The History of Black‐Muslim‐Arab Identity in the United States and its Implications for Modern Racial Boundaries

ABSTRACT

Rather than examining the identification of Black people in the United States with Arabs and Muslims, this article explores emerging scholarship about people who identify as Black and Arab and Muslim. The article first charts the larger intellectual contexts in which Arabs and Muslims became associated with U.S. African American identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then highlights the establishment of African American Muslim individuals and groups who also self‐identified as Arab, Arabian, and Arabic people from the 1930s through the 1940s. Finally, the article surveys the legacy of simultaneously Black, Muslim, and Arab communities after World War II, paying special attention to recent important changes in this complex of racial, religious, and ethnic identities.