Thinking About Race

In recent days I have found myself re-reading the Southern Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand. Published in 1930, I’ll Take My Stand is an anthology consisting of twelve essays defending the heritage of white southern culture against the looming threat of “northernization.” There is lots of rich, sentimental, and somber material in the work. The authors abhor growing industrialization, lament the rising transition from agrarian life to factory and industry, and fear an upending of their culture in favor of cold northern materialism. Their work was, perhaps above all else, a call for preservation of what was and restoration of dignity for a people who felt besieged by a culture and society that threatened to dismantle their own.

Though it is rich with insights on questions of technology, culture, society, and faith, I’ll Take My Stand can feel light on the question of race. Many authors make no mention of race, while others gloss slavery briefly (John Ransom’s crude mention describes slavery as “more often than not, humane in practice”). This lacunae struck me as peculiar at first. I would only later come to learn that it was intentional — the authors had chosen to divide topics, assigning Robert Penn Warren the responsibility of elucidating the role and place of blacks in both the South that was and the South that would be. At the time of his contribution, Warren’s article was seen by some of his collaborators as scandalous and expressing a liberal sensibility alien to the South. In fact, it is said that senior contributor and noted segregationist Donald Davidson lobbied to have Warren’s piece excluded from the work altogether, though it remained in the final publishing in spite of his protestations.

Warren’s article is entitled “The Briar Patch.” It begins with a brief retrospective of what had transpired with respect to the black man in America, rapidly moving between slavery and freedom. Warren faulted slavery for having collectively infantilized “the negro,” such that his ability to express personal agency post emancipation had been severely compromised. In describing this he writes, “Always in the past he had been told when to work and what to do, and now, with the new-got freedom, he failed to understand the limitation which a simple contract of labor set on that freedom.” It does not seem that Warren held any particular antipathy for blacks. In fact, he expressed great sympathy for them and often pitied the lot that most had in life. He saw Northerners as disingenuously exploiting them, foisting them into positions of authority to carry out acts of corruption for the benefit of white northern elites (while abandoning them expeditiously and casting them into disrepute if and when they were caught), or expediently instrumentalizing them when white workers striked or proved otherwise difficult. But Warren didn’t limit himself to highlighting northern hypocrisies. He understood the problems that blacks faced in the South, writing of discrimination and lack of opportunity, forces that were driving more blacks to move north. “At present the negro frequently fails to get justice, and justice from the law is the least that he can demand for himself or others can demand for him,” wrote Warren, further stating, “It will be a happy day for the South when no court discriminates in its dealings between the negro and the white man, just as it will be a happy day for the nation when no court discriminates between the rich man and the poor man.”

In spite of his otherwise laudable ambitions, Warren’s ultimate solution was separatism. Though blacks and whites would have to learn to reconcile with one another, professional, educated blacks would only find reliable income and labor among their own for Warren. In lieu of a racially integrated capital economy, Warren proposed robust, economically independent black communities, ones that could cultivate prosperity without relying on white contribution or collaboration. In doing so, Warren envisioned the engendering of black belonging such that blacks would have “such roots as the white society owns.” Warren would go on to later regret his separatist propositions, saying that he had not envisioned desegregation as a social possibility at the time of his writing. Warren authored a number of works dealing with the question of race in his life, and in his 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro?, he revisited “The Briar Patch,” writing that he had provided in it a “cogent and humane defense of segregation.”

Although it was written nearly a century ago, it often seems that the questions we are trying to answer remain as elusive as they were in Warren’s time. To be sure, much has changed for the better. Jim Crow is behind us and the legal system, though far from perfect, is markedly improved from the days of segregation, as is the social standing of Black Americans (we have had a black president, after all). And yet there remains much to be addressed, and the gap that continues to disfavor and debilitate Black American society, though narrower than it was a century ago, can confront us in brutal, tragic, and difficult ways.

One such awakening occurred weeks ago with the vicious and inhumane killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. For a full eight minutes and 46 seconds, now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd’s neck to subdue him while slowly suffocating Floyd in the process. In spite of Floyd’s repeated cries that he could not breathe, a coterie of officers stood in seemingly casual conversation while Floyd’s vitality withered and his body went limp.

Rightfully outraged by this act of cruelty, scores of people hit the streets protesting not only the loss of George Floyd but many others who have similarly been victims of police brutality and racial injustice. In the intervening days and weeks, protests have grown, spreading to cities and towns throughout the country, with national attention being given to the question of race relations and achieving racial equity.

The emergent discourse that has accompanied protests has centered on questions of systemic racism and what it entails. For a great many people, it has brought them into conversation with otherwise unfamiliar and rapidly-evolving terms like antiracism, structural oppression, and allyship. Though many aspects — indeed the vast majority — of this discourse aspire towards laudable aims of racial justice, it is important to apprehend their full implications as well as competing theories in these domains, particularly given the urgency of racial justice and calls for complete consolidation around certain activist platforms. As Muslims, the responsibility to act in ways that support the oppressed, dispossessed, and marginalized is not in question. Determining what, in fact, achieves that aim is.

In a grim assessment of American history, renowned historian and pioneering scholar of antiracism Ibram Kendi recently authored a piece for The Atlantic entitled “The American Nightmare.” As he is so adept at doing, Kendi harmonizes seemingly disconnected tragedies, situating them in a history and chronology of black suffering dating back centuries. These brazen and ongoing acts of aggression, of systemic dispossession and socialized racism are not tragic exceptions for Kendi, but instead the natural manifestation of a social logic that has entrenched anti-black racism into its very core. Put more simply, anti-black racism is not a bug, but instead a feature of the West as it has always been and, left unabated, will remain.

Kendi’s more elaborate book Stamped from the Beginning makes this case with considerably more force and detail. In it, Kendi traces the lineage of racism not merely to the origins of America, but much earlier, drawing on historical incidents, racist thinking, and racist policies that date back to the 15th century. Kendi uses history to elucidate his central thesis of racist and anti-racist thinking. This thesis challenges parochial definitions of racism that confine it to the marginal crevices of out-and-about white supremacists (e.g., the KKK) by radically re-envisioning it in more broadly applicable terms within the modalities of thought and ideas. Understanding racism not merely as a comprehensive state such that one is either a “racist” or not on account of subscribing to or rejecting an alleged racial neutrality but also as an internalized mode of thinking and feature of ideas such that all ideas are either racist or antiracist makes racism something that can be expressed and championed by otherwise sympathetic racial justice actors, even if they are black. Indeed, one of Kendi’s more controversial practices is his willingness to critique civil rights icons, abolitionists, and black liberationists as having been affected by racist thinking. This list includes, but is by no means limited to, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King.

Kendi does not exempt himself from this critique, confessing early on his own “racist ideas,” ideas which he only discovered upon writing Stamped. It was in writing Stamped that Kendi developed his conception of antiracist group equality, something that enabled him to “self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas I had consumed over my lifetime while I uncovered and exposed the racist ideas that others have produced over the lifetime of America.”

Kendi’s assessment of responses to racial inequality divides them into three groups: segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists. Kendi defines segregationists as those who blame black people for their own failures, whereas antiracists point to racial inequity and discrimination as the cause of disparities and variable outcomes. Although segregationists are undoubtedly problematic in this exposition, it is the assimilationist that Kendi cautions against the most: those who attempt to argue for both what the antiracists and what the segregationists have stated. The faux centrism of assimilationist thinking can undercut antiracist efforts and reinscribe racist policies and thinking by placating forms of white fragility and domination while incriminating black behavior, intelligence, and work ethic for their social and economic failures. This respectability politics contributes to the pathologizing of the black individual, and the allure of this rhetoric is such that prominent black actors will eagerly recite the liturgies of assimilationist thinking and nonetheless be regarded as working in the cause of racial justice. By comparison, antiracists not only self-consciously discern racial motivations and implications of language, policy, and thought but also comprehensively affirm an intersectionality that is equally committed to opposing homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, class bias, sexism, and more.

In spite of the nuance Kendi furnishes in describing the double consciousness people can possess as holders of racist and antiracist thought, Kendi’s thinking is frequently categorical, binary, and existential. American history is not a story of racial progress but the progress of racism. The work of dissuading many dominant racist ideas through education is wasteful and littered with failure. Promoting self-sacrifice for those with privileges is a futile path. “Uplift suasion” — the idea that whites can be convinced of black belonging by seeing successful blacks — is nefarious fiction. Antiracism as a program centers on securing outcomes in seeming ambivalence to what achieves it. If discrimination brings about equality, then it is antiracist and opposition to it is racism. If non-discrimination brings about inequality, then it is racist and opposition to it is antiracism. The success of antiracism and eradication of American racism “must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations — the world.” There is no room for deliberation, reasoned disagreement, or compromise. As Kendi writes, “An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.”

The totalitarian project of Kendi’s antiracism can often be consumed with the acquisition and exertion of power in all corners of society, both large and small. Last year when probed by Politico to expound upon a solution for racial injustice, Kendi proposed an antiracist amendment to the US Constitution. Not only would the proposed amendment target racial inequality, but it would also render unconstitutional the expression of racist ideas by public officials. Moreover, the amendment would “establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

Kendi is not without his critics, however. Adolph Reed Jr., a preeminent scholar of political science and virulent critic of identity politics, took a slight at Kendi’s historiography in Stamped, remarking off-handedly in an interview that no one he knows has read the work. Reed in other places has objected strongly to the radical foregrounding of identities and identity politics as a program (something he has referred to as the “left-wing of neoliberalism”) and has argued that rather than elucidate racial disparities, the singular obsession with race can pathologize them, intensify racial injustice, and overlook other, arguably more important dimensions of human life that can provide insight into why various forms of oppression regularly visited upon Black American communities exist. A relatively recent example of this logic appears in a piece ruminating on the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests:

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rests on insistence that “racism” — structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified — must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.

But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907. And, according to The Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations — New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado — where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police — that does not seem to be the case….[N]o black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

Reed has elsewhere argued that antiracism as a discursive category fails to provide rigorous economic analysis of the problems facing underprivileged communities, focusing instead on token diversity measures. Consequently, the antiracist activist becomes a tool of the neoliberal elite by fixating on the outcome but not, importantly, the cause of the disparities that disfavor Black Americans (by superficially — and reductively — assuming the outcome and cause to be one and the same). Moreover, Reed critiques the antiracist notion of white supremacy as a “totalizing phenomenon, a force impervious to change,” one that comes to resemble “terrorism” as an “ideological abstraction whose specific content exists largely in the eyes of the beholder.” This neoliberal character of antiracism and identity politics is but one reason Walter Benn Michaels has noted that “the commitment to identity politics has been more an expression of . . . enthusiasm for the free market than a form of resistance to it.”

Kendi and Reed are not the only voices on race, of course, but they are instructive in outlining how voices can differ substantially in their shared commitment to combating inequality. Reed is not, by any measure, a conservative or fundamentally opposed to race as a prism for reviewing human relations and injustice. He is, however, doggedly opposed to the idea that race must color all human endeavors and that race neutrality, in principle, must be seen as de facto racist.

Kendi and Reed provide much thought for consideration, but they also provoke many questions. If indeed all ideas are racist and antiracist, are all ideas also sexist and antisexist? Nativist and antinativist? Ageist and antiageist? Islamophobic and anti-Islamophobic? And what happens when the relative interest of one constituency differs from that of another? Affirmative action debates over Harvard admissions are championed not by white applicants but by applicants of Asian origin who object to quotaized regulations that lower their likelihood of admission.

Advocates of intersectionality are often keen to highlight those intersections that theoretically exacerbate one’s likelihood of enduring oppression and injustice, but what about complex intersections that both disfavor and favor an individual? And how does intersectionality adjust when presumably disfavored intersections begin to succeed at greater rates? Today, women are more likely to graduate from college than their male peers. They are also less likely to commit suicide, be incarcerated, find themselves victims of police brutality, or succumb to narcotics addictions. Would this make being a woman a “privilege” in these domains of life? Or must she always be viewed as oppressed? If not, can intersectionality be applied contextually in ways that do not necessarily have to suggest generalized outcomes? If intersectionality requires consistent context-checking, then is it really all that useful as a concept? And what about aspects of our persons that bear tremendous consequence in various settings (consider: weight, height, etc.) but do not exist as an “identity” per se?

Although there is no doubting the manner in which racial disparities affect black communities in the West, how might Kendi’s antiracism speak to the decline of white middle America? Opioid addictions, unemployment and underemployment, and the deterioration of the family are worsening in much of the country. In a recent symposium with Kendi, esteemed scholar of race John A. Powell made this very observation in reference to work he had done in Dayton, Ohio. Powell recounted time he had spent in Dayton working on efforts to bring about equitable outcomes for blacks and whites economically and socially. Though equality was ultimately achieved, it was done not through the improvement of local black communities but instead the decline of white ones. As Powell remarked (paraphrasing), “That is not the type of equality we want to achieve.”

Is Reed right when he diagnosis certain problems as principally economic and not identity-based? How do economic reforms speak to implicit bias studies or account for anti-black racism even when controlled for economic and cultural conditions? Can we not focus on economic redistribution without simultaneously sacrificing our emphasis on race?

Also: can cultures influence behavior? If simple exposure to violence on television can influence the psychological and mental health of children, then what about music, movies, athletics, and related cultural products? If these can indeed be proved to bear a causal relationship to human behavior (as is often done in Postcolonial studies, calls for forms of representation, etc.), then why is highlighting the shortcomings or calling for improvements and reforms in these products racism, or “uplift suasion”? Or are they only racism or “uplift suasion” some of the time? Who gets to choose?

These are important questions in my mind, the type that needs the oxygen of open discussion. People who care deeply about cultivating a better society — like Reed, Powell, and Kendi — can differ over them. But it can often feel that such differences are finding less purchase by the day. If we are to take Kendi as the sole proprietor of racial thinking, then Reed is himself a racist, as are indeed many others. Kendi’s historiography would have us re-read many icons of the civil rights era, while his thinking would require us to label broad swaths of the American public as racist for merely aspiring to the goal of race neutrality (distinct from those insidiously and disingenuously levying it to stifle discussions of race and racial equity) and insist that anything short of full-throated antiracism can only be segregation (read: being critical of the black community, even for blacks themselves) or assimilation (read: by believing that black communities need internal reform and that significant policy reforms are required as well).

Thankfully, the narrowing of dialogue and the imposition of white fragility and its attendant discourse are beginning to be met with greater resistance as of late. Matt Taibbi, a trenchant critic of Wall Street and incisive journalist and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, recently authored one such fulmination. Reviewing Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Taibbi offers a brutal repudiation of DiAngelo and the emerging antiracist movement, locating in it neoliberal assumptions, a broad, sweeping mandate to “cancel” all who fail to color exactly within the available lines, and an avowed opposition to all who make the mistake of adhering to race neutrality as a social objective. Here, Taibbi writes:

This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White Fragility, could have amazing consequences. In researching I Can’t Breathe, I met civil rights activists who recounted decades of struggle to remove race from the law. I heard stories of lawyers who were physically threatened for years in places like rural Arkansas just for trying to end explicit hiring and housing discrimination and other remnants of Jim Crow. Last week, an Oregon County casually exempted “people of color who have heightened concerns about racial profiling” from a Covid-19 related mask order. Who thinks creating different laws for different racial categories is going to end well? When has it ever?

At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences.

The Intercept columnist and founder Glenn Greenwald has shared Taibbi’s piece, expressing his own concerns about the totalizing nature of the white fragility movement while stifling dissent or alternative modes of thinking about race and racial justice. Perhaps more concerning, Greenwald and others have pointed to the way in which “white fragility” is now being used for explicitly racist ends, often directed towards white people. In a recent meeting of the New York Community Education Council, one colleague told another that it “hurts people when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on his lap,” followed up by yelling that the colleague needed to “read Ibram Kendi.” These sorts of expressions and gross generalizations about “white people” have become far too common in antiracist circles, and many recent converts now eagerly speak about “white people” as a lesser class of human, one that they are thankfully (and conveniently) unlike.

As of this writing, the debate over racial justice rages on, and many ingenious (and dubious) contributions are being added by the day. Perhaps the question for Muslims is, from where can we take our instruction in all of this?

Although there is likely much more to unpack, as a starting point it seems to me that there should be a few guiding criteria that we can use as a starting point:

• First, we must disentangle the empirical/historical questions from the theological. Is America a systemically racist society? Was it born of white supremacy and sustained on the back of brutal racial oppression? These are questions that reasonable people can differ over. Committed, faithful Muslims may agree with those contentions, just as they may differ with them. We must be careful not to turn every component of this debate into a difference of faith-based commitment or frame all who differ with one another as violating Islamic norms and values.
• Second, we must refuse the allure of social identities that can form in moments such as this. Too often, these identities conflate legitimate concerns with illegitimate ones. Intersectionality, for instance, enmeshes racial justice efforts with feminist, queer, and trans activism. Those concerned with the rise of protests often simultaneously downplay racial injustice or, more seriously, adopt racist attitudes towards black people. Resisting the contaminating character of right- and left-wing identities in this moment is essential.
• Third, we cannot take as axiomatic the presumption of certain people and groups being iniquitous racists. In Islam, people are presumed innocent of such defective character traits until proof of the contrary (al-asl bara’at al-dhimma), and those with whom we differ must be extended a great deal more charity than is currently being employed. We must try to interpret the words of others fairly while understanding that many are unlikely to express the latest verities of the moment exactly as others may want them to. People need latitude both to make mistakes and to disagree.
• Fourth, we cannot fall prey to prevailing discourses that traffic in racist terms. Using “white people” as a derogative or pejoratively insulting “white people” is reprehensible, rooted in the very derision that calls for racial equity should be fighting against. Although ‘whiteness’ is a sociological term — one that can be challenged, discussed, and examined — the term “white people” used as a slur is little more than blameworthy denigration.
• Fifth, we cannot accept the contention that all ideas are inexorably racist or antiracist. If this proposition were taken indiscriminately, it would render the entire edifice of faith suspect, as even belief in God, the hereafter, messengers, etc. would all be commitments that are firstly matters of race and only secondarily concerned with the actual questions that these beliefs are, as a matter of actual fact, concerned with.
• Sixth, the growing tendency to refract contemporary racial conflicts onto the past must be curtailed. Anachronistically transposing our cultural moment onto the past creates controversy when none existed nor need exist. Recently, poorly sourced speculation has resulted in erroneous charges that the noble Companion Bilal (رضي الله عنه) was thwarted in various efforts while his sayings were deliberately disregarded on account of his skin color. In spite of important interventions to refute this notion, many remain unconvinced. When Islam and its entire discursive tradition become fodder for race critique, it can be extremely difficult to disabuse people of their readings of the tradition as being infected by the very systemic racism we see today. At times, even a mountain of countervailing evidence will be written off as apology and an unwillingness to face a presumably racist past.
• Seventh, faithful Muslims must attenuate their defensiveness when provocative questions are raised or when certain community critiques are made against Muslim spaces. Questions about anti-black racism in Muslim spaces, for instance, need room for discussion and examination. As people of faith, we must be committed to the eradication of abhorrent attitudes and practices against our fellow brethren, and many black Muslims report discriminatory experiences in Muslim schools, masajid, and social settings. This needs to change.
• Eighth, calls to defer to black leadership is counterproductive and harmful when weaponized for partisan ends. When this occurs, black actors of various sorts are tokenized by groups with different agendas and ideological commitments who foist their preferred black voice as the voice on matters of race that all else must defer to while dismissing, discounting, and denouncing black voices that don’t fit said agenda. Such an ideological two-step masquerading as neutral deference is abhorrent, and we would be better served by speaking openly and honestly about our views and differences without trying to pose as uninterested allies “leaning out” so that black voices can “lean in.” This is not to say that black people should not be deferred to on questions that speak to the distinctive and subjective experiences of black people in the US. However, that is a very different thing than the blanket call for deference to specifically chosen black voices, which is often paired with an urging for silence from all non-black persons who have thoughts on race that can enrich our conversations. We should also keep in mind that black Muslim leaders have a lot to offer on subjects that have little to nothing to do with race at all.
• Ninth, we must be on guard against unfettered individualism. Contemporary activism can often take the character of what Alan Jacobs has termed “metaphysical capitalism,” whose gospel is “ ‘I am my own.’ I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny.” Hyper-individualism puts us in a place where we center ourselves in all our efforts, where we radically reject all moral instruction and transcendence, foregrounding instead our needs and desires as individuals. Reminding ourselves that we do not own ourselves, that our agency is contingent and limited, and that we are not in control of the world around us is essential. God, on the other hand, is sovereign, in complete control of His dominion, and has the power to change any affair in an instant. In relation to God, we are nothing. He owns us, and we live in submission to Him, ‘azza wa jall.

These are but a few initial thoughts on the matter, ones that I pray can help animate a more developed discourse. Racial discourse and the fight for racial equity are not going away anytime soon, and Muslims will need to stay engaged in these efforts while sifting through the sand lest they get cut by the occasional shard of glass.

Other notes:

Christian priest Fr Aidan Kimel observes about preaching politically in the church:

It is less important that those who hear you should concur in your conclusions than that they should respond positively to the principles from which you reason. When I address political questions I almost always adopt an exegetical form of sermon-structure, follow my text and the argument that arises from it, until it points irresistibly to some theologico-political principle. Then, in the lightest way possible, I give concreteness to the principle by showing how it bears on the public issue in question. Usually I do not bother to indicate my own view; it will be evident enough from the argument. If anyone disagrees with me, I hope that person will have been helped to articulate a more authentically Christian response, one which will take seriously the issues of principle I have raised. Everyone needs to come out with a clearer sense of what is unnegotiable for Christian conscience, and what, by contrast, is merely a matter of differing emphasis or differing interpretation of a given situation.

One of these days I need to convert over my lengthier FB posts onto this blog. Not sure what the best way to do it is, but when it happens I’ll probably publish them out as separate articles.

An interesting debate has been brewing over the past few years tied to pornography and public health. Today, 17 states (all “red”) have passed non-binding resolutions declaring pornography a public health crisis. The resolutions and groups campaigning against porn point to its addictiveness, the way it contributes to violence against women and children, and promotes the sexualization of teens and young women. Those defending porn reject the charges, saying that pornography is in fact healthy given its relationship to solo masturbation (taken here as a form of “safe sex”) and that what is really needed is a legalization of sex work and greater emphasis on sex education throughout public schooling.

As this debate picks up in the coming years, it will be interesting to see what side Muslims opt for. As I’ve noted in the past, I’m not terribly optimistic.

The folks at IOK in greater Los Angeles are offering a free online course with Shaykh Jibreel Speight on “A History of Black Americans and Islam.” You can register at this link: course.

And Allah Knows Best.