Colbert King spells out the perils of Bourgeois Politics plainly. There is an old saying, “Dance with the one that brought you.” I am curious as to Mr. Fenty’s understanding of the history of Black people in D.C. and why they might feel resentful to the emerging politics of race and economic privilege in the city.

Colbert I. King is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post. He is deputy editor of the Post’s editorial page. King earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in government from Howard University in 1961.

Source: Washington Post

It started with Linda Singer.

Her appointment as D.C. attorney general in January 2007 was the first decision by incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty to raise eyebrows in grocery stores, beauty parlors, barbershops and churches where black Washingtonians congregate.

Why, it was asked, would Fenty appoint Singer, the head of a national network of nonprofit organizations, to be the city’s top lawyer? Despite working and living in the District for 13 years, she had never practiced law or even bothered to join the D.C. bar.

Singer, a 40-year-old white Harvard Law School graduate, was running the well-regarded organization Appleseed when Fenty offered her the job. (Full disclosure: I received D.C. Appleseed’s lifetime achievement award in 2008.) Fenty campaign supporters now claim that his appointments have been almost universally top-drawer. There was nothing in Singer’s background to warrant her elevation to D.C. attorney general over the large number of more experienced and well-qualified black D.C. lawyers.

The fact that Singer resigned within the year to be replaced by Fenty’s general counsel, Peter J. Nickles — who had preempted her anyway by making key legal decisions for the city — spoke to her job readiness.

The Singer decision was just a start.

The District is a multiracial and multicultural city that should have top public officials who reflect the city they govern.

Within his first six months as mayor, Fenty replaced African Americans with non-black people in four of the city’s most high-profile jobs: city administrator, police chief, fire chief and schools chief, according to a July 3, 2007, Post story. “Among those who hold arguably the 10 most influential positions” The Post reported, “only one . . . is black.”

The Post wasn’t telling African American residents anything they hadn’t already noticed and taken to heart. The questions they asked repeatedly: To whom is Fenty talking? Whom is he listening to? Why is he doing this?

Fenty supporters who wonder why he has fallen so low in the eyes of “his people” (as his wife Michelle tearfully put it after this week’s Post-sponsored debate) need to recall the way he went about creating his administration — and his thinly veiled contempt for people in the community who questioned his decisions, including members of the D.C. Council. That is, until recently, after dismal poll results came in, and he started making nice.

To excuse his behavior and raise his standing among disenchanted African American voters, Fenty now says he was trying to make policy changes so fast that he didn’t realize he was making “mistakes.”

Would that that were so. He had plenty of warning.

The most telling came from Ward 8 political activist Philip Pannell who, according to a Washington City Paper “Loose Lips” column, told WJLA-TV in March 2007 that the makeup of Fenty’s cabinet, and his nominations to boards and commissions, “makes Tony Williams look like Shaka Zulu.”

If Fenty missed Pannell’s comment, he still can’t say he didn’t get a pull on his coattails from others.

Three months into his first year, I wrote, on March 24, 2007, a column titled “A History Lesson for Mayor Fenty.” It was about the disastrous end to the promising career of Roscoe Bruce, the superintendent of the District’s “Colored Schools” in 1907.

The account was drawn from Lawrence Otis Graham’s book “The Senator and the Socialite,” which chronicles the lives of Bruce’s parents. After reading the column, Fenty told me he had gotten the message. Has he?

The column contained these observations from the book:

– Roscoe Bruce lost favor with “black parents [who] accused him of ignoring them, of favoring a certain class of people in his selection, promotion and retention.”

– Roscoe Bruce “tended to undermine his own contributions by being dismissive of black Washingtonians who could have helped him. What’s more, Bruce came across as courting white people for their support because he deemed them more important.”

– ” ‘We want him out of here’ was the rallying cry of blacks who filled Metropolitan AME Church . . . on the evening of June 10, 1919.”

Roscoe Bruce left the city in disgrace.

Adrian Fenty is no Roscoe Bruce, I said at the time, describing him as energetic, engaging and intent on doing a good job. He also had assured me that he was in no one’s pocket.

But, the column asked, “Is he still in step with those core voters who launched him politically?”

“It’s one thing to conduct frequent grip-and-grin visits into the community; tapping the community for talent is another matter.” And it ended with this warning: “Fenty would do well to remember the old adage that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.”

Some people, it seems, don’t learn until it’s too late.

kingc@washpost.com

REVIEW
James Baldwin Born August 2, 1924 in Harlem, NY, Died December 1 1987, St. Paul-de-Vence, France

The first of nine children of Berdis (Jones) a clergyman and a factory worker, David (step-father), in Harlem, NY. Baldwin was a storefront preacher for three years starting at age 14. His writing started as a way to escape his stern stepfather. He attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton High School

He graduated from high school in 1942 and moved to New Jersey to begin working as a railroad hand. In 1944 he moved to Greenwich Village where he met Richard Wright and began his first novel, In My Father’s House. In 1953 he finished his important novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain which stands as a partially autobiographical account of his youth. The following year he wrote the play, The Amen Corner and won the Guggenheim Fellowship.

During the 1960’s Baldwin returned to the United States and became politically active in support of civil rights.

Baldwin wrote novels, poetry, essays and a screenplay in the later years of his life. He died of stomach cancer at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France.

REVIEW

Isabel Wilkerson, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her coverage of the historic floods in the Midwest and for her profile of a ten-year-old boy growing up with a man’s obligations on the South Side of Chicago. The award made her the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first black American to win for individual reporting in the history of the prizes. She also won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Wilkerson spent most of her journalism career at The Times, and her work has been widely anthologized. She has come to be known for nonfiction narratives that combine the disciplines of journalism and ethnography. She has written extensively on issues of social policy and the human condition, as well as on major stories of the day, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the challenges of upward mobility for the Times’ 2005 series and book, Class in America.

She has lectured on narrative nonfiction at universities, at newspapers and at professional writing workshops throughout the country and has conducted writing seminars at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. She has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, as the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University and as James M. Cox Professor at Emory University.

These difficult days have been coming for a while. For three decades shortsighted leaders have led us. They offered us placebos of happiness instead of the real transformational leadership we needed. Now we are paying the price with the worst economy since the 1930s. We should thank our lucky stars that our era isn’t the 1930s. If you want to know about economic struggle just pick-up Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, Ann Petry’s The Street, Richard Wright’s Black Boy or John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They will describe to you in rich prose what it was like to live through the Great Depression. These authors descriptively immerse us in how it felt  to live as a young person with the burden of economic collapse all around killing dreams, aspirations, and the simplest of opportunities. Caroline Bird wrote a history of the generation who lived through the Great Depression; she aptly titled it The Invisible Scar, perhaps playing off how 19th century laissez faire capitalist described capitalist markets as the “invisible hand.” All of us who are being pinched by this economy should pause and historically imagine that generation of young people who struggled with economic challenges of the depression era. If you haven’t read any of these authors, read them, and if you have read them, re-read them!I know things are difficult, but when you read these depression era authors they help us put our own economic woes into perspective.

During their times they had very few social safety nets. Folks lost their homes without legal recourse. Young people took to the rail lines hoboing around the country looking for shelter, a  a job, and an escape from the impoverishment of their familial circumstances. I realize that on many of our streets some young people are living in their own personal version of  the Great Depression, but I hope it has not reach generational proportion.

The Great Depression was horrible. However, we must respect the very bravest of those who lived under the desperate economic misfortunes of that period in time. They were forced not to accept the economic orthodoxies that were put forward to them. Both liberals and radicals challenged the system that brought on the economic collapse. They turned their misery into policies to protect the generations to come. They fought for a safety net. They created Social Security. They fought for industrial unions to provide better wages and safety in plants. They took on devious bankers and brokers. What they created wasn’t perfect. Nevertheless, they provided the foundation for social safety net that endures, though tattered by the ravages of the each state’s budget, today. They had enough foresight to put forward legislation that still protects us.

My point to you on this Labor Day weekend is, even though you are young, you can use this time of economic misery to build something for tomorrow. You do not have to apathetically endure the pain, but make something out of this terrible economy that will aid the generations to come. This will require that you do sound economic thinking. I do not mean the mathematical abstractions that created so much trouble for thirty years that commenced in the halls of the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, which enshrined greed and maximization of wealth for only a few. I mean we must analyze economies in the sense that all economics are political and moral.

Adam Smith, in case there are some blathering conservatives who might read this piece, stated in his 18th century book Wealth of Nations that all economies have a moral dimension to them. Economic principles must always be guided by the aim of how we want to live in a democracy. How we wish to live when we are born and when we are at death’s door. If you want to do something about the misery of today try this: 1.) Educate yourself as to why the economy fell apart. 2.) Organize progressively and politically to meet the challenge of our world’s global economy. 3.) Put on your hardhat and work politically to challenge the set recipes that spew forth from talking heads in the media to ill informed elected officials. It is your call; it is your time.

If this news story is accurate Colonel Gaddafi of Libya has played the “race card” in his visit with Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Italy has been the site of racial turmoil as African immigrants, mostly Ghanaians, were attacked this past spring. I found it unconscionable for Colonel Gaddafi to do this and I would hope the representatives to the African Union would reprimand the Colonel for his comments. Does his comments reflect the hidden tensions between North Africans and those Africans below the Sahara?

Gaddafi wants EU cash to stop African migrants

Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi says the EU should pay Libya at least 5bn euros (£4bn; $6.3bn) a year to stop illegal African immigration and avoid a “black Europe”.

Speaking on a visit to Italy, Col Gaddafi said Europe “could turn into Africa” as “there are millions of Africans who want to come in”.

Italy has drawn criticism for handing over to Libya migrants it intercepts at sea, without screening them first.

Far fewer now reach Italy from Libya.
European Commission figures show that in 2009 the number of people caught trying to enter Italy illegally fell to 7,300, from 32,052 in 2008. The data was collected under the EU’s Eurodac fingerprinting system.

Col Gaddafi has forged close ties with Italy since a friendship treaty was signed two years ago. It sought to draw a line under historic bitterness between Libya and Italy, its former colonial master.

“Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in,” said Col Gaddafi, quoted by the AFP news agency.

He was speaking at a ceremony in Rome late on Monday, standing next to Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

“We don’t know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans,” Col Gaddafi said.
“We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

Audience of women
Col Gaddafi has long seen himself as a champion of African interests on the international stage and has hosted many summits with African leaders.

Mr Berlusconi made no immediate comment on Col Gaddafi’s demand.

Italy has been carrying out joint naval patrols with Libya for the past year, intercepting illegal migrants at sea.

The BBC’s David Willey says Col Gaddafi’s visit to Rome was overshadowed by another controversial speech he made – to two groups of several hundred young Italian women, hired at a fee of 70 or 80 euros each from a local modelling agency.

He told them that Islam should become the religion of Europe and gave them free copies of the Koran, after he had lectured them for an hour on the freedoms enjoyed by women in Libya.

Source: BBC

ABUJA, Nigeria — Sometime in the next five months, Nigeria will probably have a presidential election.

But as the likely deadline looms, there is no election date, no list of candidates and not even a real list of voters in a country of at least 150 million people. Who will be voting — and indeed who exactly will be running — is still a mystery.

A certain amount of chaos is an ordering principle in Nigeria, with its anarchic traffic and throngs at airline counters, yet in this case the consequences could be significant: disordered election seasons have produced contested outcomes in previous votes that are later denounced as fraudulent. As a result, governments here are sometimes seen as barely legitimate, inside and outside Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

This year, however, a new and more hopeful element has been added: a calm academic, suspected of neither partisanship nor corruption, has been assigned to organize the election, whenever in the coming months it may occur. He was once jailed by one of the announced candidates, the former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida, but has said he will treat everyone, even his former persecutor, fairly.

The broad hope here — expressed in every newspaper editorial, politician’s speech and citizen’s plea — is that this potential anchor, Vice Chancellor Attahiru Jega of Bayero University, Kano, can somehow straighten out the mess and deliver not only a voter list, but also an electoral tally that is not tainted like the previous ones over the 11 years since Nigeria returned to civilian rule.

It would be a first. “Nigeria,” Mr. Jega said quietly, “has never done anything like this.”

The last election, in 2007, was widely viewed as a seriously flawed, leading to numerous court challenges that overturned the results in many races, though not the one for the presidency. “Nigeria has yet to hold a credible election,” Human Rights Watch said afterward.

Now January is mentioned most often as the likeliest month for the next election, though April is also a possibility, and Mr. Jega, a political scientist, knows how much is riding on him.

“Jega is not an angel or a magician,” he said with a quiet chuckle last week, pushing away the popular clamor that has penetrated even the thick double-locked doors and armed guards behind which he works. Violence is often a fixture of the pre-electoral maneuvering here, amply documented in human rights reports, and the authorities have confirmed that there have been fatal clashes recently between supporters of rival parties in northern Nigeria.

The odds are against Mr. Jega, the new president of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, which until now has not lived up to its name — neither independent nor truly national because it has often served the interests of local politicians.

The commission has been sharply criticized for sluggishness in revamping a voters’ list seen as manipulated by local incumbents, stuffed with the names of the dead, children, celebrities, triple-voters and whoever else politicians thought would be useful in improving their chances. There have even been thefts of voter registration machines by local politicians bent on compiling their own personal lists of voters, Mr. Jega said.

The task is “herculean,” he acknowledged to Nigerian reporters shortly after his appointment. He must come up with an entirely new list of voters, perhaps 70 million people, by early December at the latest. READ MORE

Austin Black’s love of Detroit goes deep.

“Detroit created my love affair with cities and urban planning,” says Black, a Cornell grad who grew up in and around the city. “I see what as I do now as giving back to a place that really influenced who I am today. Detroit is not dead. There are a lot of opportunities in Detroit.”

To him that means a chance to have real influence on a big city’s urban fabric. After about a decade of working as a realtor for other firms, the Detroit resident recently struck out on his own to transform his City Living Detroit nonprofit — which promoted city living through newsletters and real estate tours — into a for-profit, full-time, full-service city-based brokerage.

Black says that City Living Detroit has already landed agreements to manage or be involved with the sales and marketing of several Detroit developments including: The Mack @Brush Park, Willys Overland Lofts, Brush Park Village North, and Centurion Place.

He spoke with Model D from his Willys office recently to talk about Detroit, the opportunities it presents and how best to take advantage of them.

Q. You’re starting a real-estate brokerage in what is considered the worst real-estate market in generations and in one of America’s poorest big cities. What goes through your mind when people ask if you’re crazy?

A. Ironically, I never get that question.

Q. Really?

A. A lot of people see a real opportunity in the city despite the negative stuff going on. Friends who have visited here really understand it. There is a real authenticity that people see. A couple of my friends have said, ‘Wow, I liked this a whole lot better than I thought,’ because there is a uniqueness in Detroit that can’t be replicated in other cities. Read More

Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She earned her B.A. in English from Williams College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf 2004); PLOT (2001); The End of the Alphabet (1998); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. She is co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century (Wesleyan University Press). Her work has been published in numerous journals including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. Her poetry is also included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry… Of her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, an experimental multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and images, poet Robert Creeley said: “Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I’ve yet seen. It’s master work in every sense, and altogether her own.” She is the recipient of the 2005 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, she is the Henry G. Professor of English at Pomona College.

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time]

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me. If it were an old, black-and-white film, whoever was around would answer yes. Months later the actor would show up on some latenight talk show to promote his latest efforts. I would turn and say—one always turns to say—You said he was dead. And the misinformed would claim, I never said he was dead. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Inevitably we get older; whoever is still with us says, Stop asking me that.

Or one begins asking oneself that same question differently. Am I dead? Though this question at no time explicitly translates into Should I be dead, eventually the suicide hotline is called. You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o’clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: I-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number. Do you feel like killing yourself? the man on the other end of the receiver asks. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. When he makes no response you add, I am in death’s position. He finally says, Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling. Then he asks, Where do you live?

Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rings. You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had a momentary lapse of happily. The noun, happiness, is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better than to pursue. Your modifying process had happily or unhappily experienced a momentary pause. This kind of thing happens, perhaps is still happening. He shrugs and in turn explains that you need to come quietly or he will have to restrain you. If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult. Any resistance will only make matters worse. By law, I will have to restrain you. His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t you see that! You climb into the ambulance unassisted.

Source: Poets.org

This is certainly an interesting political campaign for Mayor in the nation’s capital. In January I wrote a Friday Comment titled The Perils of Bourgeois Politics and this campaign certainly looks like I was dead on in my commentary according to this Washington Post article. Lets keep our eyes on this campaign because it will play itself out all over the country among Black politicians.

Adrian Fenty, Vincent Gray and the politics of race and class in D.C.

By Robert McCartney
Sunday, August 29, 2010; B01

The overarching question in the District’s mayoral race is how on Earth incumbent Adrian Fenty could be at risk of losing, when a majority of voters believe that conditions in the city are getting better. There are two answers — one of style and one of substance.

On style, Fenty is in trouble because he is widely seen as a self-absorbed autocrat who is unresponsive to citizens. The substantive explanation is equally important, however, and it clarifies the stakes in this election as well as why, according to polls, blacks and whites see the choice so differently. Notwithstanding the progress Fenty has made in improving the District’s schools and lowering its murder rate, his biggest shortcoming in the minds of many black voters is that he has mishandled the most important long-term issue facing the city: gentrification, and the racial politics that go with it.

His principal challenger, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, is exploiting that weakness by campaigning as someone who would oversee the city’s economic and demographic transformation more fairly — and thus do a better job of bridging the city’s racial gap. Despite worries that he might allow some of the reforms achieved under Fenty to lose momentum, Gray’s approach is working. A new Washington Post poll shows Gray ahead by more than a 10-point margin leading up to the Sept. 14 Democratic primary. Gray’s huge advantage among black voters overcomes Fenty’s sizable but somewhat narrower edge among whites in the contest, in which victory is tantamount to winning the office outright in the heavily Democratic District.

Gentrification, in which decayed urban neighborhoods are renovated and then draw in more affluent (often white) residents to replace poorer (often black) ones, has been the key force shaping the city since the 1990s. The process arouses powerful feelings for many African Americans, in part because it threatens the District’s identity as a predominantly black town. Sometime in the next few years, the black share of the D.C. population will probably slip below 50 percent for the first time since the late 1950s.

Gray and Fenty offer fundamentally different approaches to the issue. That contrast is clear from their records and personal histories, as well as interviews with both of them and with other political, business and civic leaders.

Fenty would continue to push forcefully to improve education and nuts-and-bolts city services, without going out of his way to address racial or economic divisions. Although he’s had a recent campaign conversion, saying the right things about becoming humble and inclusive in a second term, it doesn’t seem realistic that he’d suddenly start paying much attention to what anybody else thinks. A restless loner with what one business supporter called “the attention span of a strobe light,” Fenty doesn’t dig into the substance of the issues but leaves lieutenants such as Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Attorney General Peter Nickles to do the heavy lifting of governance.

At 39, Fenty is a post-civil-rights leader who prides himself on being color-blind. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, rich or poor; the key is that your trash is picked up, your potholes are filled and your kid’s teacher is qualified.

That kind of neutral, results-oriented approach is great in theory, and it appeals especially to affluent voters and the younger generation. But it hasn’t gone down well with less wealthy, older, mostly black voters in the eastern half of the city. Nearly six in 10 African Americans see Fenty as caring more about upper-income people, according to the Post poll.

Today, Fenty is visibly frustrated that he doesn’t get credit from blacks overall for the progress he’s made — especially for the schools and rec centers he’s built and the new supermarkets and other businesses he’s attracted.

“When I got elected, my thought is, okay, let’s amass as many results as humanly possible over the next four years. One, because that’s what you’re elected to do, and two, because if you’re able to do so, I assumed people . . . will reelect you,” Fenty told me. “I realize now at the end of the four years that was flawed thinking. Yes, you absolutely have to deliver results, but there’s more to it. You have to include people . . . you have to include everybody.”

Fenty is struggling partly because many black voters feel that he hoodwinked them when he ran for mayor four years ago. Based on his remarkable face-to-face campaign effort in 2006, when he knocked on almost every door in the city, voters expected him to be a more humane, accessible version of the previous mayor, the wonky and equally results-oriented Tony Williams. Fenty swept every precinct by convincing people that he’d continue the improvements in city services and finances ushered in by Williams, while being more receptive to precisely the concerns about gentrification, poverty and inclusiveness that are tripping him up now.

In Fenty’s mind, his push to improve public schools is the key to overcoming the city’s economic divisions. “The vision is really around education,” he said. “That’s what I believe the chancellor’s reforms are all about, stopping the cycle of lack of education, people dropping out . . . and how that contributes to the cycle of poverty.”

But critics charge that Fenty’s policies have served mainly to attract newcomers to the city, or to protect the interests of recent arrivals in gentrifying neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights and Capitol Hill. That explains the frequent criticism that the mayor has spent too much money on bike lanes and dog parks, and too little on affordable housing and jobs. With his own enthusiasm for triathlons and Smart Cars, Fenty’s persona is also identified more with newcomers than with longtime residents. It doesn’t help that he appointed few African Americans to top cabinet positions. READ MORE

REVIEW

REVIEW

Alex Heard is an editor at Wired magazine. He has also edited and written for The New York Times Magazine, Outside, The New Republic, Slate, and many other publications.

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargesia, Somalia in 1981 and was educated in the UK, studying History and Politics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She lives in London and is working on her second novel.

By Edward E. Curtis IV

Curtis is millennium chair of liberal arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is the author of “Muslims in America: A Short History” and the editor of the “Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History.”

Source: Washington Post
Sunday, August 29, 2010; B03

In addition to spawning passionate debates in the public, the news media and the political class, the proposal to build a Muslim community center near Ground Zero in New York has revealed widespread misconceptions about the practice of Islam in this country — and the role of mosques in particular.
1. Mosques are new to this country.

Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn’t be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, African American Muslim slave and Islamic scholar Job Ben Solomon, a cattle driver, would regularly steal away to the woods there for his prayers — in spite of a white boy who threw dirt on him as he made his prostrations.

The Midwest was home to the greatest number of permanent U.S. mosques in the first half of the 20th century. In 1921, Sunni, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims in Detroit celebrated the opening of perhaps the first purpose-built mosque in the nation. Funded by real estate developer Muhammad Karoub, it was just blocks away from Henry Ford’s Highland Park automobile factory, which employed hundreds of Arab American men.

Most Midwestern mosques blended into their surroundings. The temples or mosques of the Nation of Islam — an indigenous form of Islam led by Elijah Muhammad from 1934 to 1975 — were often converted storefronts and churches. In total, mosques numbered perhaps slightly more than 100 nationwide in 1970. In the last three decades of the 20th century, however, more than 1 million new Muslim immigrants came to the United States and, in tandem with their African American co-religionists, opened hundreds more mosques. Today there are more than 2,000 places of Muslim prayer, most of them mosques, in the United States.

According to recent Pew and Gallup polls, about 40 percent of Muslim Americans say they pray in a mosque at least once a week, nearly the same percentage of American Christians who attend church weekly. About a third of all U.S. Muslims say they seldom or never go to mosques. And contrary to stereotypes of mosques as male-only spaces, Gallup finds that women are as likely as men to attend.
2. Mosques try to spread sharia law in the United States.

In Islam, sharia (“the Way” to God) theoretically governs every human act. But Muslims do not agree on what sharia says; there is no one sharia book of laws. Most mosques in America do not teach Islamic law for a simple reason: It’s too complicated for the average believer and even for some imams.

Islamic law includes not only the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the prophet Muhammad) but also great bodies of arcane legal rulings and pedantic scholarly interpretations. If mosques forced Islamic law upon their congregants, most Muslims would probably leave — just as most Christians might walk out of the pews if preachers gave sermons exclusively on Saint Augustine, canon law and Greek grammar. Instead, mosques study the Koran and the Sunna and how the principles and stories in those sacred texts apply to their everyday lives.
3. Most people attending U.S. mosques are of Middle Eastern descent.

A 2009 Gallup poll found that African Americans accounted for 35 percent of all Muslim Americans, making them the largest racial-ethnic group of Muslims in the nation. It is unclear whether Arab Americans or South Asian Americans (mostly Pakistanis and Indians) are the second-largest. Muslim Americans are also white, Hispanic, Sub-Saharan African, Iranian, European, Central Asian and more — representing the most racially diverse religious group in the United States.

Mosques reflect this diversity. Though there are hundreds of ethnically and racially integrated mosques, most of these institutions, like many American places of worship, break down along racial and ethnic lines. Arabs, for instance, are the dominant ethnic group in a modest number of mosques, particularly in states such as Michigan and New York. And according to a 2001 survey (the most recent national survey on mosques available) by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, they represented the plurality in only 15 percent of U.S. mosques.
4. Mosques are funded by groups and governments unfriendly to the United States.

There certainly have been instances in which foreign funds, especially from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region, have been used to build mosques in the United States. The Saudi royal family, for example, reportedly gave $8 million for the building of the King Fahd Mosque, which was inaugurated in 1998 in Culver City, a Los Angeles suburb.

But the vast majority of mosques are supported by Muslim Americans themselves. Domestic funding reflects the desire of many U.S. Muslims to be independent of overseas influences. Long before Sept. 11, 2001, in the midst of a growing clash of interests between some Muslim-majority nations and the U.S. government — during the Persian Gulf War, for instance — Muslim American leaders decided that they must draw primarily from U.S. sources of funding for their projects.
5. Mosques lead to homegrown terrorism.

To the contrary, mosques have become typical American religious institutions. In addition to worship services, most U.S. mosques hold weekend classes for children, offer charity to the poor, provide counseling services and conduct interfaith programs.

No doubt, some mosques have encouraged radical extremism. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik who inspired the World Trade Center’s first attackers in 1993, operated out of the Al-Salam mosque in Jersey City, N.J. But after the 2001 attacks, such radicalism was largely pushed out of mosques and onto the Internet, mainly because of a renewed commitment among mosque leaders to confront extremism.

There is a danger that as anti-Muslim prejudice increases — as it has recently in reaction to the proposed community center near Ground Zero — alienated young Muslims will turn away from the peaceful path advocated by their elders in America’s mosques. So far, that has not happened on a large scale.

Through their mosques, U.S. Muslims are embracing the community involvement that is a hallmark of the American experience. In this light, mosques should be welcomed as premier sites of American assimilation, not feared as incubators of terrorist indoctrination.