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Race and the Nation of Islam - Coggle Diagram
Race and the Nation of Islam
Race as a Construct
(Weisenfeld 21:30) "He [Noble Drew Ali] argued that people of African descent (Black people)...should understand themselves as Moorish Americans..and all these other racial labels of ‘negro’ and ‘colored’ are...nicknames meant to erase the true history of Moorish Americans.”
"Perfect Endurance's declaration not only aimed at securing racial reclassification, but also explicitly linked religious and racial identity in ways that challenged conventional American racial categories" (3)
"I use the term 'religio-racial identity' to capture the commitment of members of these groups to understanding individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race" (5)
"...these movements not only called on blacks to reject the classification...as Negro, which leaders taught was a false category created for the purposes of enslavement and subjugation" (5)
"That is, race is at once a culturally constituted interpretation of human difference and a social and individual reality in everyday life with profound material consequences" (6)
"whites maintain the power to create and impose race and restrict access to the most privileged racial category in America" (6)
Rejection of slavery and Christianity as the one and only Black American history
(Weisenfeld 10:23) Black Americans thought “We are God’s people, we will be freed from slavery and this happens! But in the wake of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, there was a lot of questioning and searching”
(Weisenfeld 10:40) Black Americans thought “what does it mean that God did this for us and yet we are still subjected in these ways, we are still constrained”
(Weisenfeld 31:00) “Food practices involved the rejection of foods that W.D. Fard and Elijah Muhammad... talked about as slave foods...These were rejected as tying people to slave habits and they prescribed a new diet”
(Weisenfeld 56:33) There was a kind of seeking amongst Black Americans “for an identity that is not the longer-standing conventional Negro Christian which is the product of this time period” (Post-Reconstruction)
"...they sought to redefine black people-hood by restoring what they believed was a true collective identity" (8) which was not rooted in subjugation.
"They understood the work of restoring their true, God-given identity to involve acceptance of a different narrative of race history" (16).
"Rogers's emphatic message that black history predates enslavement in the New World resonated powerfully with the kinds of narratives members of the religio-racial movement embraced" (18).
Community Support
(Weisenfeld 8:50) “Its a combination of a certain liberation from...small communities small church congregations in the south to the north, to cities where people...are encountering new religious, political, cultural forms.”
(Weisenfeld 38:40) “The Moorish Science Temple had businesses that focused on food and healing. Noble Drew Ali founded a Moorish drug company that sold some patented medicines for healing.”
(Weisenfeld 41:54) “I got a really strong sense from finding these census records...a sense of how they tried to create a counter-space within the space of the city...Their own counter religio-racial space.”
"Indeed, many of the groups provided material support in times of hardship and addressed race and economics in their religio-racial systems" (10)
"While commentary at the time was often derisive...for members of these groups such practices of self-fashioning were powerful means by which they experienced and expressed their new religio-racial identities" (19).
According to Judith Weisenfeld