So…who are we?

We’ve been here since the beginning of this country.  We’ve been diplomats and ambassadors, industrialists and slaves.

We’ve been illiterate and uneducated, and we’ve written some of the defining essays and books of the American experience.

Our background has made us as a community some of the most conservative members of this society, and at the same time some of its most well known social revolutionaries.

You know many of us best as some of the greatest athletes this country has ever produced.  The NBA’s all time leading scorer, the most feared boxer of the 1980s, and one man who was simply known as, well, ‘the Greatest’.

You know some of us best through our works as some of this country’s greatest entertainers.  You can’t talk about the ‘Golden Age of Hip Hop’ without talking about a number of groups, DJs, and MCs who all belong to this community.  One of the best known comedians of the modern era is one of us; he never said it out loud, but his reclusive lifestyle away from his Show probably gave a loud hint that he wasn’t all about the money.

We’re apathetic citizens who no longer have faith in any aspect of ‘the System’, and we’re Representatives in the United States Congress.  Representatives who were driven to tears having to defend a common sense reality in the face of a political lynch mob.  It’s sad it had to come to that but it gives us pride that there are already those in D.C. who understand where we come from.

We’re mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, teachers and students.  Some of us were born here and have lived here our entire lives.  Some of us are 2nd generation citizens blending our religious culture with our new homeland.  Some of us are 1st generation, who came here like nearly every other immigrant who has ever come here, for the opportunity to live a life of freedom and to pursue the American Dream.

Because that’s who we are.  Americans. Muslim Americans.