Think Progress - a 19th Century Campaign to Declare Mormons ‘Non-White’ & Modern Day Islamophobia
Jack Jenkins over at Think Progress discuses a part of American history you may not even be aware of, and what it can teach us about our current climate of Anti Muslim bigotry. To among other things this shows how inherently meaningless “race” actually is, and how we still haven’t learned from our past when it comes to demonizing people, including when it comes to their “race” or religion. Many in the anti Muslim “counter Jihad” like talk about how “Islam is not a race,” well neither was nor is, Mormonism.
Much has been written about the unprecedented wave of Islamophobia currently sweeping the United States, with Muslim Americans falling victim to an ever-increasing number of threats, assaults, and attacks on their houses of worship. The groundswell of hatred has appalled and confused many on the Left, with some wondering how a nation such as the United States — which enshrines religious freedom for citizens in the First Amendment to its Constitution — could ever create an environment that openly oppresses a single faith group.
But if history tells us anything, it’s that religious bigotry isn’t just common in the United States, it’s as American as apple pie. In fact, laudable ideals of religious freedom notwithstanding, our country has actively demeaned, belittled, and persecuted minority faith groups since the colonial era.
The early Puritans, themselves refugees from religious persecution, banned rival faiths and hanged those who worshipped differently; Ominous organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and shadowy political parties such as the “know-nothings” sprung up in the mid-1800s to vehemently oppose Irish Catholics who were thought to corrupt America’s purely Protestant Christian heritage; And anti-Semitism has a long and painful history in the U.S., such as when Americans mocked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by calling it the “Jew Deal.”
In all of these instances, the purveyors of vitriol — like the anti-Islam crusaders of today — took pains to present themselves as somehow reasonable, arguing that those they oppressed were simply unfit to participate in America’s shining beacon of democracy. And like their modern counterparts, historical hatemongers often blended various forms of bigotry — fusing xenophobia, racism, and nativism to cast aside groups with “different” religious beliefs and even designate them as belonging to a “lesser” race, irrespective of their actual skin color.