A community can be officially celebrated and secretly persecuted simultaneously

Evidence

To complicate matters further, the US State Department uses Dearborn as a promotional tool in its public diplomacy campaigns abroad, producing high-gloss videos (available on YouTube) that show a robust, influential, unapologetically Arab Muslim city in the heart of the American Midwest. 29 A steady stream of US government officials, military brass, and foreign dignitaries march through the Islamic Center of America, the Arab American National Museum, and the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) during visits to Dearborn. These institutions receive thousands of visitors a year, and each boasts a multimillion dollar annual operating budget. Like most churches and synagogues, the Islamic Center is supported by the offerings of people who pray or send their children to school there. The Arab American National Museum and ACCESS, by contrast, subsist almost entirely on support from major US charitable foundations and funding provided by federal, state, and local governments. In short, it is hard to imagine an American ethnic or religious community that is so enthusiastically embraced by the political and cultural mainstream even as it is relentlessly stigmatized, surveilled, infiltrated, scapegoated, and intimidated by federal law enforcement agencies. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 686

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Beydoun’s chapter and the volume’s overall pivot from interrogating Islam to examining the frightened American subject; also resonates with the double-faced state treatment of minorities found in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Spiritual and bohemian protest is absorbed as harmless ceremony by system — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 137
• SEED: Angle: ‘promotional token vs surveillance target’ — the performative embrace that functions as cover for intensive policing, an essay on how state PR and state surveillance can target the same minority body.