Black Muslim Subjects as a Site of Multiple Oppression: Somali Mothers Contest Colonial Hierarchy in School

• In Event: Toward a Critical Muslim Youth Studies: Conceptual and Empirical Debates and Tensions

Abstract

In this study, I explore the counter-stories of a group of Somali mothers as they speak against the criminalization of their children, particularly boys, in an urban school in London, UK by teachers and administrators of color. Drawing on both phenomenology of race scholarship (Alcoff, 2005; Gordon, 1995) and anti-colonial discursive framework (Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001), I highlight how the construction and production of the narrative of “troubled Somali boys” by mainly non-white teachers and administrators, of South Asian descend, many of whom are Muslim, reflects racial hierarchies within colonial relations dictated by coloniality of power discourse (Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2007). I argue that the racial hierarchy among colonial subjects in this study, Somalis and South Asians, is an example of how coloniality of power operates in the bodies and actions of colonized people as it upholds and sustains white supremacy. This suggests then, the South Asian school staff’s antiblackness towards Somalis is motivated by a desire for whiteness (Author, 2020), which demands both antiblack as well as antiMuslim racism.

This research is part of a larger project that examined the experiences of immigrant Somali students and families in three European countries, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden. Focus groups conducted with ten Somali mothers provided primary data sources. While, focus groups with teachers, school leaders, and students provided secondary data sources. In addition, my research partner and I spent a total of 50 hours observing classrooms, school staff meetings, hallways, and the school cafeteria. In this paper, I focus on the stories shared by five of the mothers, who acted as a focal point and whom we followed up with interviews. Data was analyzed using thematic analysis, and membercheking.

My findings show that Somali mothers understood and challenged the South Asian staff’s treatment of Somali students as anti-Blackness racism that was used to rationalize high policing and surveillance of their sons. We also found that the Somali mothers weaponized Black identity as a strategy to counter anti-Blackness narratives and action of the school staff. This is relevant, because Black immigrant Muslim boys are becoming increasingly subjected to disciplinary measures just like their African-American and Latinx peers (Okilwa, Khalifa & Briscoe, 2017). And finally, the Somali mothers’ stories shed light on the struggle over the control of Somali male children’s bodies as Black Muslim diasporic subjects. This suggests that the notion of Muslimness is implicated by race and racial relations, where the Black male body continues to signify danger. This work will bring a nuanced complexity to the literature on Muslim students, and that of boys of color educational disenfranchisement as well as research on school policies that often tend to miss how colonial logic plays out among Muslim and other communities of color.

Author

• Nimo Abdi, The Ohio State University - Columbus