Khaled Beydoun

DEARBORN — From exposing the mistreatment of domestic workers in Lebanon, to addressing racism within the Arab American communities, to combating Islamophobia in the media, Khaled Beydoun exemplifies academic activism.

Beydoun, a law professor and critical race theory scholar, said politicians’ xenophobic statements are serving as a barometer for the racism in American society.

He said conventional and public education efforts through academia and social media should spearhead the fight against bigotry.

“There has to be a multi-faceted front,” he added.

Beydoun, 37, said he is hopeful about the push back against Islamophobia because there are more Muslim Americans in positions of influence — lawyers, scholars and politicians.

“By virtue of penetrating these bases, we can combat Islamophobia both at the grass roots and also at the grass tops,” he said.

While right wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, are seen as the front for anti-Muslim sentiments, the professor said the federal government has policies that victimizes Muslim citizens.

Beydoun is an opponent of Countering Violent Extremism, a national security program that he says aims to infiltrate concentrated Muslim communities in a collaborative effort between the FBI and local police.

“Law enforcement seeks to develop informant-type relationships with people in the community to essentially function as proxies for the police to spy on Muslims who are suspected of radicalization,” he said.

After the recent wave of hate crimes against Muslims, several federal officials have pledged to protect Muslim Americans. But Beydoun is skeptical of the government’s approach.

“Protection is code for two things— for paternalism and second for intrusion,” he said. “What Muslim Americans or Americans of any faith or ethnicity should ask for is the equal protection of the laws.”

“A natural alignment”

The law professor is an outspoken advocate of social and racial justice issues. In several articles and countless social media posts, he has condemned police brutality and institutionalized racism that targets African Americans.

Beydoun said Arab, Muslim and African Americans are all seen as a demographic threat.

“Blackness is always associated with criminality; Muslim is always associated with national security threats; and Black Muslim is viewed as both,” he said.

Beydoun said religious and ethnic identities are not one-dimensional, adding that Muslim and Black histories in the United States are intertwined.

“Communities don’t exist along single tracks,” he said.

Referring to African Muslims who were brought against their will to the United States as slaves, Beydoun said the first Muslims in America were Black. He added that Black Muslim movements, such as the Nation of Islam, were also some of the earliest American communities to follow the Muslim faith.

“To talk about Muslim Americans, you have to start by talking about African Americans,” he said. “There’s that intimate overlap and nexus that prompts a natural kind of alignment with the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Beydoun blamed segregation for anti-Black bigotry in southeast Michigan’s Arab community.

“Given the way the area is set up demographically, there is little meaningful interaction between Arab Americans and African Americans,” he said. “On the other hand, you have individuals who come here with very embedded stereotypes and racist views about who Blacks are.”

He added that many Arab Americans revere identifying as White, although their experiences are far more similar to those of African Americans.

“By virtue of pursuing Whiteness, you are moving away from Blackness,” he said. “And the process of moving away from Blackness is to discriminate, hate, slander Blacks.”

When it comes to addressing issues within the Muslim American community, like racism and sectarianism, Beydoun does not hold back or self-censor.

He said it is naive to think that internal criticism of the community would play into the hands of Islamophobes because critics are not exposing anything that’s unknown to the wider American society.

“If our objective is to bring forth policies or to shift public opinion or to shift media representations, the most optimal solution towards achieving that is to build coalitions and maximize our number of allies,” he said. “And the biggest obstacle towards making that happen has been us.”

On identity

Beydoun, who was born to a Lebanese father and Egyptian mother, said it is hard to prioritize the multiple aspects of his identity.

But he added that he would identify as a person of color who is a Muslim. As an activist, he said being Muslim allows him to be a part of a cross-racial identity that is increasingly becoming a target of bigotry.

He said he is disappointed in the performance of the vast majority of Muslim and Arab American organizations.

He said the Arab American Institute is confined to Washington and primarily focuses on the interests of middle class Arab American Christians. As for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Beydoun said he believes in the ADC’s mission, but the group seems to be struggling financially. He said the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is the best Muslim civil rights organization, praising its decentralized structure. He called the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) problematic for its close ties to the government, describing the organization as a proxy to the Department of Homeland Security.

Beydoun was born in Egypt and moved to the United States at age 2. He was raised by his mother in Dearborn. He graduated from the University of Michigan and received a law degree from the University of California-Los Angeles. He practiced law for seven years and worked in Dubai for a while before becoming a professor at UCLA. He now teaches law at Barry University in Florida.

“Academia was an extension of my activism,” he said. “I realized that there was a void of legal scholarship and research focusing on Arab and Muslim Americans and I wanted to fill that void.”

Despite his lengthy resume at a relatively young age, Beydoun seems wary of growing old. Although his short hair is not yet greying and he looks like he spends a lot of time at the gym, when he was named as an “Emerging Scholar Under 40”, he said he is not sure if he is more pleased with the recognition or the fact that he hasn’t completed his fourth decade.