Although these enslaved Muslims prayed, observed Ramadan, maintained pious lifestyles, and forged spiritual communities while bonded to slave code and slave master, the law preempted seeing them as bona fide Muslims. Blackness, the antithesis of whiteness, was constructed to justify and perpetuate the enslavement of African peoples, and systematically reduce them to property. But this was by design. In her landmark treatise Whiteness as Property, UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris observes, "The hyper-exploitation of Black labor was accomplished by treating Black people themselves as objects of property. Race and property were thus conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on race—only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property." The creation, construction, and consignment of blackness onto the bodies of Africans washed away, from the eyes of the law and those expected to abide by and enforce it, the spiritual identities of enslaved Africans. Enslaved African Muslims were black, the law held, and thus property. And property could not adhere to any organized religion, let alone believe in Islam.

XREF: Connects to Cheryl Harris's Whiteness as Property and the racial-property conflation framework.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 170