Fear of black-brown transnational solidarity drove federal surveillance of Muslim Americans

Evidence

The 1924 National Origins Act, focused on further reducing immigration from nonwhite lands, was emblematic of the age. This new law expressed concerns among many Anglo-Americans that immigrants from non–Western European countries were bringing both physical and ideological disease to America. Such concerns were amplified in the development of domestic securities agencies such as the nascent FBI, which focused on the spread of “dangerous” groups such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Communist Party. As enormous federal, state, and local resources were committed to Jim Crow segregation, a racial apartheid system implemented most strongly in the southern United States but present in the North as well, the fear of America’s people of color uniting with colonized people abroad put the growth of Islam among black Americans at the front of the federal government’s surveillance and suppression agenda. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 376

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: the genealogy of ‘Islamophobia’ as originally anti-black — fear of Muslims was born from anti-Blackness and anti-communism rather than theology. This rewrites the standard post-9/11 origin story.