By Lee A. Daniels

The Muslim-American residents of Murfreesboro, Tennessee have discovered this summer they’re not as “American” as they perhaps thought they were.

Not in the hearts and minds of some of their non-Muslim neighbors, anyway.

And so, they now find themselves on the other side – the bad side – of the “tipping point.”

In terms of American group relations, the tipping point is that point or marker or moment in the mind of the dominant group when they say to themselves: there’re too many of these strange kind of people – these Others – around here. We’ve got to do something!

Then, it doesn’t matter how long your community has been a part of the larger community. Nor what your individual character is. Nor how assimilated you appear to be. Now, the Muslim-American community is learning that in America the color of your skin is still likely to count for more more often than the content of your character—especially when times get tough.

As the Washington Post reports, in Murfreesboro, as in other cities and towns around the country, the flashpoint is the attempt of the Muslim-American community there to build a large Islamic community center, complete with mosque, swimming pool and school.

That provoked what has become the by-now familiar guilt-by-association response from a segment of the non-Muslim residents: references to the 9-11 attacks, to terror cells and “sleeper” agents; denigration of Islam as a religion, and a forgetting that there’s been a visible Muslim-American presence in the town of 100,000 for the past three decades or so.

But I think that even more important factors are the growth in the size of the Muslim-American population, to as many as 25,000, and their growing variegation (some Somalis, some Iraqi Kurds). Adding difference to difference, in other words.

Reading of Murfreesboro, I couldn’t help by think of the broader American history of the tipping-point dynamic: the quota systems enforced against Irish-, Italian-, and Jewish-Americans as the swelling ranks of European immigrants infuriated whites of Anglo-Saxon stock; and against Americans of color by WASPs and white ethnics alike. For blacks well into the middle part of the twentieth century, the tipping point – outside of the South, with its absolute ban against black inclusion – was often one is too many.

That history is why I found it hilarious in a deeply cynical way that, according to the Post, the leader of the anti-Muslim-American forces in Murfreesboro is a correctional guard who is black.

The Post account stated that Kevin Fisher “chafes when the mosque’s supporters ‘dial up the rhetoric from the ‘60s” to attack opponents by accusing them of bigotry against Muslims. ‘It’s offensive to me,’ he said. His stepmother ‘was dragged off restaurant stools in the 1960s and has cigarette burns in her arm. That’s discrimination.’”

In other words, only he can “dial up” the ‘60s to make his point.

So, here you have a black American in a southern town where blacks were once subjected to a fierce tipping-point dynamic, with all the attendant guilt-by-association trappings, applying the same shopworn bigotry to others who are different.

Now, that’s good old American hypocrisy for you, no matter the color of your skin.