Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 142–144 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.10 Book Review Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) Spencer Dew Wittenberg University, Springfield, USA and Ohio State University, Columbus, USA When, in the late 1990s, I taught college courses on religion to Chicago cops, my students would occasionally gift me their old, dog-eared copies of the glossy “Intelligence Report” magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. These sources helped shape their sense of who the “bad guys” were: extremists, terrorists , sovereign citizens, hate groups. These cops—like the cops and prison officials described in Those Who Know Don’t Say—were actively seeking out and exchanging knowledge about religious movements, and, in the process, perpetuating fantasies of dehumanized villains dead set on irrationally disrupting a society predicated on “law and order.” This memory recurred, with new poignancy, as I read Garrett Felber’s essential book on the Nation of Islam (NOI), one intervention of which is attention to how police and carceral officials read—and shared—C. Eric Lincoln’s 1961 The Black Muslims in America. Lincoln himself volunteered to consult with police departments and cooperated with prison officials interested in his research. Following Lincoln, agents of the state could insist that the NOI was not authentically Islamic or “legitimately” religious, that it eschewed political engagement Spencer Dew 143 for eschatology, that it was an insular group unaware of and unlinked to global trends and networks, and that it was inherently violent. Lincoln’s work did not just misinform; it helped maintain a fantasy of innocence . His scholarship simultaneously provided law enforcement and prison officials with a narrative in which the NOI “was a subversive hate group masquerading under the guise of religion” while ignoring the fundamental violence of their own work and the ways that the NOI offered a critique of and response to that violence (48). Such logic reads Malcolm X’s assassination as an instance of “‘Black-on-Black’ violence,” while remaining silent about law enforcement interventions which stoked internecine conflict within the NOI (180). Lincoln’s work on the NOI contributed to a broader narrative that, while emphasizing “violence, nihilism, and political naiveté in Black communities,” framed state violence as exceptional—whether in relation to the NOI, the urban rebellions of the late 1960s, or the prison uprisings at Tombs, Folsom, and Attica (170). Lincoln’s “Black Muslim” label, flagging a supposed division between NOI and global forms of Islam, served as replacement for earlier descriptions of the NOI as a primitive “jungle cult” (20). Yet like the term “New Religious Movement” employed as a fashionable replacement today for the word “cult,” the echo of earlier hierarchies remained. Indeed, Lincoln’s scholarship itself served as a replacement for actual activity by and actual law enforcement knowledge of the NOI—a useful reduction, a conceptual tool for the law enforcement / incarceration industry. Felber’s central argument is that the NOI played an essential role in the growth of this industry, in the rise of the modern carceral state. Through what he terms the “dialectics of discipline,” NOI organization and protest was met with “new modes of surveillance, punishment, and ideological knowledge production ” (2). Attention to the “ground up” dynamic of policymaking—with interpretations of information collected and shared by police officers and wardens ultimately reaching officials on the federal level—is paired with attention to the NOI’s legal work, including “the first major organized prison litigation movement in the country’s history” (49, 7). Felber insists—rightly—on reading prisons and courts as “sites of activism,” where the legitimacy of the state was challenged, locating litigation alongside hunger strikes, sit-ins, takeovers of solitary confinement , street protests, and prison uprisings as acts of resistance within a broader Black Freedom struggle—acts to which the state responded, often with crushing force (81, 5). Felber describes “the revanchist violence of the state” both in individual terms (the torture and rape of Muslim prisoners after the Attica revolt) and on a national...