American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah

1. African American and Immigrant Relations: Between Inequality and Global Flows

25 1 African American and Immigrant Relations Between Inequality and Global Flows Safiyyah, a Muslim woman who lives on the South Side of Chicago , calls herself black, as do most of the others who live in her neighborhood . But Safiyyah dresses her little girl in shalwar kamiz (traditional South Asian garments) and dreams of traveling to Pakistan, a place of belonging and roots for Safiyyah. Her real roots, however, reflect a painful discovery. Safiyyah grew up in a college town in the United States thinking that she was a dark Pakistani but later learned that her South Asian family adopted her in Tanzania before migrating to the United States. Now Safiyyah knows that her biological parents were East African. It makes sense now that when she looked at the faces of the African American women at her local mosque, she sensed a mysterious kinship. Looking like an African American woman in the United States, Safiyyah experiences the racism that comes with brown skin, and she now claims membership in an African American community in Chicago, resisting the isolation and second -class treatment that she encountered in her South Asian family and community. These events explain why Safiyyah lives on the South Side of Chicago but longs to find her place in Pakistan. Safiyyah’s narrative is both powerful and provocative. I would have never imagined meeting a woman who would so strikingly challenge the categories, African American Muslim and South Asian Muslim, with which I began my research. Safiyyah claims both ethnic identities yet slips out of both at the same time. She is not a South Asian immigrant or the American-born daughter of South Asian immigrants or the descendant of African slaves. Instead, she is biologically East African. Transcending the boundaries of my research, Safiyyah’s multiple identities forced me to imagine outside the usual ethnic boxes. How do I define Safiyyah’s 26 African American and Immigrant Relations ethnicity? Not her language (English), her skin color (brown), her neighborhood (Chicago’s South Side), or her kinship (East African and South Asian) can fully describe her. Safiyyah’s narrative illustrates the unexpected, fluid forms of identity that arise from global migration. The movement of ethnic identities across the globe create new possibilities, but not without the emergence of new inequalities. Migrations to the United States have created new configurations of race and ethnicity. With this “mix of diverse newcomers,” increasingly from Asia and Latin America, ethnic identities and group boundaries have been recast,1 and it is this change that frames how the American ummah emerges as a space in which African Americans and immigrants negotiate their ethnic identities and sometimes cross the group boundaries that separate them. The possibilities for ethnic solidarity in the American ummah must be understood against the backdrop of new race relations in America, redefined by the movement of Asians and Latinos into the United States. The streams of migration that enable unpredictable ethnic genealogies are labeled by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as global flows, “flows of persons, technologies, finance, information, and ideology.” These growing flows inspire imagination, says Appadurai, prompting individuals like Safiyyah to imagine themselves in new places. Various ethnic and class groups dream and then move across the landscapes of a dynamic world, creating “images of flow and uncertainty.” Migrants move for various reasons , but for many, the hope is to make true “dreams of wealth, respectability , and autonomy.”2 Many arrive here believing in American ideals of democracy. But how do we account for a landscape that seems to steal dreams before they are imagined? Describing Chicago, an African American imam spoke of the city’s abundant resources that “mysteriously” escape a substantial segment of the African American population. The enthusiasm in his voice plummeted to a sullen low: “Sometimes I feel like this place is cursed.” During the Great Migration, African Americans left cities like Macon and Memphis to settle in cities like Camden and Chicago. Now these lands of promise appear unpromising. Did their migration create dreams of wealth, respectability, and autonomy? Not always. The American social landscape is one of dreams achieved and dreams deferred. Global flows—particularly flows of people—do bring promise to American shores. Just as mass migrations have created unexpected possibilities in the global age, they have radically remade the ethnic landscape African American and Immigrant Relations 27 in the United States. In particular, mass migrations challenge the historical color...