Homework answers / question archive / ESSAY 4 “IS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MUSLIMS REALLY RACISM?” : THE RACIALIZATION OF ISLAMOPHOBIA Steve Garner Birmingham City University, United Kingdom Saher Selod Simmons College Muslims in Europe and the United States are increasingly facing discrimination and prejudice from the state and their fellow citizens

ESSAY 4 “IS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MUSLIMS REALLY RACISM?” : THE RACIALIZATION OF ISLAMOPHOBIA Steve Garner Birmingham City University, United Kingdom Saher Selod Simmons College Muslims in Europe and the United States are increasingly facing discrimination and prejudice from the state and their fellow citizens

Economics

Share With

ESSAY 4 “IS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MUSLIMS REALLY RACISM?” : THE RACIALIZATION OF ISLAMOPHOBIA Steve Garner Birmingham City University, United Kingdom Saher Selod Simmons College Muslims in Europe and the United States are increasingly facing discrimination and prejudice from the state and their fellow citizens. In France, the association of terrorism with Islam has led the state to enact a policy that prohibits Muslim women from covering their faces in public. The French prime minister at the time, Manuel Valls, stated French universities should ban Muslim women from wearing the hijab (Chrisafis, 2016). “Flying while Muslim” is an expression that has been coined to describe the discriminatory treatment many Muslims have experienced at airports or on airplanes. For example, passengers who speak Arabic or wear the hijab have been removed from flights because of the fear it incites in their fellow passengers or flight attendants. A Muslim student was kicked off of a Southwest Airlines flight for speaking Arabic (Westcott, 2016), and a Muslim family, where the mother was wearing a hijab, was escorted off a United Airlines plane after they asked for assistance with a booster seat for their child. Additionally, mosques are increasingly being vandalized (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017). In January 2017, two mosques in Texas were burned to the ground (Garcia, 2017). In August 2016, in a suburb of Portland, Maine, Iraqi residents of an apartment complex found scattered around the complex typed notes that read, “All Muslims are Terrorists should be Killed [sic]” (Doyle, 2017). Muslims in the United States and Europe fear for their civil liberties and safety because of growing anti-Muslim sentiments, and indeed in the years since 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States and Europe have increased. Adapted from Steve Garner and Saher Selod, 2015, “‘Is Discrimination Against Muslims Really Racism?’: The Racial Formation of Islamophobia,” Critical Sociology 41(1), 9–19. Used with permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. According to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI, 2001), hate crimes against Muslims grew from 28 to 481 incidents, a 1,600% increase, in 2001 alone. While this number decreased the following year, anti-Muslim sentiments steadily grew in the decade after 9/11. According to the FBI, in 2015, hate crimes toward Muslims increased by 67% from the previous year. These crimes differed from hate crimes against other religious groups because they were more likely to target individuals rather than property (Kishi, 2016). The anti-Muslim rhetoric that characterized the 2016 Republican presidential campaign, coupled with terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, has only added to an increase in prejudice and discrimination against Muslim Americans. For example, while campaigning, President Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, creating a registry for Muslims living in the United States, and requiring Muslims in the United States to wear identification cards. In the month after Trump won the presidential election, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 112 anti-Muslim hate crimes (Hatewatch Staff, 2016). Religion and race have historically been treated as separate identities; however, this chapter seeks to uncover the ways religion has increasingly acquired racial meaning for Muslims in a post-9/11 society. Islamophobia, an unfounded fear of Islam, is a term that conveys these negative experiences. These statistics reflect this intersection of race and religion as a result of stereotypes that plague the religious identity of Muslims worldwide. These experiences can best be understood as the process of racialization, similar to the process applied to Jews in Nazi Germany. We argue Islamophobia must incorporate in its definition an understanding of racism and racialization to place these experiences within a larger context of the social construction of race. RACISM/RACIALIZATION/ISLAMOPHOBIA If we are going to argue that Islamophobia is a form of racism and that racialization is a valid way to interrogate the experiences of a faith-based social group, we need to supply working definitions of racism, racialization, and Islamophobia. These definitions cannot and should not attempt to capture a phenomenon in a one-size-fits-all fashion, because forms of racism are by their nature dynamic and specific to historical, cultural, geographic, and political contexts. As Sajid (2005) notes regarding the long historical evolution of Islamophobia, “It may be more apt to speak of ‘Islamophobias’ rather than of a single phenomenon. Each version of Islamophobia has its own features as well as similarities with, and borrowings from, other versions” (p. 2). Thus, a definition of racism, as Klug (2012) notes, should be based on the notion of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances”; that is, the various forms share principal traits, but each form may have slightly different lesser characteristics. The core of racism then comprises three elements (see Garner, 2010): 1. A set of ideas [ideology] in which the human race is divisible into distinct “races,” each with specific natural characteristics derived from culture, physical appearance, or both. 2. A historical power relationship in which, over time, groups are racialized—that is, treated as if specific characteristics were natural and innate to each member of the group. 3. Forms of discrimination flowing from these [practices], ranging on a spectrum from denial of access to material resources on one end to genocide on the other. The forms of racism experienced by people in 21st-century Europe and North America have quite different contexts from each other, as well as a large body of shared terrain. Yet these are not the same geographical and political spaces as they were in the early 19th century, for example, when the institution of slavery was legal in both Europe and the United States. That ideas and practices of racism evolve, temporally and spatially, like any other social relationship ought to be an uncontroversial premise. More difficult in this chain of logic linking religion to racism is the way “race” is conceptualized. The above definition of racism is based on an understanding of race as not being exclusively derived from phenotypes. One logic, “religion cannot be raced,” runs as follows: 1. Religious groups are not defined by what has been commonly perceived as natural distinctions of people into groups determined by what they look like. Despite ambivalence about the hierarchies, the body-centered understanding of “race” is essential. 2. All the major world faiths include a variety of people drawn from all these “racial” groups, and Islam is no exception. 3. Racism is focused on one or more distinct racialized groups. 4. Therefore, if (1), (2), and (3) are accurate, how can Islamophobia be a form of racism? Using this logic makes it difficult to analyze Muslim experiences with racism. As such, our response is an alternative logic—religion can be raced, based on the following social facts: 1. “Race” has historically been derived from both physical and cultural characteristics. The long 19th-century canon of body-fixated race theory is an anomaly in a longer history that evidences various combinations of culture and phenotype being used to define racial characteristics. In other words, world history indicates that race has been defined by cultural and physical characteristics, where we define Islam as not only a religion but a culture. 2. On the basis of these definitions, groups thus racialized are assigned to a hierarchy, with White Europeans at the top and other groups in their wake. The process of racialization entails ascribing sets of characteristics viewed as inherent to members of a group because of their physical or cultural traits. These traits are not limited to skin tone or pigmentation but include myriad attributes, among them cultural traits such as language, clothing, and religious practices. The characteristics thus emerge as “racial” as an outcome of the process. 3. Muslims have historically been one of these groups that experience racism, as have other faith-based groups, most obviously Jews. Their racialization is accomplished not only by reference to religion but other aspects of culture such as physical appearance (including, but not limited to, dress). 4. Muslims can be racialized, and the ways this occurs can be understood as constituting Islamophobia. 5. Islamophobia is therefore a specific form of racism targeting Muslims, and racialization is a concept that helps capture this process across time and place. Scholars have shown how people map Muslim-ness on to individuals by using a combination of ideas about culture and appearance (Carr & Haynes, 2013; Garner & Selod, 2014; Mac an Ghaill & Haywood, 2014; Moosavi, 2014). If the markers of Islam (e.g., hijab, jilbaab, a Muslim name, nation of origin) are absent, “passing” as a non-Muslim is possible. Deploying the “religion can be raced” logic means we can employ Islamophobia as a set of ideas and practices that amalgamate all Muslims into one group and treat the characteristics associated with Muslims as if they are innate (e.g., violence, misogyny, political allegiance or disloyalty, incompatibility with Western values; see also Read in this volume). If this is the case, then it is useful to use the concept of racialization to study this phenomenon in practice. In any case, “race” is never finished, never stable, never precisely defined or definable. If it were, there would already be a consensus on its meaning. The main problem with Islamophobia as a term is its linguistic base. Using the suffix -phobia introduces the idea of irrational fears, which is not necessarily a bad thing to have in proximity to racism (Rustin, 1991). However, the use of this suffix also often denotes a mental disorder, moving us further toward the individual and the psychological and further from the social, the collective, the structural, or the systemic. Our argument relies on ideas and practices being inherently social and shared, rather than deviant psychological responses. RACIALIZATION The history of the concept of “racialization” stretches back into the 19th century (Barot & Bird, 2001), but its recent resurgence in the social sciences can be traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s. Different understandings of racialization can be identified in the works of Fanon (1963), where it is a synonym of dehumanization, and Banton (1977), who describes the process of Europeans’ ascribing characteristics to the people they encountered during colonization. While European scholars have been at the forefront of advancing the concept of racialization (Murji & Solomos, 2005), some efforts have also been made in the United States. Omi and Winant (2014) define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (p. 111). While their definition is important and a major contribution to expanding scholarship on race, it is still tied to phenotypes, thus limiting an analysis of cultural attributes that also racialize individuals. For instance, they state, “We provide a concept of racialization to emphasize how the phenomic, the corporeal dimensions of human bodies, acquires meaning in social life” (p. 109). This characterization prevents an analysis of how other attributes, such as clothing, language, and religious signifiers, can also racialize individuals. It also ignores how racially classified groups experience newer forms of racism that are different from past forms. Therefore, while racialization has never been the object of consensus, the overwhelming area of agreement appears to be that racialization is something the powerful do to the less powerful. Wolfe’s (2002) concise statement summarizes this argument, where he says that racialization “is an exercise of power in its own right, as opposed to a commentary that enables or facilitates a prior exercise of power” (p. 52). There is a lot to be said for thinking of racialization in this way, with the state, the media, and other authorities as key agents in the process, but we are sure that racialization can also be used as an act of resistance, as well as a demonstration of power (see also Koch in this volume). For example, Miles and Brown (2003) assert that racialization is a “two-way process” (p. 102) whereby groups can racialize themselves as a political strategy for organizing around an identity. An example of this would be the Black power movement, whose activities included countering and refuting a number of negative ideas about Blacks. Additionally, racialization is being used to understand mass incarceration in the United States as an extension of macro systems resulting in the economic, political, and social disenfranchisement of communities of color (Brewer & Heitzeg, 2008). Racialization can also be seen in the policing of perceived undocumented immigrants, where the word immigrant seems to almost exclusively denote a person of Mexican descent (see Cebulko in this volume). So what does racialization actually do? It (1) draws a line around all the members of the group, (2) instigates a feeling of “we-ness,” and (3) ascribes particular cultural and social characteristics that may or may not ring true. In this way, ostensibly White groups such as Jews (Brodkin, 1998), Gypsy-Travelers (Bancroft, 2005), and eastern European migrants (Fox, Morosanu, & Szilassy, 2012) can be racialized in the United States and Europe; the British can be said to have racialized the Irish in colonial times (Garner, 2003, 2010); and more important, heterogeneous groups such as asylum seekers and Muslims can be racialized, as well. This is not due to their all looking vaguely the same but, rather, to the essentializing gaze. As Chao (2015) states, “It is hence not Islam, the ‘religious origin,’ but the perpetrators’ projections about what Islam is, that constitutes the discrimination” (p. 58). In other words, those who produce, absorb, and reproduce representations of asylum seekers, and Muslims, can transform the clearly culturally and phenotypically dissimilar individuals who fall into this bureaucratic category (asylum seeker), or are simply devotees of the same religion (Muslims), into a homogeneous bloc. This is the basis of the racialization of Muslims (the process) and of Islamophobia (the snapshot of outcomes of this process). RETHINKING RACE: THE TRANSATLANTIC RACIALIZATION OF MUSLIMS Using racialization as a key analytical concept allows us to make sense of the fact that regardless of physical appearance, country of origin, and economic situation, Muslims are homogenized and degraded by Islamophobic discourse and practices in their everyday lives. They are seen solely as Muslims. This relates dress to visible physical markers, thus transforming their bodies into racialized Others: Muslims. Paradoxically, this is illustrated in the experiences of White converts to Islam, who see their Whiteness questioned and downgraded as a consequence of their new belonging to the Muslim faith. Du Bois’ (1903/1994) widely used concept of double consciousness has famously underpinned a whole stream of work on African Americans’ experiences in the United States. However, its basic premise, which is that minority groups learn to read themselves through the eyes and mindsets of the majority population and regulate their behavior accordingly in specific contexts, is also more widely applicable. If anything emerges from the work here, it is that all over the West, Muslims are deploying brands of “double consciousness” to manage the risks of discrimination, confrontation, and abuse. It is our hope that we can begin a conversation on the dire need to create or revise language that will enable a discussion of newer forms of racism. Racisms are fluid, changing in form across time and place. At this point and time, we cannot conceptualize the Muslim experience as existing wholly outside of a racial paradigm. Until Muslims are viewed as fully human and treated as such, we must continue to document their experiences with racism. Steve Garner is professor of Critical Race Studies and head of Criminology and Sociology at Birmingham City University, United Kingdom. He has published widely on racisms and their intersections with class and nation. His latest book is A Moral Economy of Whiteness (Routledge). Saher Selod is an assistant professor of sociology at Simmons College. Her research focuses on race, religion, and gender. More specifically, she examines how Muslim Americans are racialized through hypersurveillance. She teaches courses on social inequalities, research methods, Islamophobia, race theory, and mass media and popular culture. Professor Selod has also published articles in journals such as Sociology Compass and Critical Sociology. Suggested Additional Resources Alsutany, E. (2012). Arabs and Muslims in the media: Race and representation after 9/11. New York: New York University Press. Bail, C. (2015). Terrified: How anti-Muslim fringe organizations became mainstream. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bayoumi, M. (2015). This Muslim American life: Dispatches from the war on terror. New York: New York University Press. Cainkar, L. (2009). Homeland insecurity: The Arab and Muslim American experience after 9/11. Baltimore, MD: Russell Sage Foundation. Chao, E. (2015). The-truth-about-Islam.com: Ordinary theories of racism and cyber Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 57–75. QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION 1. What are some of the stereotypes that have come to define Muslims? What impact do you think these stereotypes have on Muslims’ daily lives? 2. How does rhetoric in the media influence what you know about Muslims? What have you heard about Muslims from politicians recently? 3. What does it mean to be an American? Who is able to claim an American identity, and who is not? How does being a Muslim impact one’s American identity? Reaching Beyond the Color Line 1. Go to the Internet and do a search of the term Muslim in Google’s news section. Read carefully through five different articles and write down descriptions of the language used to describe Muslims in each article. After reading these articles, what did you learn about Muslims? Are Muslims represented as average Americans? Did you feel there was bias in the articles? Did they focus on one particular issue surrounding Muslims? How did the news sources differ from one another? 2. Some policies have impacted Muslims living in the United States and in Europe. In France, the government passed a ban on Muslim women’s covering their faces in public, known as the burqa ban. In the United States, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) was instituted from 2002 to 2011, requiring Muslim noncitizen men over the age of 16 to register with the government, where they were fingerprinted, interrogated, and photographed. Do some research on these two policies and write up a brief paragraph about how they can result in the state targeting Muslims unfairly. REFERENCES American Civil Liberties Union. (2017). Nationwide anti-mosque activity. Retrieved February 8, 2017, from https://www.aclu.org/map/nationwide-anti-mosque-activity Bancroft, A. (2005). Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in Europe: Modernity, race, space, and exclusion. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate. Banton, M. (1977). The idea of race. London: Tavistock. Barot, R., & Bird, J. (2001). Racialization: The genealogy and critique of a concept. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24(4), 601–618. Brewer, R. M., & Heitzeg, N. A. (2008). The racialization of crime and punishment: Criminal justice, color-blind racism, and the political economy of the prison industrial complex. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(5), 625–644. Brodkin, K. (1998). How did Jews become White folks and what does that say about race in America? (2nd ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Carr, J., & Haynes, A. (2013). A clash of racializations: The policing of “race” and of anti-Muslim racism in Ireland. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 21–40. Chao, E. (2015). The-truth-about-Islam.com: Ordinary theories of racism and cyber Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 57–75. Chrisafis, A. (2016, April 14). French PM calls for ban on Islamic headscarves at universities. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/13/french-pm-banislamic-headscarves-universities-manuel-valls Doyle, M. (2017, January 3). Investigation of anti-Muslim hate crime in Westbrook ends with no answers. Portland Press Herald. Retrieved February 8, 2017, from http://www.pressherald.com/2017/01/03/caringpolice-calm-fears-after-unsettling-hate-crime-in-westbrook/ Du Bois, W. E. B. (1994). The souls of black folk (Unabridged ed.). New York: Dover. (Original work published 1903) Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Federal Bureau of Investigations. (2001). Hate crime statistics, 2001. Retrieved February 8, 2017, from http://www.fbi.gov/aboutus/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2001/hatecrime01.pdf/view? searchterm=hate%20crime%202001 Fox, J. E., Morosanu, L., & Szilassy, E. (2012). The racialization of the new European migration to the UK. Sociology, 46(4), 680–695. Garcia, J. (2017, January 30). Texas mosque fire “too close to home.” USA Today. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/29/texasmosque-fire-too-close-home/97230972/ Garner, S. (2003). Racism in the Irish experience. London: Pluto Press. Garner, S. (2010). Racisms: An introduction. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Garner, S., & Selod, S. (2014). The racialization of Muslims: Empirical studies of Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 9–19. Hatewatch Staff. (2016, December 16). Update: 1,094 bias-related incidents in the month following the election. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved January 4, 2017, from https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/12/16/update-1094-biasrelated-incidents-month-following-election Kishi, K. (2016, November 21). Anti-Muslim assaults reach 9/11-era levels, FBI data show. Pew Research Center: Factank. Retrieved February 8, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2016/11/21/anti-muslim-assaults-reach-911-era-levels-fbi-datashow/# Klug, B. (2012). Islamophobia: A concept comes of age. Ethnicities, 12(5), 665–681. Mac an Ghaill, M., & Haywood, C. (2014). British-born Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men: Exploring unstable concepts of Muslim, Islamophobia and racialization. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 97–114. Miles, R. H., & Brown, M. (2003). Racism (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Moosavi, L. (2014). The racialization of Muslim converts in Britain and their experiences of Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 41–56. Murji, K., & Solomos, J. (2005). Introduction: Racialization in theory and practice. In K. Murji & J. Solomos (Eds.), Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (pp. 1–12). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Rustin, M. (1991). The good society and the inner world: Psychoanalysis, politics and culture. London: Verso Books. Sajid, A. (2005). Islamophobia: A new word for an old fear. Paper presented at the OSCE Conference on Anti-Semitism and on Other Forms of Intolerance, Cordoba, June 8–9, 2005. Retrieved from http://www.osce.org/cio/15618 Westcott, L. (2016, April 19). Muslim student kicked off Southwest Airlines flight for speaking Arabic. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/muslim-student-southwest-airlines-arabic449598 Wolfe, P. (2002). Race and racialisation: Some thoughts. Postcolonial Studies, 5(1), 51–62.