1975) “…almost single-handedly took on the
charge of investigating activities against African leaders who did not wish to
continue to permit the United States to continue its exploitation of their
resources,”[6]
these hashtags created a more interactive forum (and visual) for Black Muslims internationally
that extended across various ethnic groups.
Links
-- Kam
[1] Donna Auston, “Prayer, Protest, and
Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spiritual Resistance in the Ferguson Era,” Transforming
Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2017): 19–20, https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12095.
[2] Auston, 12.
[3] In
1959, Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax’s television broadcast The
Hate that Hate Produced (1959) marked a key moment in which the term “Black
Muslim” became marginal in American public discourse, due to the program’s framing
of the original Nation of Islam.
[4] Sherman Jackson, Islam and the
Blackamerican: Looking toward the Third Resurrection (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 59–60.
[5] Aminah Beverly McCloud, African
American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995).
[6] McCloud, 53.
No comments:
Post a Comment