Attacks on Muslim American candidates reflect an American parochial history driven by fanatical supremacists in power

There’s a lot of discourse lately around the anti-Muslim rhetoric thrown at Muslims running for office. From Abdul El-Sayed to Zohran Mamdani, attacks on Muslim candidates on the basis of their religious and ethnic identities have been extensively catalogued. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) called El-Sayed a “terrorist.” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) described “every single Muslim holding public office in America” as a threat to national security. Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy last year resulted in the same tired allegations of terrorism, Sharia-takeover, dual-loyalties, and communism. President Donald Trump ultimately declared that “jihadists” are “being elected all over the place.”

These tirades have been interpreted to mean that the American Right has an Islamophobia problem and that we just have to ‘power through’ it – meaning if we put our heads down and work hard enough and remind these people about the Constitution, we’ll make it through this difficult time like so many other marginalized groups targeted before us. 

But it’s more accurate to say that the United States is founded on a system of racial capitalism that makes this type of exclusionary politics inevitable. 

Racial Capitalism v. Individualized Racism 

Racial capitalism was coined by Cedric Robinson in his 1983 book, Black Marxism, which he defined as the unequal valuation of human life and labor along racial lines. It is the exploitation of racialized labor and indigenous land that makes the accumulation of wealth for a few possible. 

For all the public discourse in the United States around increased political polarization, the country’s descent into tribalism, and the proliferation of “hate”, we somehow forget these conditions are the result of a system that allocates resources and power according to the value assigned to lives based on race.

When we reduce the harms of racism to individual experiences by emphasizing microaggressions and personal interactions, we do so at the expense of obscuring the role it plays in a system that decides who has the right to live and who has rights generally – including the right to speak and the right to share power. Taken in this context, the anti-Muslim rants of public figures reflect their attempts to hoard power for their own group within this system of racial capitalism.

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A Legacy of Parochial Supremacism 

The public figures making these vile statements today follow in the footsteps of supremacists and segregationists who stoked the racial anxieties of white voters and sought to destroy the civic participation and leadership of people of color for generations. 

Around 2,000 Black men served in elected office during Reconstruction. That didn’t stop President Johnson from declaring to Congress in 1867 that extending voting rights to Black Americans would result in “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed,” his attempt at preempting a politically empowered Black voting bloc. In 1868, governor of New York Horatio Seymour declared, “This is a white man’s country: let white men rule.” After the Supreme Court declared all-white primary elections unconstitutional, Herman Talmadge announced during his 1948 gubernatorial campaign: “If we can’t have a white primary, we want as white a one as we can get” as he urged party leaders to enforce poll taxes and intimidation tactics to reduce Black voter turnout. 

Physical violence may no longer be their go-to method, but the public figures making anti-Muslim statements today still seek their own supremacy within what they view as a racial hierarchy.

Their goal is to limit minority influence in an attempt to increase their own in what they understand is a zero-sum game of race-based political power. They are the same small-minded, parochial supremacists littered throughout this country’s history, now detested, and alongside whom they will take their own places. 

Demanding More Than Crumbs  

Thus, the anti-Muslim rhetoric around Muslim candidates says more about the system than it does about their targets. The color or the religion or the ethnicity of the targets change – and that’s why it’s not the color or the religion or the ethnicity of their targets that matters; it is the mentality of the supremacists encouraged to pursue domination within a system of racial capitalism that is the issue.

It is their commitment to their own domination that has them reject equal citizenship for all. And why no amount of pleading or explaining the laws and constitution will change their minds. 

In 1964, a group of Black activists resisted their exclusion from Mississippi’s political process by creating an independent state Democratic Party to challenge Mississippi’s all-white, supremacist and segregationist delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) were also smeared as criminals and communists by the white establishment. 

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After the Convention, civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis said, “We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.”  We can do everything right: play by the rules, cite the constitution and laws, and it will never be enough for people wedded to a system of racial capitalism that has them vying for their own supremacy at the expense of everyone else’s humanity.

The MFDP did not fight for integration into this existing racist power structure. Instead, they organized themselves around their belief in the equitable distribution of power regardless of race, literacy, gender or class. When pressured to compromise as a condition for entering politics, Freedom Summer organizer and strategist Bob Moses replied, “We were trying to bring morality into politics, not politics into our morality.” 

The work of the MFDP in the 1960s reminds us not to settle for crumbs – in this case, mere entry or acceptance into a racially exploitative system. We should be unequivocally demanding a more equitable one that denounces the dehumanization, exploitation and exclusion of people the current system relies on. It means not meeting every anti-Muslim smear verse by verse with a response that tries to appeal to reason or to these peoples’ humanity – they don’t have it and they won’t give it. We have to build our own power, among all excluded communities, without pleading for acceptance in a system designed to divide and exploit along racial lines. 

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.