Religion & Spirituality - Diversity | Equity | Inclusion Resources at Truman College

Religious Discrimination | refers to prejudicial treatment of a person based on their actual, perceived, or lack of religious or philosophical beliefs. Learn more here.

Antisemitism | is a perception, prejudice against, or hatred of Jews (U.S. Holocaust Museum, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance).

Islamophobia | "refers to the fear of and hostility toward Muslims and Islam that is driven by racism and that leads to exclusionary, discriminatory, and violent actions targeting Muslims and those perceived as Muslim" (Oxford Bibliographies).

Books @ CCC

Cover art How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?

Print Books

Bayoumi, M. (2009). How does it feel to be a problem? : being young and Arab in America. Penguin Books. The story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. Just over a century ago , W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk: How does it feel to be a problem? Now, Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same about America's new "problem"-Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the United States. He moves beyond stereotypes and clichés to reveal their often unseen struggles, from being subjected to government surveillance to the indignities of workplace discrimination. Through it all, these young men and women persevere through triumphs and setbacks as they help weave the tapestry of a new society that is, at its heart, purely American. -- Publisher Description.

eBooks

Bayoumi, M. (2015). This Muslim American Life : Dispatches From the War on Terror. NYU Press. Winner of the 2016 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book AwardA collection of insightful and heartbreaking essays on Muslim-American life after 9/11Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake “Mustafa Bayoumi” was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an “anti-American, pro-Islam” agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed.Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.
Beydoun, K. A. (2018). American Islamophobia : Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. University of California Press. The term “Islamophobia” may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia's roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system? Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. Beydoun charts its long and terrible history, from the plight of enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum South and the laws prohibiting Muslim immigrants from becoming citizens to the ways the war on terror assigns blame for any terrorist act to Islam and the myriad trials Muslim Americans face in the Trump era. He passionately argues that by failing to frame Islamophobia as a system of bigotry endorsed and emboldened by law and carried out by government actors, U.S. society ignores the injury it inflicts on both Muslims and non-Muslims. Through the stories of Muslim Americans who have experienced Islamophobia across various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Beydoun shares how U.S. laws shatter lives, whether directly or inadvertently. And with an eye toward benefiting society as a whole, he recommends ways for Muslim Americans and their allies to build coalitions with other groups. Like no book before it, American Islamophobia offers a robust and genuine portrait of Muslim America then and now.
Curtis IV, E. E. (2009). Muslims in America : A Short History. Oxford University Press. Muslims are neither new nor foreign to the United States. They have been a vital presence in North America since the 16th century. Muslims in America unearths their history, documenting the lives of African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, European, black, white, Hispanic and other Americans who have been followers of Islam. The book begins with the tale of Job Ben Solomon, a 18th century African American Muslim slave, and goes on to chart the stories of sodbusters in North Dakota, African American converts to Islam in the 1920s, Muslim barkeepers in Toledo, the post-1965 wave of professional immigrants from Asia and Africa, and Muslim Americans after 9/11. The book reveals the richness of Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi and other forms of Islamic theology, ethics, and rituals in the United States by illustrating the way Islamic faith has been imagined and practiced in the everyday lives of individuals. Muslims in America recovers the place of Muslims in the larger American story, too. Showing how Muslim American men and women participated in each era of U.S. history, the book explores how they have both shaped and have been shaped by larger historical trends such as the abolition movement, Gilded Age immigration, the Great Migration of African Americans, urbanization, religious revivalism, the feminist movement, and the current war on terror. It also shows how, from the very beginning of American history, Muslim Americans have been at once a part of their local communities, their nation, and the worldwide community of Muslims. The first single-author history of Muslims in America from colonial times to the present, this book fills a huge gap and provides invaluable background on one of the most poorly understood groups in the United States.
Khabeer, S. A. (2016). Muslim Cool : Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. NYU Press. Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hopThis groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.
Felber, G. (2020). Those Who Know Don’t Say : The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. The University of North Carolina Press. Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.

Articles & Essays

CAIR. (2019). Hijacked by Hate: American Philanthropy and the Islamophobia Network. CAIR Foundation. Anti-Muslim bigotry is a common and widespread feature of our country’s mainstream cultural and political landscape. However, it is important to remember that Islamophobic attitudes and policies are propagated by special interest groups with deep sources of funding. This decentralized group of actors is known as the Islamophobia Network, a close-knit family of organizations and individuals that share an ideology of extreme anti-Muslim animus, and work with one another to negatively influence public opinion and government policy about Muslims and Islam. To provide a better understanding of how the Islamophobia Network operates, this report maps the flow of funding from charitable organizations to anti-Muslim special interest groups, and their negative impact on public life. The report finds that the Islamophobia Network has been drawing upon mainstream American philanthropic institutions for financial and political support for years.
CAIR. (2021). Islamophobia in the Mainstream. CAIR Foundation. The following report examines Islamophobia in 2019 and 2020. To assess the extent of Islamophobia, we look at five different aspects: funding of the Islamophobia Network, school bullying statistics from 2019 – 2020, antimosque incidents, the spread of Islamophobia on social media by institutional leaders, and Islamophobia within American politics.
Jews For Racial & Economic Justice. (2017). Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to our Movement. Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, 1.3. Part I: Background, Part II: Understanding Antisemitism, Part III: The Current Moment, Credits, Reading List, Glossary (p. 33-39), Resources
Kazi, N. (2019). Troubling Islamophobia: Redefining the Conversation on Anti-Muslim Violence. Political Theology Network. Without a sustained focus on material inequalities and repressive state power, the conversation on Islamophobia too easily slips into a mealy-mouthed appeal to diversity and tolerance.
Kazi, N. (2020). Reform, Abolition, and Decoloniality: Framing Islamophobia. Political Theology, 21(5), 455–460. In article the author talks about the issues in anti-Islamophobia scholarship and activities which includes reform, and abolition. Topics include that books including "Radical Skin, Moderate Masks," "Islamophobia and Racism in America," and "Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics" that explore flaws both in academia, and representational Muslim politics and advocacy, and policy practices.

Audiovisual Resources

Acho, E. (2020). Race vs Religion w/Carl Lentz - Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Ep. 7 [TV Series Episode]. uncomfortableconvos.com. It's time to talk about race & religion. Carl Lentz, lead pastor of Hillsong East Coast, sits down with Emmanuel Acho to have an uncomfortable conversation about the role religion plays in fueling and/or killing racism.
National Education Association Center for Social Justice. (n.d.). A Social and Racial Justice Checklist for Safe, Healthy and Just Learning. NEA edjustice. As we expand digital learning models, due to COVID-19, it’s important to remember that students with disabilities, those without access to the internet, and LGBTQ, Black, brown and Indigenous populations are at higher risk of experiencing school closures more intensely. Regardless of the education delivery system during the pandemic, all students must be provided the care and attention and learning opportunities they are guaranteed and deserve. Ask yourself the following questions when planning or assessing digital instruction through a racial justice lens:
Smithsonian. (2018, January 30). Confronting the Past: Enslaved and Muslim in Early America (Season 2, Episode 17) [Audio podcast]. In Sidedoor. Smithsonian Institution. Today, the U.S. population is about 1% Muslim, but in the late 1700s that number was likely closer to 5%. Who were these early Muslim Americans, where did they go, and why didn’t we all learn about them in school? In this episode, we search for American history's missing Muslims, and explore their experience through the words of Omar ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim man in North Carolina whose one-of-a-kind autobiography still resonates today.

Guides & Tools for Pedagogy

Kazi, N. (2016, September 23). Teaching Against Islamophobia in the Age of Terror. Chronicle of Higher Education, 63(4), B25–B27. The author reflects on Islamophobia and educating college students concerning their understanding of Islamophobia. She comments on the use of humility as an intellectual tool and comments on privilege theory. She suggests current events can be utilized as pedagogical opportunities and adjusting course content as needed. She talks about the importance of critical thinking even in times of terror and helping students think past the concept of the Other.