"To be Black and Muslim is to occupy a space of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility. Blackness is hypervisible, perceived and consumed through the historical aperture of the brutality of slavery. The stereotypes about Black people that guide our most quotidian and unconscious choices dictate that Blackness is dangerous: something to be contained; a threat. Blackness does not ask the Black subject to legitimize their Blackness, perhaps as a consequence of hypervisibility. It is simply a fact of one’s being, a physicality that signifies much more than just melanin. But when you add the identity marker of “Muslim” to that of “Black,” something very different happens: erasure. Black Muslims are invisible to their faith communities and to wider society, for Muslims, unlike Black people, must actively legitimize their identities as Muslims—through practicing faith, maintaining proximity to a community, or a cultural inheritance. The hypervisibility of Blackness makes one’s identity as a Muslim impossible precisely because Blackness precludes Muslimness in the cultural imaginary. So to occupy both subject positions is to experience the downward thrust of cognitive dissonance: you will always be too Black to be a true Muslim, but you must live with all of the pain that America inflicts on both Black people and Muslims. How are we to understand ourselves and our social locations, if being Muslim precludes being Black, which cannot be reconciled with being an American subject? The historical and contemporary erasure of Black Muslims can only be situated in the context of a violent anti-Black solidarity; the Black Muslim in America must then contend with an economy of unresolved strivings—towards faith, visibility, resistance, and self determination."

- Muna Mire, Towards a Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance
(via amaalsdrifting)

(Source: theeducatedfieldnegro, via amaalsdrifting)