Economic exclusion drove blacks to embrace Islam but could not erase race

Evidence

As Robert Dannin (2002, 25) argues, economic displacement during the Great Migration and Great Depression, and the structural obstacles to gaining access to resources presented by organizations such as the Christian (read, white) church and labor unions, formed the context for the success of Islam among African Americans in the 1930s. For many in the black community, identifying with Islam seemed to o√er a way around ”race,” as well as possible entitlement to full citizenship rights as Americans. Religion, it was believed, superseded race, an idea that Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam also took up when he stated, ”The very nature of the black man is a Muslim” (Gomez 2005, 315)—another attempt to subvert biological determinism via notions of religion and culture. Yet both the Ahmadiyya movement and the Nation of Islam remained trapped in the early-twentieth-century logic of race, which would not allow them to transpose their blackness. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 198

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the core thesis that religious conversion could not substitute for racial identity in the early-twentieth-century US.
• XREF: Connects to Burton’s earlier discussion and the broader literature on race-as-biology being displaced by religion/culture rubrics. — connects to: Black Islam’s theology refused non-violence and made equality a prerequisite for reconciliation — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 194