The Moor of America: Approaching the Crisis of Race and Religion in the Renaissance and the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

It is something of a liberal bon mot to declare that Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, is the country’s first Muslim president.¹ The jest trades on the paranoia of right-wing extremists (and even of some conservative moderates) who pounce on the president’s Muslim middle name, Hussein, as evidence of his “true” faith. Its bite comes from the obvious ignorance of those who subscribe to this belief despite the president’s repeated avowals of his Christian religion. At the same time that the quip marks the absurdity of attempts to graft a Muslim identity onto Obama, it delegitimizes that identity and in effect colludes with polemical pronouncements that baldly declare Muslim and American to be antithetical. Winking at the exclusionary, reactionary, and simplistic notions of American identity and belonging articulated by the Right, the Left participates in its own brand of identity politics, not only through self-congratulating ridicule about Obama’s religion, but also through its heralding of a “postracial” America.² The phantasmagoric difference that can be shunted aside or laughed off (Islamic) is a substitute for the real, visible, somatic difference (black) that is acknowledged only insofar as it is erased. In other words, the election of the first man of African ancestry to the highest political office in the United States has ushered in a new era of race relations in the country, relations constituted by the invisibility and purported irrelevance of race.³