The Tyranny of "Firsts"

How a United States of America's favorite congratulatory headline erases the rest of human history.

"Scholars in the Library of the House of Wisdom," a 1237 illustration from the manuscript Maqamat al-Hariri, painted by Yahya al-Wasiti, now held at the French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Codex Arabe 5847)

A headline crossed my feed today, asking whether a particular candidate would become “America’s first Muslim senator.” It’s the kind of headline we’ve all stopped noticing, because we’ve seen its cousins a thousand times: first Black president, first woman vice president, first openly gay cabinet secretary, first Native American to lead a federal agency. Each one is presented to us as a triumph of liberalism, a marker of progress, a story of a barrier finally falling.

And it is that. But it’s also something else, something quieter and more uncomfortable, and I think it’s worth sitting with.

These headlines treat United States of America milestones as though they were human milestones, United States patriarchy and racism, all of 300 years old at best, as though they were the norm throughout all 150,000 years of human history, the world over. They imply, without ever saying so directly, that the achievement itself is new — that a Muslim has never before held real political power, that a woman has never before led a nation, that a Black person has never before sat at the center of governance and law, that a Native American woman has never stewarded this continents’ lands. The “first” is doing a particular kind of rhetorical work: it asks us to marvel at the accomplishment of the individual while quietly erasing the fact that the only thing actually new here is the United States of America’s willingness to allow it again.

Consider what was happening in the Islamic world during the period Europeans once called, with characteristic self-regard, the Dark Ages. Baghdad’s House of Wisdom was translating and advancing Greek, Persian, and Indian scholarship while preserving knowledge that might otherwise have been lost to history. Córdoba, under Muslim Spain, was one of the most sophisticated cities on Earth, with public libraries holding hundreds of thousands of volumes at a time when most of Europe’s monasteries were lucky to have a few dozen. Cairo’s al-Azhar was teaching law, theology, and the sciences to students who came from three continents. These were mature, literate, mathematically sophisticated civilizations running courts, hospitals, postal systems, and universities — building algebra, advancing optics and medicine, mapping the stars with an accuracy Europe wouldn’t match for centuries.

So when an American headline asks, in 2026, whether the country is ready for its “first” Muslim senator, the honest answer is that Muslims were running empires, writing legal codes, and advancing the frontiers of mathematics and astronomy a thousand years before the United States even existed as an idea. The “first” was never about capability. It was always about the racist, sexist founding principles of this land — about which doors this particular country, built on chattel slavery and a founding document that counted some humans as three-fifths of a person, has been willing to unlock and for whom.

The lie of omission embedded in these “firsts” headlines are a load-bearing piece of how America tells its own story. The “first” framing lets the nation cast itself as the protagonist of progress — generous, evolving, expanding the circle of who counts — without ever having to sit with the much less flattering version of events, which is that the circle was drawn artificially small in the first place, by people who knew exactly what they were doing and why. Every “first” headline is, whether intended or not, a confession. It tells you precisely how long a group of human beings was deliberately locked out of power in a brutal caste-driven country that likes to describe itself as a meritocracy.

There’s a useful comparison in how we talk about science. When a long-known mathematical relationship gets attributed to whichever European scholar happened to publish it in a journal Europe was reading, instead of to the Babylonian, Indian, Mayan, or Islamic mathematicians who’d worked it out centuries earlier, we call that erasure, and rightly so. The “first” headline does the same work in the political sphere. It launders the historical record so that sexist, racialized Chistocentric American institutional gatekeeping reads as cosmic inevitability — as if humanity itself were only now, in this generation, in this country, working out that Muslims, women, and people of color are capable of governing.

None of this is an argument against celebrating these moments. A first Muslim senator, should it come to pass, will have had to navigate a political landscape thick with suspicion, surveillance, and a post-9/11 scaffolding of othering that has nothing to do with capability and everything to do with fear and an entrenched ignorance that too many mistake for patriotism. That achievement is real, and it deserves recognition. But recognition and mythology are different things, and United States news media, if such a thing even exists anymore, tends to collapse them into one.

What I’d like to see, instead of “Will this be America’s first Muslim senator,” is a headline closer to the truth: “Will The United States of America’s caste-driven white Christofascist gatekeepers finally allow a Muslim senator, a thousand years after Muslim societies were running some of the most advanced governments on Earth?” It’s clunkier. It won’t run as a headline. It will offend Kid Rock. But it’s honest about where the delay actually originated, and it stops flattering a nation that has, time and again, mistaken its own gatekeeping for the world’s slow arrival at justice.

The “firsts” are not the world catching up to the United States of America. They are the United States of America, finally, catching up to the world.