American racism against Muslims extends back to enslaved Africans

Evidence

Through law, American racism manufactured these existential binaries and then fluidly tweaked them in order to serve shifting interests. These binaries drove blanket characterizations of deeply complex and heterogeneous populations. Viewing Muslim peoples as an unbending monolith is hardly a modern invention, nor is it a hardened characterization christened after the War on Terror, the latest emanation of American racial and racist empire. Rather, it is a primary device from the American racial toolkit, used against a broad host of peoples and the first Muslim populations—enslaved Africans—whose faith was stripped from them along with their humanity. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 223

Categorization

• XREF: Directly links the African-slavery precedent to modern Islamophobia; feeds the global-synthesis view alongside Iftikhar by rooting anti-Muslim monolith thinking in American racial history. — connects to: Europeans saw enslaved African Muslims as semicivilized aids for Christianizing other Africans; Islam’s racialization dates to American slavery, not modern immigration debates — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148; Islam has been raced in America since the early slave era — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148