Talking to Our Brown Muslim Families About Police Abolition
by Saqib Bhatti, Co-Executive Director of ACRE and Reema Ahmad, Organizing Consultant with Crescendo
***DISCLAIMER: Muslims across the globe span a multitude of nationalities and diverse ethnicities. As such, Muslim American communities are not a monolith.
While we wrote this article from the perspective of the collective “we,” this is not intended to over generalize the important differences in history, heritage, experiences, and politics that span Muslim American communities. Furthermore, we acknowledge that there are also Black Arab and Black Desi communities living in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere in the world. The collective “we” in no way is intended to erase those communities or paper over other complexities in identity.
Instead, we offer this article as a guidepost for those that find familiar stances and objections in the points we lift up — and hope that transformative conversations will be had as a result of the examples we dig into below.***
The uprisings in support of the Movement for Black Lives in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders by the police has led to growing national calls for defunding and abolishing the police. As non-Black Muslims of color, we cannot stay on the sidelines.
While it’s important for us to show up as allies in movement spaces and support Black-led organizing, that alone is not enough. We also have a responsibility to have conversations with our families about police abolition, and yes, this means directly confronting anti-Blackness in our own communities.
If you’ve tried talking to your parents, siblings, aunties, uncles, or cousins about policing in Black communities or the uprisings, chances are that you have heard some version of these questions and statements:
- If we got rid of the police, who would keep us safe? In fact, we ask the police to come to our mosques and keep us safe from white supremacists during Jummah, Taraweeh, and Eid prayers.
- Why do we have to get rid of all cops if only some of them are bad?
- Why can’t Black people just follow the law? If they did, they wouldn’t have to worry about the cops.
- It’s bad that cops are killing Black people, but why do they have to resort to rioting and looting? Don’t they know they’re hurting their own cause.
- This issue doesn’t concern us and we have to keep our heads down.
These can be difficult conversations, and oftentimes our tendency is to lash out against our family members or to just walk away. But that is taking the easy way out. We can’t just write off our families. We have to engage them around abolition and bring them around — and that is especially true with our elders.
This piece is intended as a starting point for talking to our Brown Muslim families about police abolition. This is intended primarily for non-Black Muslims of color from immigrant families. With Eid approaching, we encourage you to read this piece together with your families and then have a discussion about it over the upcoming holidays.
Even though Muslims have been under attack for centuries in this country (the first Muslims in the US were enslaved Africans), non-Black Muslims’ experience with racism and bigotry in America does not compare with the level of structural racism and oppression faced by Black folks, including Black Muslims. The same is true with policing. Even though the police and other law enforcement agencies in the US have a long history of surveilling, entrapping, and illegally detaining Muslims, this pales in comparison to the level of police repression and violence that Black folks face. Most people in our communities still believe the police keep us safe. Many Muslim small business owners regularly call the police on Black customers with little or no cause. In fact, the owner of the Minneapolis store that called the police on George Floyd was Muslim.
To help our families understand what it is like for Black folks to live in overpoliced neighborhoods with a mostly white police force that views their very existence as a threat, it might be helpful to make a comparison that they can more easily relate to: foreign military occupation.
It is hard for our communities, especially our elders, to truly understand the danger that police in America pose to Black folks. In some of the countries that our families emigrated from, the police have a reputation for rampant corruption, and cops in the US may even look like good, upstanding public servants by comparison. Furthermore, in many of our families’ countries of origin, the police force largely comes from the communities it is policing, so policing may not appear to be inherently racialized.
That is not the case in the United States.
Here, police are overwhelmingly white and they are there to protect whiteness from Black folks. Yes, when Desi or Arab shopkeepers call the cops on Black folks the cops show up and offer us some protection as well, but that is because of the relative privilege that white supremacy and anti-Blackness provide us with over our Black neighbors. As business owners, our system of racialized capitalism affords us some measure of whiteness in those situations. The police may harass us and make racist comments about us to our faces, but like any good Karen, we know that they will side with us over Black folks in the community.
To help our families understand what it is like for Black folks to live in overpoliced neighborhoods with a mostly white police force that views their very existence as a threat, it might be helpful to make a comparison that they can more easily relate to: foreign military occupation.
Police forces are effectively occupying armies in Black neighborhoods. Occupying armies have different identities from the occupied, and the occupiers are there to protect their national interests from a group they deem to be an “other”. In both cases, this otherness is used as justification for state violence.
From Palestine to Kashmir, from China to Iraq, from Myanmar to Afghanistan, many Muslim communities are living under occupations by predominantly non-Muslim military forces. Whether or not our communities are directly living under occupation, we generally understand that the goal of the occupiers is not to keep Muslims safe, but to control them. We know that this control is inherently violent and dehumanizing. We know the military occupiers, whether they be Israeli, Indian, Chinese, Burmese, or American, do not value Muslim life.
Our families also know that there is no reasoning with occupying military forces. It does not matter whether Palestinians abide by Israeli laws, Kashmiris abide by Indian laws, or Uyghurs abide by Chinese laws. Those laws can be easily changed and even more easily ignored by the occupying forces, with violent results. There are no repercussions for occupiers who commit violence against the occupied. We know that our communities cannot be safe as long as they are under occupation. Our families understand that desperation can lead Muslims living under military occupation to resort to tactics that we personally might not be able to imagine ourselves using, up to and including acts of violence.
Just like we know that our people will not be truly free until the military occupation of their lands comes to an end, Black people in the US will not be truly free until policing is abolished, because the police are an occupying force and occupation is incompatible with freedom.
We hate it when people demand that we condemn every act of violence carried out by other Muslims before we are allowed to speak out against the occupying forces wreaking havoc on Muslim people around the world. We resent being forced into a Good Muslim/Bad Muslim dichotomy, in which only the Muslims who show some sympathy for the occupiers and are willing to work with the other side are deemed worthy.
There are parallels between the violence and repression faced by Afghanistanis, Iraqis, Kashmiris, Palestinians, Rohingya, Uyghurs, and other Muslim communities living under military occupation around the world and the violence and repression faced by Black folks in the United States at the hands of police. The experiences are not the same. The history of chattel slavery in the United States and its ongoing legacy and trauma is a major difference that cannot be overstated. However drawing some parallels can help our families better understand the relationship between Black folks and the police in America.
In Black neighborhoods, police function as an occupying army. Like the Israel Defense Forces in Palestine or the Indian army in Kashmir, they are not there to keep Black folks safe. They are there to control Black folks, and to make white people feel safe from the perceived threat of Black violence — the same way the Israeli Defense Forces claim that their presence in the West Bank is intended to keep Israelis safe from terrorist attacks by Palestinians, and that the Indian army claims its yearlong curfew and decadeslong occupation in Kashmir keeps Indians safe from terrorist attacks by Kashmiris and Pakistani infiltrators.
Like the Uyghurs in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar, Black folks in America don’t have to break any laws to be seen as a threat. Their very existence makes them a threat that can justifiably be met with lethal force. Breonna Taylor was gunned down and shot more than eight times while in her home after officers broke into her house with no warrant and took her life. Rayshard Brooks was killed at a drive-through after he fell asleep in his car. Neither of them broke any laws, yet they were killed by cops.
This is not and has never been about following laws.
So if Iraqis and Afghanistanis living under occupation can be driven to acts of violence out of desperation and frustration, then why do we wince when we see Black folks rioting and destroying property? Why do we ask Black folks to condemn looting or demand that they be one of the “good”, peaceful protestors if they want our support?
Just like we know that our people will not be truly free until the military occupation of their lands comes to an end, Black people in the US will not be truly free until policing is abolished, because the police are an occupying force and occupation is incompatible with freedom.
Importantly, we also need to examine our roles as non-Black Muslims of color in the occupation of Black neighborhoods by police forces. When we own stores in Black neighborhoods, in which we are selling mainly unhealthy junk food, liquor, and cigarettes; either paying local Black workers minimum wage or refusing to hire from the local community at all; referring to members of the community by slurs like 3abeed and kalloo; using our profits from those stores to lead relatively comfortable lives in whiter parts of town; and constantly calling the cops or threatening to call the cops on Black folks who live in the neighborhood; we are acting like the Israeli settlers who move into the West Bank and demand that the Israeli Defense Forces keep them safe from the local Palestinians. We are being deputies of whiteness and upholding the occupying force, all while actively extracting wealth and resources from Black communities. This behavior is rooted in the deep-seated anti-Blackness that is pervasive in our communities.
We cannot underscore enough the degree to which anti-Blackness informs non-Black Muslim communities’ relationships to Black communities. We will not be able to do justice to that topic in this piece, so instead of delving into it here, we encourage you to educate yourselves with some of the excellent resources put together by Black-led Muslim groups like MuslimARC and Sapelo Square.
If this comparison between the military overseas and the police in the US sounds like a stretch, then think about the fact that many local police departments in the US send cops to Israel for training from the Israeli Defense Forces. Think about the fact that the same military contractors that make weapons that are used against Muslims overseas also supply the military-style equipment that American police departments use. Recall how during the uprisings here cops stood ready to protect private business interests, and then look at the ways in which military occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even in the Uyghur homeland of East Turkestan has opened up opportunities for US-based megacorporations. Non-Black Muslims of color may be positioned higher than Black folks in the racial hierarchy of the United States, but ultimately the same forces of racialized capitalism that are making it impossible for Black folks to breathe in the United States are also responsible for choking our communities overseas.
We know that we don’t need occupying armies or drones in Muslim lands to keep us safe. We can keep our own communities safe without foreign troops watching over us with guns, ready to pull the trigger at any perceived misstep or without any reason at all. In fact, we know that we cannot possibly be safe as long as we are living under military occupation. Similarly, we don’t need the police to keep us safe in America. What we need is for every community to have the resources they need to thrive — resources like affordable and safe housing, fully-funded schools, good jobs, and healthcare. We know how to protect our own communities, and we also know we cannot truly protect them as long as the police and military forces continue to occupy our neighborhoods. By joining together and rising up against the police and military forces that treat Black and Muslim lives as disposable both here and broad, we can work towards our collective liberation.
