Non-black Muslim Americans, who tend to be the gatekeepers in prominent Muslim advocacy, political, and religious institutions, are largely wed to community models bound to Arab or South Asian ethnocentrism and model minority status, and to an aspirational whiteness that too often is expressed in racism toward African Americans, including African American Muslims. Emulating and becoming more proximate to whiteness mandates expression of one of whiteness's cornerstone traits, anti-black racism, which non-black Muslims have actively performed in order to claim, or attempt to claim, the coveted privileges of whiteness.

XREF: Connects to anti-blackness discourse from scholars like Toni Morrison and Afropessimism literature, as well as patterns of immigrant racial positioning.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 442