Affirmative Action For Muslims?

Writing in the Washington Post‘s Outlook section today, Peter Skerry offers some telling observations about the state of the domestic Muslim community. Or is that Arab community? Neither. Essentially, they don’t exist. Yet.

In the United States today, there is no “Middle Eastern community,” no “Arab community” and no “Muslim community,” certainly not in any politically cohesive sense.

Muslims and Arabs are a disparate lot, especially in this country. Despite our tendency to equate Arabs with Muslims, the fact is that most Arabs in the United States today are not Muslims — they’re Christians from places such as Lebanon. And most Muslims are not Arabs — they’re South Asians or African Americans. Muslims here are riven by national, linguistic and sectarian divisions. And many Middle Easterners (Iranians, Turks and Kurds among them) are not Arabs. The divide between Iranians and other Muslim immigrants is particularly telling. Often identifying themselves as “Persians,” Iranians in this country have not been highly visible as Muslims.

What teeming waters, one would think, into which for diversity-seeking admissions officers to cast their nets. But so far, to the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t happened, at least on a large scale. It’s not clear to why Arabs don’t receive diversity preferences in larger numbers. I suspect Muslims don’t because of the still lingering notion that preferences to religious groups would encounter breach the “wall of separation” between church and state, but as I’ve often predicted (here and here, for example) if the diversity justification for discrimination prevails in the Supreme Court it will inevitably spread to include religious preferences. If the demand for diversity can undermine the barriers against racial discrimination, as it has very nearly done, surely legitimization by the Supremes will give it enough force to sweep away the barriers against religious discrimination as well.

Skerry argues that the absence of common interests among domestic Muslims and Arabs is rapidly changing.

All of these groups are beginning to identify with one another, in no small part because the U.S. government and many citizens are treating them as a more or less homogeneous group. Waging the homeland security battle is necessary. Yet, however one feels about the new Immigration and Naturalization Service registration requirement for men from many Muslim countries, or about the profiling of Arabs and Muslims more generally, it is important to understand that our policies are helping to forge a new minority identity. We are pushing these groups together into a political coalition around grievances against the government that will not soon be forgotten. The outcome will almost certainly be a new minority group whose claims against America will be a source of rancor and division long after the current crisis has eased.

Government policy created a “Hispanic” community out of many different nationality groups who did not realize they were Hispanic until they came to the United States and were put in that category. Ditto with Asian-Americans. And even with blacks. (See my discussion of “People of Color Who Never Felt They Were Black,” here.)

Now that’s about to happen with Arabs. Or Middle Easterners. Or Muslims. But at least that will prepare them to receive the benefit of preferences, should they survive.