Religious identity could not overcome racial stigma in pre-1960s America.

Evidence

The history of Islam in America is a harrowing reminder of the disjuncture between religious and racial modes of integration in American history prior to the mid-1960s. When in the late 1920s, Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple, he deliberately chose to organize African Americans around a distinct Islamic national identity because he recognized the roles race and religion played in America’s national identity and in the economic and social assimilation of minority communities. … In hindsight, Noble Drew Ali was naive. Religion did not wash away prejudice based on phenotype. His efforts to counter the stigma of black skin by defining a distinct, black, Moorish national identity was up against America’s white, Protestant national narrative, and brought him and his followers under state surveillance. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 291

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the volume’s core pivot from interrogating Islam to examining the frightened subject—here the American state surveils Noble Drew Ali precisely because his religious claim collides with the white Protestant national narrative. — connects to: Religious identity alone distanced Asian Indians from whiteness in naturalization law. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 118