Politics

Fellow Muslims keep asking me why I support Kamala Harris. Here’s what I say.

Published

2 years ago

November 12, 2024

Fellow Muslims keep asking me why I support Kamala Harris. Here’s what I say.

The first Muslims to arrive in what became the United States of America were Black like me. They were brought here via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These enslaved Africans were faithful Muslims praying in the U.S. colonies before Thomas Jefferson was even born. And they suffered, as all enslaved Africans suffered, through genocide and brutal and deadly oppression. Although there’s a mistaken belief that Muslims first arrived en masse in the United States with an influx of Arab and Pakistani immigrants in the 1960s, the history of Black Muslims, who were here before there was a country, is a reminder that while we may share the same faith as Muslims from the Middle East and South Asiawe have a different experience of America.

While we may share the same faith as Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia, we have a different experience of America.

These Black Muslim ancestors left rich histories and a legacy of fighting for what’s right. I am proud to have carried on this legacy throughout my career, most recently by founding the Black Muslim Leadership Council — a first-of-its-kind nonprofit dedicated to advancing justice and equity for Black American Muslims through policy advocacy, civic education, voter mobilization and leadership development. Our advocacy wing, the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund, has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaignand I, in my personal capacity, am doing the same.

Despite my consistent calls for a cease-fire in Gazaand despite my history of working with the Palestinian community in my native Philadelphia, my support of the vice president’s candidacy has led to accusations that I am ignoring the human rights catastrophe in Gaza and undermining the Palestinian cause. Despite my leadership in the Uncommitted Pennsylvania campaignwhich led to more than 60,000 voters using the write-in vote to protest President Joe Biden’s leadership; and despite my directly telling President Biden about the history of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians and the moral dilemma his candidacy presented, I have been repeatedly asked by other Muslims to defend my vote for Harris.

My parents converted to Islam in the early 1970s, finding a safe haven and a home alongside other Black American Muslims in a country that so often tried to reject them. This community is now my haven. My Pennsylvanian Muslim family is my foundation, and serving them is my way of life. Every day, I see the struggles facing my people, and I see the courage and resolve it takes to overcome and thrive.

Despite so many advancements, my community still suffers significant oppression. I have been harassed, targeted and doxxed by people throughout the country — including by other Muslims. My support of Vice President Harris has been attacked, as many have chosen not to support Harris, seeing her as an extension of President Biden, who has been widely criticized for his handling of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. My goal in my career is to advance policy for the American Muslim community at large, but with a focus on Black American Muslims.

I will continue to focus on the nuanced needs of my specific community because, in large part, no one else is focusing on us. This is how I honor the legacy of my father, a prominent imam who devoted his life to serving this same community. While I share many of the same goals and concerns as other American Muslims, I also am specifically dedicated to uplifting the needs of the Black American Muslim community.

My community cares deeply about the crisis in Gaza, as well as the suffering of Muslims in Sudan and its Darfur region Congo Yemen Syria Kashmir and China. We care about reproductive rights, particularly for people who have experienced sexual abuse, and for women who have died during childbirth — especially Black women, who die at much higher rates than other women in the United States. We care about economic opportunity, including the paths to establish generational wealth, which have for so long been denied to Black people, including Black Muslims. We care about public safety and ending the rampant gun violence that has led to the deaths of so many people, especially Black men.

Harris is the candidate who has most effectively supported the causes that are important to my community. Her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has shown in his track record and on the campaign trail that he will not support these causes.

I am specifically dedicated to uplifting the needs of the Black American Muslim community.

I have heard from many who say they’ll vote third-party to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the major party candidates, or who say they will not vote at all. As tantalizing as some of these third-party candidates may be, they are not a viable option. Other third-party candidates have deeply problematic and even dangerous stances on international relations, health care and immigration.

Not voting is not an option either. The threat that faces our country, and our world, is too great not to use the greatest gift of democracy: our vote. In its purest essence, politics is about strategy. This sometimes means having to make tough choices to achieve the best possible outcome for ourselves and our community. It would be nice to agree with each and every one of our chosen candidate’s decisions and platforms. But we do not have to do this to keep our democracy alive.

We have, on one hand, a candidate who fights for voter rights, reproductive rights and public safety. On the other, we have a candidate who seeks to consolidate power, threaten our constitutional freedoms and implement policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. We have a candidate who, as a Black and South Asian woman, understands personally the oppression faced by the most neglected of us and has overcome adversity to rise to a position of power, and we have a candidate who moved to ban Muslims from entering the country, has called majority Black nations, many of them with large Muslim populations, “s—hole countries,” and who bases his campaign on sowing division and hatred.

As I have already done, I will continue to advocate for the innocent people who are being killed in Gaza, as well as advocate for the other domestic needs of my community. I will also continue to tell Muslims asking me to defend my vote for Harris that I see her as not only the best chance for a cease-fire, but also the best chance we have to protect fundamental freedoms — for every one of us.

In this decision, and in my personal and professional career, I stand on the shoulders of the great Black American Muslim women and men who came before me — who fought through unspeakable traumas to build a better life for their descendants. I am proud to be part of this legacy. The fight continues now, as it has for centuries — and it will take each one of us committing to defending our freedoms to ensure that we will not go back.

The views represented in this article are the author’s own, given in her individual capacity and do not represent the positions of her associated institutions.

Salima Suswell

Salima Suswell is an award-winning community organizer and coalition builder. She is the founder and CEO of the Black Muslim Leadership Councila national nonprofit dedicated to uplifting the unique needs of Black American Muslims, and its 501(c)(4) advocacy wing, the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund. She is also the CEO of Evolve Solutionsa government relations and community engagement firm based in Philadelphia.

Politics

Kennedy and Wright cheer on US

Published

8 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.

Politics

The politician who kicked his way to power

Published

37 minutes ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.

Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.

The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.

The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.

The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.

Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)

Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.

Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”

Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.

Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.

Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.

Politics

The US-Australia face-off that isn’t happening

Published

1 hour ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Who’s not here at Seattle’s Lumen Field for the Pacific Rim face-off between the United States and Australia?

If they’re following the match, the two countries’ elected heads — President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — are doing so from afar.