The FBI surveilled black Islam partly out of fear of nonwhite global solidarity

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding theme — fear serves a function (justifying surveillance) for the one who holds it; parallels Islamophobia-as-domestic-control arguments in Beydoun’s chapter.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the fear of black Muslims ‘uniting with colonized people abroad’ prefigure later surveillance of Muslim Americans as transnational threats?

Related

• Fear of black-brown transnational solidarity drove federal surveillance of Muslim Americans (similarity 0.96)
• Federal attention to US Muslims historically began as anti-Black surveillance (similarity 0.83)
• The FBI surveilled black Muslims as seditious threats more than white Arab immigrants (similarity 0.83)
• The FBI framed Islam as dangerous to justify anti-black state suppression (similarity 0.82)
• The FBI surveilled black Muslim religious life as a national security risk (similarity 0.81)
• The FBI treated Black Muslims’ political Islam as a national security threat for decades. (similarity 0.81)
• Fear of black Muslims uniting with colonized peoples drove FBI surveillance. (similarity 0.81)
• The FBI conflated Black Muslim anti-racism with sedition and imperialism critique (similarity 0.80)
• State repression of the Nation of Islam conflated civil rights with communist subversion (similarity 0.79)
• The federal government actively manufactured hatred of and between black Muslims (similarity 0.78)