Intersectionality Dies In The Suburbs Of Detroit

A Prominent Midwest Muslim Mayor Backs Trump, And The Blame Game Starts

Former President Donald Trump and Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Michigan, endorsed him late last week.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump received a surprise endorsement in his quest to return to the presidency: Amer Ghalib, the Democratic mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, a working-class Detroit suburb.

Already, this sounds great, right? Swing state; a working-class city. A Muslim, even.

The endorsement gets more interesting when you add that Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 entirely surrounded by Detroit's city limits, is the only majority-Muslim city in the country. Home to a large population of Yemeni and Bangladeshi Americans, it became a haven for immigrants from those countries starting in the late 1990s, when white flight and industrial collapse hollowed out Detroit and its inner suburbs.

Hamtramck had a majority-white City Council, mainly coming from the city’s dwindling Polish community, well into the 2010s. In 2015, progressives in Michigan, including some people I was personally friendly with, got involved in campaigns launched by members of the Muslim community to shift the council to a Muslim majority, aiming to make it more representative of the community. Though Muslims had become a majority in Hamtramck a decade earlier, most of the community were immigrants who were not yet citizens or children and thus couldn’t vote in elections. Once the Muslim community became the majority of the electorate, there was an opportunity for them to be represented by the city government.

It was successful. With the help of Detroit-area progressive organizations, including LGBTQ groups, Hamtramck elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015, the first in America. Progressives praised this milestone as progress toward representation for minority groups, in this case Muslims, even as Donald Trump was rising in the polls while pushing Islamophobic rhetoric.

In 2021, Ghalib won the city’s mayoral election, defeating longtime Democratic incumbent Laura Majewski, with the help of several local progressive groups and the endorsement of Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). As a result, the mayor and the six-person Hamtramck Council were all Muslim – and all men.

Again, progressives celebrated this as progress. It was a sign that their diverse coalition was representing marginalized groups.

Then something wild happened.

In November 2022, progressives were dumbfounded when they saw the results of the midterm elections in Hamtramck and nearby Dearborn, another city with a considerable Muslim population. Though Democrats won huge margins statewide and won their first governing trifecta - control of the governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature – since 1982, Republicans saw their candidates perform 25-35 points better in Hamtramck and the Muslim-majority precincts in Dearborn than President Joe Biden did two years earlier. Ghalib even backed Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon over Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer, siding with her on a hot-button culture war issue that year – LGBTQ curriculum and representation in schools. Further, the Muslim-majority precincts in Hamtramck and Dearborn voted against the statewide referendum to enshrine abortion rights.

Muslim-majority precincts in Dearborn and Hamtramck were the only ones in the immediate Detroit area to vote against a 2022 referendum enshrining abortion rights into Michigan’s Constitution, less than six months after the fall of Roe v. Wade

The following year, the all-male, all-Muslim Hamtramck city government banned Pride flags, and in both Hamtramck and Dearborn, council meetings and school board meetings became flooded with members of the Muslim community who shouted anti-gay slurs at LGBTQ residents speaking in defense of their community.

The result led to a sense of “confusion and betrayal” among local progressives and internal squabbling.

Brett Powoski, a Michigan native who I met at a writing group in Brooklyn in the early 2010s and who lives in Royal Oak, was involved in progressive groups encouraging Muslim candidates to run in Hamtrmack, Dearborn, and other cities with growing Arab communities like Warren and Dearborn Heights.

“It’s depressing and discouraging evidence that intersectionality doesn’t always work,” he told me. “We never had a plan on what to do if greater representation for one marginalized group led to the repression of another because we just didn’t believe it could happen.”

Brett shared with me a fascinating story.

Last year, a white lesbian candidate, Lynn Blasey, ran for the Hamtramck Council primarily due to the Pride flag issue. She also felt the need to speak out for the LGBTQ Muslim community in Hamtramck, whom she said was not being heard. She sought support from local Michigan progressive groups. They spurned her because she was running against the Muslim incumbents, and some progressive groups, Brett said, did not think it was appropriate to push a white candidate in a Muslim-majority city, especially in the opening days of the War in Gaza. She lost by 82 votes. Blasey had been heavily involved in Detroit's progressive mutual aid and social justice causes.

“She was the most progressive choice, but the groups sought to help her thought because she was a white woman, it would be Islamaphobic to help her win,” Brett said, “[LGBTQ] groups did not believe that as a white woman, she had any place speaking for LGBTQ Muslims either, even though some in that group were fine with it.”

It might not surprise you that the groups Brett was talking about are largely made up of young, white, recent college graduates.

“It was white kids from Ann Arbor and Grosse Pointe telling a white lady in Hamtramck they won’t help her because she isn’t qualified to speak for her Queer Muslims friends in her town who don’t have a voice in their own community,” Brett explained. “It felt like a right wing parody of intersectionality politics.”

Intersectionality, the theory that the struggles of different marginalized groups are interconnected and interrelated, is not necessarily wrong. Frequently, the same people who oppress one group are also oppressing another. However, the theory is not as simple as there is one group oppressing everyone and all the oppressed groups uniting together in solidarity and fighting their common oppressor, even if social justice warriors on the Left like to present it that way. Different ethnic, religious, and racial groups have different beliefs and worldviews. LGBTQ people learned after the passage of Proposition 8 in California in 2008 that anti-gay sentiment was strong in the Black community. While it was disheartening, it was also an eye-opening lesson. They had to focus on the Black community, listen, and adapt. They did. By the mid-2010s, African Americans had shifted strongly in favor of marriage equality and LGBTQ rights. However, Prop 8 did lead to some lasting resentment among LGBTQ people toward the Black community that held on for many years, even into the Black Lives Matter movement.

For Muslims, specifically in Michigan, there’s an echo. Muslims are indeed an at-risk group in the United States, but Islam has tremendous political and social power in large swaths of the world; it is not often a progressive-friendly institution. It is as powerful as Christianity and Capitalism – two institutions that Western progressives fight against.

The main reason progressives feel any solidarity with Muslims is because, in the United States, their community has historically been subject to prejudicial treatment, especially since September 11, 2001. That has made the politics around social issues and Muslims in Michigan extremely awkward. This dynamic has spread online, where progressives desperately and bizarrely try to defend the rightward shift of many Muslim Americans as merely a “fuck you” reaction to Democrats over Gaza rather than a repudiation of progressives on other issues or the continuation of a trend that was occurring even before the war started a year ago. Muslims in America also tend to be wealthier, higher-educated, own businesses, and be staunchly anti-communist, which makes Republican-style economic ideas more attractive to them. Before 9/11, Muslims leaned Republican. George W. Bush won Dearborn in 2000, the last Republican presidential candidate to do so.

I’m not dismissive of the idea that Gaza made it easier for Muslim Americans to reestablish themselves on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Still, the fact is Muslims are, and have always been, a conservative-friendly demographic that doesn’t mesh with progressive policies of equality and empowering marginalized communities. That’s fine; they don’t have to, but while progressives can demand other groups feel “solidarity” and attack them and call them evil when they don’t, they can’t be surprised when that doesn’t work. Most people will always look out for themselves and their community and be skeptical of those who have gone against them.

Progressives are notoriously unable to do any introspection and self-critiquing because they are afraid the criticisms of specific groups’ politics will be used in bad faith by white people and conservatives to oppress further or destroy the group they’re critiquing. You can’t talk about labor corruption because it will undermine labor; you can’t discuss things like a topless trans activist at a White House family event because it might reinforce dangerous stereotypes against LGBTQ people; you can’t opine on the social conservatism of Muslims driving them to the GOP because it’s Islamaphobic – it might spark a backlash that would endanger them. Progressives are so desperate to try to hold their rainbow coalition together that they are engaging in a massive amount of delusion and self-censorship to prevent any cracks from forming.

“Progressive groups here definitely made it seem like we needed to focus solely on the Palestinian cause and thus have to ensure Muslims, no matter how they felt about other issues we care about, are prioritized,” Brett told me this week. “In the end, we got anti-progressive Muslim leaders running a city that should be a progressive stronghold and a lot of really angry people who want nothing to do with the progressive movement anymore.”

That’s why intersectionality doesn’t work, and it won’t work. “Solidarity” across ethnic, racial, and religious groups is unrealistic. “Liberation” is a meaningless buzzword that excites bored activists. It tries to tie everyone's cause to whoever is the Oppressed Group Of The Day and ends up pitting one group against another. The best you can hope for in a diverse political society is the ability to piece together coalitions for each specific issue or policy in a way that resembles putting words together to form sentences. The alliance for more substantial labor rights or healthcare might look different than the one for abortion or climate issues. There are going to be blacks, immigrants, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and women who are pro-Israel, and you have to accept that.

Of course, they’re proving unable to accept it. The painful realization that this is the reality is leading to some ugly reactions, including some progressives backing Trump or hoping he wins out of spite and a rejection of identity-centered politics that progressives once pushed. A lot of racism, sexism, and homophobia have been lobbed at people of color, women, and LGBTQ people who don’t fall into line on the Gaza Omnicause.

It’s not surprising, but it is just another example of the dynamic that has befallen the progressive movement since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has reached its peak, cannot expand further, and its supporters cannot cope.