Black (Counter)Terrorism

Abstract

���� ��� riting in Social Text very soon after 9/11, Muneer Ahmad cited a New York Times article that quoted African American and Latino men, themselves long the victims of racial profiling, admitting that they supported racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims. Ahmad argued that, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, African Americans became suddenly more “American,” “now that Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians have assumed the primary position of racial scorn.” 1 Arguably, Arabs and South Asians have maintained that unenviable position in US popular culture since 9/11, and terrorism is certainly still popularly understood to be a Muslim phenomenon, but the popular-cultural association between terrorism and ethnicity has turned out to be considerably more labile and unpredictable than Ahmad’s early assessment would have suggested. In this essay I offer a brief account of some of the ways in which African American figures have come to be linked to terrorism via either their association with the US-based Nation of Islam or with a vaguely defined pan-African blackness that, putatively, has insidiously made its way into the United States, bringing Islamic terrorism with it. Significantly, all three of the representations I discuss feature a black counterterrorist agent who is able to infiltrate an active terrorist cell. Thus each simultaneously affirms and disavows its linkage of terrorism to blackness: in each case, the black agent in is fact a loyal US citizen—indeed, an exemplary citizen. But he is an exemplary citizen who may be plausibly mistaken for a terrorist, both by the cell into which he insinuates himself and, in two of the cases under discussion, by the audience as well. The Showtime television series Sleeper Cell (2005–6), about an Islamic terrorist cell based in Los Angeles, features Michael Ealy as a devout African American Muslim with ties (via his father, played by Charles Dutton) to the Nation of Islam. The first episode begins with an extended montage, in which we see Ealy’s character, Darwyn, wearing a taqiyah over his cornrows, praying in a prison cell. A picture of Mecca hangs on the wall, and the adhan—the Islamic call to prayer—resonates on the soundtrack. We see Darwyn say goodbye to his fellow Muslim prisoners; one of them, “the Librarian,” gives him a