“Birtherism” and Anti-Blackness: The Anti-Islamic Ante-Life of Africanized Slavery

Abstract

The first black President of the United States, Barack Obama, entered office on a wave of racial optimism. But rather than transcending the United States’ racialized history, Obama's presidency has in a sense “outed” it, exposing this history's anti-Islamic origins. This article establishes a link between anti-blackness and the Islamophobic reaction to his election: late medieval and early modern European Christians could classify newly Africanized peoples as uniquely and ontologically enslaveable only because they previously had imagined Muslims as such.

Keywords:

• anti-blackness
• birtherism
• white supremacy
• supersessionism
• Islam

Notes

1 Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?, 3.

2 For an overview of the history of the “birther” movement, see Howell, “Not Just Crazy,” 429–31. For evidence of this movement's influence on mainstream discourse, see Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama,” 87–8.

3 Kristof, “The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama.”

4 Hosenball, “Romney's Birth Certificate.”

5 Malcom, “19 Months In”; Blake, “Why Obama is Not First ‘Imposter’ President.”

6 Hamburger, “Bobby Jindal, Raised Hindu.” Jindal or another Indian American governor, South Carolina's Nikki Haley, of course have been victims of racism and xenophobia. See, for example, Kaufmann, “The True People of South Carolina.”

7 Not even the symbolically hyper-potent character of the presidency fully accounts for the distinct reactions to Jindal and Obama: the so-called “birther” phenomenon first arose back in 2004, when Obama was running for Senate. Smith and Tau, “Birtherism.”

8 This does not deny that President Obama has also been subject to more traditional forms of anti-black racism. See, for example, Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama,” 90–1. Joseph, “Imagining Obama,” 389–405.

9 Griffin, “At Last …?” 136–7. Knuckey and Kim, “Evaluations of Michelle Obama as First Lady,” 365–86.

10 It remains true that because “racialization is an open circuit with no singular truth,” depictions of and beliefs about Obama “can be read in multiple ways by multiple viewers.” Joseph, “Imagining Obama,” 393.

11 See, for example, Ibid., 436, 438, 443; Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama,” 86–107; and Hughey, “Show Me Your Papers!” 172.

12 Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited.

13 I do not deny that various forms of oppression, especially racial ones, have much in common. See, for example, Slabodsky's highlighting the ways in which European discourses portrayed “Natives and Latin Americans, Africans and Blacks, Muslims and Arabs, and finally Israelites (not Israelis) and Jews” as barbaric and themselves as “civilized.” Decolonial Judaism, 25.

14 Although other scholars such as Kelly Brown Douglas and M. Shawn Copeland have unraveled the theo-political history of white supremacy in the United States, I engage primarily with the analyses of Jennings and Carter for two reasons: one, they attempt to capture the theological logic of white supremacy as a nearly global phenomenon; and two, they exemplify Christian theology's lack of interest in the anti-Islamic foundations of anti-blackness supremacy. Douglas, Stand Your Ground; Copeland, “Racism and the Vocation of the Theologian,” 15–29; Copeland, “Blackness Past, Blackness Future,” 625–40; and Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom.

15 Douglas, Stand Your Ground; Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6; and Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness” 36.

16 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13.

17 Ibid., 5.

18 For more on the symbolic legacy of Africanized slavery, see Grimes, Fugitive Slaves.

19 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 4–5.

20 For more on the relation between anti-blackness supremacy and the afterlife of slavery, see Grimes, Antiblackness as Corporate Vice.

21 Jennings, The Christian Imagination; and Harvey, Whiteness and Morality, 9.

22 Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism, 54.

23 Here, I differ from scholars and activists who have argued that the status of African-Americans is a colonial status. Without denying either the similarities between colonization and enslavement or the emotional power of this comparison – especially during its late 1960s and early 1970s peak in popularity – I argue that it is more accurate and illuminating to emphasize the difference between colonization and enslavement.

24 Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism, 55.

25 Ibid., 27, 29.

26 For this reason, this article neither contests nor comments on Edward Said's critique of what he terms orientalism.

27 Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire, 79. In selecting this date, I also push back against conventional narratives that places the start of European imperial expansion “at the turn of the sixteenth century …. [after] the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from [Iberia].” Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism, 33.

28 Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique, 27.

29 Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 147.

30 Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 42–3.

31 Ibid., 43–4.

32 For more on the origins of Africanized slavery, see Grimes, Antiblackness as Corporate Vice.

33 Van Koningsveld, “Muslim Slaves and Captives,” 5.

34 Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 22.

35 For an overview of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean world, see Abulafia, “The First Atlantic Slaves, 1350–1520,” 109.

36 Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism, 47.

37 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 46.

38 Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 21.

39 Ibid., 141.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 34.

42 Ibid., 141.

43 Further evidencing the unique enslaveability of Muslims, when the Spanish first colonized the Philippines, they used the term moro to “refer to members of the Muslim population of the islands who were also subject to enslavement,” which distinguished them from “many other indigenous groups under Spanish rule” who were immune from this fate. Cook, Forbidden Passages, 6.

44 O'Callaghan, “Castile, Portugal, and the Canary Islands,” 294.

45 Abulafia, “The First Atlantic Slaves,” 110.

46 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 62.

47 Abulafia, “Stripped Assets,” 41. Uncoincidentally, in my view, Spanish classification of first Canary Islanders and then Taino Indians as “wild” closely resembles the way English settlers described Irish and indigenous peoples. Feest, Indians and Europe, 136. Like the Irish, “the Indian” wore his hair long, did not “plant any gardens or orchards,” refused to “enclose or improve their lands,” “live together in settled villages or towns,” or “make any provision for prosperity.” Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 20. In the English imagination, the Indian, like “the wild Irish…could become good, that is, civil and Christian, only by submission.” Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two, 4.

48 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 63, 110.

49 Although European colonial projects would imagine a similarity between Jewish and indigenous peoples, this did not really take hold until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; therefore, it does not help to explain the Africanization of slavery. Parfitt, “The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse,” 61.

50 Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind, 110, 127.

51 Abulafia, “Stripped Assets,” 39.

52 Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves, 7; and Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 172–4.

53 O'Callaghan “Castile, Portugal, and the Canary Islands,” 291.

54 Ibid., 293.

55 Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 27; and Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” 479–520.

56 Love, “Legal Restrictions on Afro-Indian Relations in Colonial Mexico,” 132.

57 Narbona, Pinto, and Karam, Crescent Over Another Horizon, 49.

58 Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 34.

59 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” 217; and Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 2.

60 Abulafia, “Stripped Assets,” 41.

61 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 16.

62 Abulafia, “The First Atlantic Slaves,” 120.

63 Thomas, The Slave Trade, 98; Clayton, “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1526–41.

64 Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” 183–201.

65 Here my argument resembles one other scholars have made with respect to the Curse of Ham. As Goldenberg contends, “as the black slave trade moved [from Spain and Portugal] to England and then America, the Curse of Ham moved with it.” I claim that a similar phenomenon occurred with respect to the anti-Islamic underpinnings of Africanized slavery. The Curse of Ham, 175.

66 Emmer, The Dutch Slave Trade, 9.

67 Ibid., 19.

68 Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 14.

69 Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World, 33.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid., 58, 34.

72 Ibid., 34.

73 Ibid., 66.

74 Lewis, The Rise of Black Ethnic Religious Rhetoric, 8.

75 Lewis, “Like Devils out of Hell,” 112–13.

76 Lowe, “The Stereotyping of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe” 25.

77 Lewis, “Like Devils Out of Hell,” 115.

78 Ibid., 117.

79 Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 1.

80 This interpretation of salvation both could coexist with and sometimes even reinforce other justifications for slave-ownership such as Aristotelian notions of “natural slaves” and widespread practices of enslaving war captives and debtors.

81 Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, 19.

82 Ibid., 98.

83 Augustine, Epistulae, CSEL 57, 227 as found in Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions.

84 Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions, 98.

85 Ray, The Sephardic Frontier, 71; and Constable and Zurro, Medieval Iberia, 396.

86 Onwuachi-Willig and Barnes, “The Obama Effect,” 325, 332; and Onwuachi-Willig and James, “The Declining Significance of Presidential Races,” 89.

87 Austin, America is Not Post-Racial, 20–2.

88 Carter and Dowe, “The Racial Exceptionalism of Barack Obama,” 105–19.

89 Ray, The Sephardic Frontier, 65. For more on how Obama was perceived differently than other black politicians, see Tesler and Sears, Obama's Race, 3–5.

90 Stolberg, “Obama's Mother Had African Forebear.”

91 McCrummen, “Finally. Someone Who Thinks Like Me.”

92 Howell, “Not Just Crazy,” 437.

93 Tariq and Moody. “Barack Hussein Obama.”

94 McCrummen, “‘Finally. Someone Who Thinks like Me.”

95 Howell, “Not Just Crazy,” 440.

96 For more on the ways in which Moorish identity and blackness were unstable during this era, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 316; Bartels, “Making More of the Moor,” 434–5.

97 A recently published book argues not just that we have underestimated the scope of indigenous slavery, but that it was in many ways “more insidious” than the enslavement inflicted upon Africans. Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 4. However, because Reséndez seems to classify all conditions of coerced labor as “slavery,” he overestimates the similarity between the mechanisms of indigenous and black oppression.

98 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 11, 49.

99 This does not deny the fact that “for most of the modern period, European discourses portrayed Jews as non-Westerners” who threatened “to destroy Western civilization.” However, as Slabodsky explains, this narrative has begun to change in recent decades. Decolonial Judaism, 4–8. For the history of how Jewish people transformed from racial outsiders to undoubtedly white insiders in the United States, see Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks.

100 “Some Believe Obama is Anti-American -- New Research Shows Why,” Psychology Today, accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/201009/some-believe-obama-is-anti-american-new-research-shows-why.

101 Barbaro, “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years”; and Tesler, “Birtherism Was Why So Many Republicans Liked Trump in the First Place.”

102 Nor should we be surprised that a call to keep what he described as rapaciously violent Mexican nationals out of the United States comprised the second momentous turning point in Trump's presidential campaign. Preceding white supremacy chronologically, anti-blackness supremacy anchors it in place. No wonder then that the election of a black President with a “Muslim” name and foreign Muslim father would intensify the United States’ most enduring form of xenophobia, anti-Mexican racism. Unmoored by Obama's undomesticated and disquieting blackness, racial conservatives have felt their entire racial order spinning away from them. Obama's invasive presence in and presidency over the United States has weakened their racial defenses: they must double down on their efforts to expel Mexican migrants, even though fewer Mexican nationals entered the United States and far more were deported from it during Obama's time in office than during previous presidential administrations. Here the symbolic integrity of whiteness trumps the material reality: many Americans insist on “strengthening the border,” even though it has never been more impenetrable.

103 For more on the relationship between support for Trump and anti-blackness, see Milbank, “Yes, Half of Trump Supporters Are Racist.”

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Katie Walker Grimes

Katie Walker Grimes was born and raised in Marion, Ohio, and is an assistant professor of theology at Villanova University.