Monitored and suppressed groups can gain legitimacy from state attention itself.

Evidence

Even the FBI admitted internally that drawing additional attention to the NOI may have backfired, making the organization and its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X even more popular. There was also a larger context to the movement’s growth. The US prosecution of the Cold War, its manipulation of newly independent African and Asian states, the beginning of the Vietnam conflict, and the lack of real progress on social equality at home made the religious and political critique of the NOI convincing to many both inside and outside the movement. On the domestic side, the NOI opposed integration as a solution to racism, perhaps becoming the country’s most forceful postwar voice for black political, economic, and cultural self-determination. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 406

Categorization

• QUESTION: The FBI’s own admission that attention backfired is a fertile thread — does this hold generally for surveillance feeding legitimacy?