To Be Part of the Corrective Conscience of the West

I love this quote with such passion from Dr. Jackson:

"If historical process, however, that is, routes rather than roots, is really the stuff of which human identities are made, the immigrant Muslim (like Muslims in the Muslim world) should be able to see himself as a product of the "process of modernity," a process that enthroned not all but a particular persuasion of "white" Westerners as the standard-bearers and definers of human value and achievement.

From this perspective, the Post-Colonial Muslim might be able to see that he and the Negro are products of the same historical process. Both reflect the unlit side of the Enlightenment, the darker dimensions of the triumph of "Western" man, the scarred and mutilated underbelley of modernity, with all its hypocrisy, racial terror, and moral myopia: "We hold these truths to be self-evident," in the most brutal and inhumane period of American slavery; "Liberte, equalite, fraternite," on the eve of the the most unequal, unbrotherly, and dehumanizing period of European colonial savagery.

On this understanding, the immigrant and Blackamerican Muslim could join forces as part of the corrective conscience of the West, a new Western consciousness committed to liberating both itself and humanity from the debilitating self-alienation and idolatry imposed by the false universals of white supremacy. On this approach, rather than being divided and pushed in opposite directions by American whiteness, immigrant and Blackamerican Muslims could be united in a common cause to undermine its ill-gotten authority and ensure than domination (from the Latin dominari , to rule, to be lord, master of) remains emphatically and uncompromisingly the preserve of God alone."- pg. 95 of Islam & the Blackamerican

"This raises the question, of course, of the future of Blackamerican-immigrant relations. As I hope to have shown, there are no insurmountable obstacles to immigrant-indigenous unity. Continued conflict between the two communities will only come of a conscious decision on part of either to ignore or reject their own or the other's participation in a common history. Even on such a recognition, however, immense effort will be required to sustain a shared historical consciousness. And in the absence of the latter, the two communities are likely to continue to meander along their separate paths, coexisting in a pro forma mutual recognition, resigning themselves all the while to the impossibility of bridging their respective paths, presents and future."-pg. 97

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

"Search of Bengali Harlem: South Asian Migration and Settlement in New York City, 1910s-1950s"

Wow! Thanks to Maheen and Dinu for directing me to this

Check out this article "NYU’s Vivek Bald Reveals Early Desi Diaspora in New York"

"Bald gives a peep look into the fascinating and little-known history of South Asian New York before 1950.

The existing literature tells us that immigration from the subcontinent was merely a trickle during that period. But, starting from the stories of three Bengali Muslim men who migrated undocumented to New York during this period, Bald draws on scholarly literature, archival material, and oral histories in an effort to answer the question: what exactly did the Indian presence in New York look like in the first half of the 20th century?

His answer to the question leads us to the histories of Indian lascar sailors along the New York waterfront and to a community of former-lascars who settled in Harlem in the 1920s-1940s. These men married Puerto Rican and African American women from their adopted neighborhood and worked as dishwashers, cooks, and factory workers.

Bald reveals that by the late 1940s, they had opened some of the city's first halal butchers and Indian restaurants, and also became a significant part of the larger Harlem landscape and were building links with local religious and political figures, including Malcolm X."