The FBI relabeled Black Muslim groups as cults to dodge religious protections.

Evidence

During World War II, for example, the FBI believed that African American civil rights activists were colluding with the Japanese, which led to mass surveillance of African American dissidents under the code name RACON. To circumvent legal prohibitions against targeting religious groups, the FBI labeled the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple cults and violent ideologies—the same framing by right-wing Islamophobes in the post-9/11 era whose primary targets are immigrant Muslims. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 599

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking whether the FBI’s ‘cult’ relabeling set a precedent reused against other minority religions (e.g., Scientology).
• XREF: The ‘cult’ designation as a legal loophole parallels how governments deploy legal classification to enable surveillance, echoing Milgrom’s institutional design work. — connects to: The FBI surveilled black Muslims as seditious threats more than white Arab immigrants