The pattern repeats every election cycle. A candidate like Abdul El Sayed in Michigan, or Zohran Mamdani in New York, gets on the ballot, and the smears start almost immediately. National security concerns. Dual loyalty accusations. Warnings about foreign subversion. Pundits tend to treat this as a glitch, a byproduct of partisan polarization that can eventually be fixed by reminding people of constitutional values or simply waiting for the political climate to cool.
That framing misses something important. This hostility isn’t random internet ugliness. It’s a feature of a political economy built to keep power concentrated where it already sits. Scholars like Cedric Robinson gave this dynamic a name, racial capitalism. When public figures deploy anti Muslim rhetoric, they’re usually protecting a zero sum arrangement that only works if certain doors stay closed to certain people.
Racial capitalism helps explain why appeals to tolerance keep failing here: the system ties political legitimacy to proximity with the dominant cultural group.
We’ve seen this playbook before. Thousands of Black Americans won public office during Reconstruction, only to face a ferocious backlash that unwound much of that progress. Generations later, civil rights organizers learned that playing strictly by the rules and appealing to the moral conscience of an entrenched establishment wasn’t enough on its own to dismantle structural barriers. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party understood this in 1964. Rather than beg the all white delegations at the convention for a seat, they built an independent movement instead.
The targeting of Muslim candidates today serves a similar function. It draws a line around who gets to participate fully in civic life. Paying taxes and contributing to the economy is acceptable. Writing the laws is where the line gets enforced. Polite appeals to reason tend to fall flat against this kind of hostility, because the underlying animus was never really about reason in the first place. It’s structural. Which means the response has to be structural too, coalitions built on collective power rather than better arguments delivered more politely.
Look closer at the mechanics, and the exclusion runs deeper than it first appears. This rhetoric didn’t emerge overnight. It builds on centuries of legal and social precedent about who counts as fully American. Whenever a marginalized community starts translating population growth into real institutional power, the people already holding power tend to react with alarm. That reaction gets framed as a national security concern or as cultural preservation. In practice, it’s neither. It’s the preservation of political monopoly, dressed up in more respectable language.
Racial capitalism helps explain why appeals to tolerance keep failing here. The system doesn’t just distribute economic resources unevenly. It ties political legitimacy to proximity with the dominant cultural group. A Muslim candidate on the ballot disrupts the unspoken assumption that political authority defaults to one kind of person. Their presence alone exposes the fiction of a colorblind, purely meritocratic democracy. So the establishment response moves quickly, discrediting the platform before any real policy debate can even begin, reducing a healthcare plan or a housing proposal to a story about infiltration instead.
Every genuine expansion of American democracy has triggered fierce resistance from whoever benefited from the previous arrangement.
Media ecosystems make this worse. Outrage travels faster than nuance, and a sensational headline about a Muslim candidate will consistently outpace a fair one. Commentators often treat each incident as an isolated flare up rather than what it actually is, a symptom of something chronic. Treating bigotry as one person’s individual failing conveniently protects the broader system that keeps producing it in the first place.
The historical echo here is hard to miss. Every genuine expansion of American democracy has triggered fierce resistance from whoever benefited from the previous arrangement. Reconstruction brought a real surge in Black political power, followed by disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence. The methods have shifted since then, physical intimidation gave way to voter suppression laws and character assassination campaigns, but the underlying goal has stayed remarkably consistent. Keep the levers of power in the same hands.
This context changes how we should read what’s happening now. Candidates who refuse to back down under xenophobic attack, who keep pushing platforms addressing healthcare, inequality, and civil rights anyway, are doing something bigger than just running for office. They’re testing the actual boundaries of what’s politically imaginable. Their participation looks less like assimilation and more like an attempt to transform the system itself.
Real political equality isn’t going to come from asking nicely. Marginalized groups have been told for generations to soften their message, accept a token seat, and call it progress. The legacy of labor organizing in the early twentieth century and the grassroots core of the civil rights movement both teach a different lesson, and it isn’t patience. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and a rigged structure cannot be fixed by playing it exactly as written.
Building independent political power means organizing sideways, across communities that have each been pushed to the margins in their own way. Islamophobia aimed at Muslim candidates connects directly to voter suppression targeting Black and brown communities, to the economic exploitation facing working class families, and to every structural barrier blocking genuine representation. Organize around shared material needs, and the gatekeepers start to become optional.
The path ahead is undoubtedly difficult, and it’s going to require real resilience and strategic clarity to walk. But the alternative, perpetually pleading for basic recognition within a framework built to exclude you from the start, only offers hollow victories and endless compromises in return.
By refusing the crumbs of token acceptance and demanding structural transformation instead, modern movements can finally start dismantling the architecture of racial capitalism.
Demanding structural transformation clears the way for a genuinely inclusive democracy where citizenship and power actually get shared by everyone.
About the Author
Ketty L. is a Columnist writing on politics and international affairs.