Refusing the Normative through Racial and Gendered Embodiment

This paper examines the relationship between U.S. secularism and blackness through an engagement with U.S. Black Muslima thought, focusing specifically on Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), a figure powerfully aligned with Black Muslima life. It identifies three acts of refusal preserved in her mid-twentieth-century archive. Shabazz resisted integration into existing racial, religious, and gendered discourses from her first encounters with the NOI in 1955 to her corrections to Malcolm X’s politics post-1965. Shabazz’s negations rejected the status quo and envisioned alternative possibilities for black life (Campt, 2019). Attention to Shabazz’s refusals allows scholars of religion to see moments where a religiously, racially, and gender-identified subject disagrees with how the world diagnoses their religion, gender, and race. Secularism is the term that I argue integrates Blackness into what is Thinking with Shabazz shows that this integration depends on erasing Blackness as an epistemology for thinking and imagining otherwise in the twentieth century.