they found themselves unable to integrate and climb the socioeconomic ladder as quickly or effectively as the new arrivals. From their perspective, while American whiteness operated to authenticate and enhance the position of immigrant Muslims, it continued to exert the nearly opposite effect on them. Yet, the putatively universalist, race-blind discourse of historical/Immigrant Islam showed itself to be helpless before this reality, where not actually accommodating of it. Indeed, if, as has been suggested, to approach American society without the clue of race is to produce nursery rhymes, the new "Islamic" discourse of Immigrant Islam constituted a painfully vacuous melody. This would remain the case, at least for most immigrant Muslims, all the way until the events of September 11, 2001, which resulted in an anti-immigrant Muslim backlash that carried unmistakably racial implications. Today, as the "legal whiteness" of immigrant Muslims proves incapable of offsetting the negative effects of a newly acquired, post-9/11 "social nonwhiteness," it remains to be seen if they will join Blackamerican Muslims in a Third Resurrection that seeks to confront the problem of white supremacy in America without degenerating in to reverse racism and without hiding behind the empty platitudes of "Islamic" utopianism.
-Sherman A. Jackson, Islam & the Blackamerican, 16
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