The Poison of Prejudice

A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY relies on the contributions of its citizens in everything from launching technology companies to managing the PTA. Discrimination against an identity group in a democratic society is not just a violation of its dignity, it is a barrier to its contribution.

The contributions of Muslims to American civilization are impressive and wide-ranging, captured well in the speech President Barack Obama gave in Cairo on June 4, 2009. “American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch.”

But the atmosphere of Islamophobia in the Trump era has created special hardships for Muslims, a dynamic that hurts both the Muslim community and the nation to which they seek to contribute.

Take, for example, Rumana Ahmed, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman who worked for President Obama’s National Security Council and chose to remain in her position after the election as part of what she viewed as a patriotic duty to help a new administration—even one that she vehemently disagreed with—transition from the strident rhetoric of campaigning to the nuanced challenges of governing. After watching what she considered to be Islamophobic and un-American policies take shape within the first week of the administration, she resigned.

In an essay for The Atlantic, she described what she told her office mate, the senior communications adviser of the National Security Council, Michael Anton, as she departed: “I told him I had to leave because it was an insult walking into this country’s most historic building every day under an administration that is working against and vilifying everything I stand for as an American and as a Muslim.” It was only later that she found out that Anton had written that Islam was “incompatible with the modern West.”

Prejudice does internal damage to identity that is hard to see but is pernicious. Social theorist Charles Taylor points out that identity development is a highly complex and fraught process. Our identities are formed in an ongoing dialogue between our own self-perception and the manners in which we are perceived and represented by others. Taylor writes in “The Politics of Recognition” that “a person or group can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” Misrecognition, he writes, “can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred.”

I am negotiating this right now as a father who wants his two Muslim sons to grow up feeling proud of being Muslim and committed to making a contribution to the various communities to which they belong. Highlighting Muslim artists is one way I do this, so when a band of Muslim musicians from Mali, called Tinariwen, announced a stop at a local music venue, I excitedly showed my 10-year-old a poster advertising the show. The image depicted smiling men holding musical instruments and wearing the traditional garb of their local desert region: flowing robes and head wraps.

“What are you doing, Dad?” my son exclaimed. “That’s ISIS.”

Somehow, a 10-year-old boy—raised in a liberal Muslim household, in a multicultural, upper-middle-class neighborhood of Chicago, surrounded by authority figures who know and affirm his Muslim identity, sent to a progressive Muslim religious education program where inspiring stories about Islam make up the curriculum, exposed to a wide range of positive Muslim role models—still, upon seeing dark men dressed in robes and head wraps, instinctively associates them with terrorists.

Prejudice is a poison. Sometimes it is evident and you can point it out. Other times it is imperceptible, but it works its way into your system and does its damage just the same.