Sunday, May 3, 2009

New Faith, Olds Fears

It seems like New Faith, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (2002) by Bruce Lawrence hasn't gotten much attention in the Muslim community nor on the web in general from what I can see from my google search...I just started it (have gotten it from amazon, used though new quality for really cheap) and love it so far. Here's an excerpt from the preface:

"Alongside Native American voices are those of African Americans. Victims of court injustice and denial of rights even with the official end of slavery more than a century ago, they embody the racism that has marked U.S. history since long before the first waves of Asian immigrants arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, and more recently, since 1965. All Americans, not just African Americans, "are imprisoned by the history of racial subordination in America," writes legal scholar Derrick Bell. While the way out of the prison is to delegitimate racism, "we can only delegitimate it," argues Bell, "if we can accurately pinpoint it. And racism lies at the center, not the periphery; in the permanent, not in the fleeting; in the real lives of black and white [and red and brown and yellow and mixed] people, not in the caverns of the mind."-p. xv-xvi

"It is my central thesis that without sustained attention to racizalized class prejudice one can comprehend neither culture nor religion, neither the views of the dominant class toward immigrants and other marginal groups nor the hopes and the fears that Asian immigrants share with other disadvantaged folk in the twenty-first-century America."-xvi

UPDATE: Additional quotes from the Introduction

"In its broadest formulation the challenge for Asian Americans is to understand where they are, or can be, or should be, in the racialized pattern of American society. At the subjective level there is no longer the bipolar model of white/black or black/white. Always complicated by the presence of Native Americans, it is now multiplied by the recent immigration of Asians and Hispanics." - p. 2

"The decisive analytic rubric is best defined as racialized class prejudice. Whiteness studies have demonstrated the pervasive influence of whiteness as an unmarked category projecting Ango privilege. Class prejudice underscores how the economic and social and cultural resources of whiteness are denied to all nonwhites, but especially to one race that is underlined as occupying the other end of an unspoken U.S. hierarchical social order, namely, African Americans. Far from being freed of racial taintedness because they are neither white nor black, neither Anglo nor African American, other minority groups--Asians, Hispanics, and also Amerindians--are implicated in that persistent biracial patterning of norms and values. Racialized class prejudice applies to immigrants as much as it does to African or Anglo Americans; it also suffuses religion and politics."-p. 10

"In sum, to pursue a binary analysis or to rely on binary categories of Asian-American or black-American is to miss the sense in which Anglo unhyphenated still projects the fullest form of U.S. citizenship, placing Anglo Americans apart from and above all other groups, whether those groups are deemed to be others, outsiders, or minorities. At the outset of new millennium the old prejudice lingers: all non-Anglos have yet to find the equal access, equal rights, equal hopes that mark the American dream."-pg. 11

"The option most often explored is to overleap class prejudice even when racial prejudice lingers. Bruce Lee and Tiger Woods may have made it, but the message of their success is not people of color unite and resist the oppressor; it is rather work hard so that you are less excluded than the other nameless minority--the Guptas or Singhs or Kims."- pg. 11

2 comments:

  1. Nice...I would agree with his central thesis. 1st attention must be given to the issue and then we must acknowledge that racial prejudices still exists on many levels. But he did seem to make one assumption: that Asian immigrants "share" the same hopes and fears with other disadvantaged folk in the twenty-first-century America. And, in fact, we may...but we must become more united in the cause. I might have to check this book out

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  2. Thanks for commenting!

    I'm on page 23 so far and am liking the author's nuanced approach. (I found out about the book btw from a blurb on the back of Dr. Jackson's book.)

    You make a good point. Later on, on page 21, the author writes "the barrier between all immigrant Muslims and the largest group of American converts, African Americans, remains high, as it does for other Asian groups defined by religion, whether they be Hindu or Buddhist or Sikh....My intent is to frame notions of cultural citizenship and cultural fundamentalism on a continuum that includes both immigrants and nonimmigrants, Asian, African, and Anglo-Americans. At the same time, I want to acknowledge, and preserve, the internal diversity of the very groups who are put in conversation with each other as though they were "obviously" different from all others when often they are also different from each other."

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