"I think Muslims have become the new Negroes in America. They are being mistreated at airports, by the Immigration - everywhere. Islam is a religion of peace. They are wrong"
About this Quote
Jermaine Jackson reaches for a deliberately jarring analogy: “the new Negroes in America.” It’s a blunt, old-school civil-rights framing meant to force a moral shortcut in the listener’s mind. If you recognize the shame and violence attached to Black American history, he’s saying, you should recognize the pattern when it’s redirected at Muslims. The phrasing is uncomfortable on purpose, because discomfort is the point: it’s harder to shrug off “extra screening” as mere inconvenience when it’s placed in the lineage of state-backed suspicion and humiliation.
The specific intent is protection through recognition. Jackson isn’t offering a policy memo; he’s using celebrity plain-speech to argue that post-9/11 security culture has laundered prejudice into procedure. Airports and immigration offices become stages where bias can pretend to be bureaucracy, where a name, accent, headscarf, or country stamp turns into a presumptive charge.
“Islam is a religion of peace” functions less as theology than as rebuttal to an era’s most marketable stereotype. It’s a defensive sentence, the kind marginalized groups are often required to recite: to be seen as individuals, they must first disavow the caricature assigned to them. The clipped ending - “They are wrong” - is pop-star directness, but it also reveals a frustration with how effortlessly the public “they” gets to define the terms.
Context matters: coming from a Black American musician with a famously public family and global audience, the line is also coalition-building. He’s trying to weld memory (civil rights) to the present (Islamophobia), arguing that America’s talent for scapegoating doesn’t disappear; it just finds a new target.
The specific intent is protection through recognition. Jackson isn’t offering a policy memo; he’s using celebrity plain-speech to argue that post-9/11 security culture has laundered prejudice into procedure. Airports and immigration offices become stages where bias can pretend to be bureaucracy, where a name, accent, headscarf, or country stamp turns into a presumptive charge.
“Islam is a religion of peace” functions less as theology than as rebuttal to an era’s most marketable stereotype. It’s a defensive sentence, the kind marginalized groups are often required to recite: to be seen as individuals, they must first disavow the caricature assigned to them. The clipped ending - “They are wrong” - is pop-star directness, but it also reveals a frustration with how effortlessly the public “they” gets to define the terms.
Context matters: coming from a Black American musician with a famously public family and global audience, the line is also coalition-building. He’s trying to weld memory (civil rights) to the present (Islamophobia), arguing that America’s talent for scapegoating doesn’t disappear; it just finds a new target.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Jermaine
Add to List
