Homework answers / question archive / ESSAY 3 “NATIVE AMERICAN/ INDIAN, ASIAN/ORIENTAL, LATINO/HISPANIC

ESSAY 3 “NATIVE AMERICAN/ INDIAN, ASIAN/ORIENTAL, LATINO/HISPANIC

Psychology

Share With

ESSAY 3 “NATIVE AMERICAN/ INDIAN, ASIAN/ORIENTAL, LATINO/HISPANIC . . . WHO CARES?” : LANGUAGE AND THE POWER OF SELF-DEFINITION Bradley Koch Georgia College Students are often intimidated when it comes to discussing race in a public setting such as a classroom. Discussions of race appear to them like minefields, wrought with unseen danger, with the potential to maim and disfigure. Because of what seems like the vagaries of usage, many students assume that they should avoid certain words simply out of a sense of political correctness. To be “politically correct” is to avoid offense and the semblance of injury or ill intent. The problem with both the practice of political correctness and the framing of this issue in terms of political correctness is that it ignores the structural nature of racism and the subtleties of unrecognized individual racism. One place where we see the notion of political correctness muddying the waters is with the avoidance of racial terms that are not racist at all. As a hypercorrection, people often avoid terms such as Mexican, Jew, Puerto Rican, and even Black, assuming that the terms are negative. There is a great irony here, however, because when we extend a politically correct prohibition to words that are not in and of themselves socially or psychologically damaging, such as Mexican, Jew, or Puerto Rican, we unintentionally stigmatize the identities of those who should otherwise proudly embrace them. In these ways, language and terminology are important and carry social meanings that merit attention. RACE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE When most students think of racism, they imagine overt individual racism. They think of a White man in a robe burning a cross or a storeowner who refuses to serve Black customers. The good news is that the civil rights movement has been largely successful in reducing this kind of racism. However, there has been less success in convincing people that racism also exists in the invisible patterns of our social behavior and in the often unconscious biases that are difficult to recognize. Sociologists recognize that people create and transmit meaning through language. Because of that, words can have great power. The meaning and intent behind the use of racial pejoratives, such as the N-word, is to denigrate a racial group—and in the case of the N-word, that has been the intent of the word since its coining (Asim, 2007; see also Harkness in this volume). It is not, however, only about pejoratives. Many terms that are not inherently offensive and are not leveled intentionally as a way to demean and dehumanize nonetheless perpetuate differences in the historical and lingering advantages, power, and privilege between different racial and ethnic groups. Sociologically, the greater concern is the inequality. We are worried about how the biases inherent in language reinforce unequal outcomes by race. The way we all write, talk, and ultimately think about who we are—and who “they” are—influences these outcomes. One way to think about the importance of language is to engage the language of identity as reflected in the question: “What are you?” It is hard to imagine a less couth question, and yet it strikes at the heart of two issues: What is one’s identity, and who gets to decide? There is tremendous power embedded in the process of definition. Historically, colonization has left some telling scars. As world powers began dominating other peoples, they regularly imposed their own labels on them. Take, for example, the original human inhabitants of the Americas. We continue to call many of these peoples Indians after Christopher Columbus’s lifelong and mistaken belief that he had made it to India. Despite its inaccuracy, the term has stuck. As time has passed and overt imperial domination has largely waned (replaced by a system of global capitalism), many racial and ethnic groups have attempted to shed historically subjugating exonyms, or terms for a group created by an outside dominant group, for endonyms, or terms for a group created by the group members themselves. Latino, for example, is an endonym, the name that those to whom the term refers use for themselves. Hispanic (literally “Spanish-speaking”), on the other hand, is an exonym, a name outsiders impose on those to whom the term refers. After all, one’s language is not a designation that would help those who already know they speak the same language. Interestingly, Pew Research from 2012 indicates that most Hispanics/Latinos (51%) surveyed prefer their family’s country of origin as a descriptor of their ethnicity, meaning they preferred not to use panethnic terms such as Hispanic or Latino and instead identified as Mexican, Cuban, or Dominican, for example. Only about one quarter (24%) said they used Hispanic or Latino most often to describe their identity (Taylor, Lopez, Martínez, & Velasco, 2012). Regarding the terms Hispanic and Latino, most (51%) had no preference for either term, but when a preference was indicated, Hispanic was preferred over Latino (33% vs. 14%, respectively). This shows some preference for exonyms, perhaps because they tend to have been present in the culture longer than some endonyms and also tend to be terms (historically) used on government documents. Oriental—literally meaning “of the east”—is an exonym, too. It begs the question, east of what? Oriental only makes sense from the perspective of those in the West. The perspective and ascription of the terms matter. In fact, one way to make sense of racial or ethnic categories is as ascribed statuses. Ascribed statuses are social positions that others impose on individuals irrespective of the individual’s wishes (Linton, 1936). All exonyms are ascribed statuses. Inasmuch as there is widespread cultural acceptance of the term, exonyms carry with them a reminder of the social and political power that the subjugating group wields over the oppressed group. In these terms, it is not difficult to see why groups would be anxious to shed their exonyms and replace them with endonyms. First, such substitutions challenge the historically oppressive social relationships between groups, and second, the individual-level sense of agency that comes from self-definition can increase self-esteem and reduce anxiety (Cahill, 1986). CHANGES IN RACIAL LANGUAGE As a way to orient yourself to this social process, it is useful to think about how racial terminology has shifted over time as the concepts of race and ethnicity have shifted. One great new tool with which to see this is Google Ngrams. The Ngram tool draws from Google’s growing collection of digitized books (Michel et al., 2011). By searching a word or series of words, Ngram will chart the frequency of those words as they show up in books over time. It is not a perfect tool in that it restricts analysis to content that elites have created for themselves, it cannot differentiate between critical and noncritical usages, and it cannot control for any other independent factors, making Ngrams of limited use for rigorous scholarship. They can, nonetheless, point to larger historical trends in usage in ways that can be informative. I begin by comparing the terms American Indian and Native American (Figure 3.1).1 I use American Indian instead of just Indian to avoid any confusion with Asian Indians. (Years below in curly brackets {} represent the first recorded use of the term and come from Harper [2001].) While both terms are relatively scarce until the early 1900s, Native American {1956}, which had been the less frequent term, overtakes American Indian {1553?} around 1992, signaling a significant victory for Native Americans in their ability to self-define. While the term is still of European origin, it at least is not a coinage of an unapologetic conqueror. The tough thing, of course, with Asian {late 1300s} and Oriental {1701} is that they can just as easily refer to inanimate objects (e.g., rugs) as they can human beings. Still, Asian American is slowly replacing Oriental (see Figure 3.2). Interestingly, though, more than three quarters (76%) of Asian Americans do not often describe themselves with the terms Asian or Asian American; instead, most (62%) prefer to use their country of origin to define themselves (e.g., Chinese; Pew Research Center, 2012). In fact, the ability of the dominant group (e.g., Whites) to impose a term such as Asian on a set of heterogeneous ethnic groups obscures diversity and thus further reifies the power of the dominant group. Figure 3.1 American Indian Versus Native American Ngram Use of both Latino {1946} and the corresponding Hispanic {c. 1972} spike in the 1970s and 1980s (see Figure 3.3). What most of us assume is a neologism is often the older of the two terms. Latino, for example, is older than Hispanic, and increasingly, many academics and progressives view Latina and Latino as more appropriate. As with Asian Americans, people of these ethnicities are questioning the use of many of these terms, though, and even the very existence of an all-encompassing ethnicity. As stated above, most prefer national labels (e.g., Mexican) to either Hispanic or Latino, and more than two thirds (69%) believe that the latter two terms represent multiple cultures (Taylor et al., 2012). Adding a further level of complexity, many use the term Latin@ or Latinx (see Delgado, 2010) as not to normalize the masculine and devalue the feminine. Figure 3.2 Asian American Versus Oriental Ngram Figure 3.3 Latino/a Versus Hispanic Ngram I do not show all the Ngrams for the terms related to the Black racial category here, but they still deserve our attention, as they are important in and of themselves and illustrative of the other terms we have addressed above. (Notably, it is nearly impossible to compare Black {1620s} to these other terms, because it has several definitions pertaining to the color that are unrelated to race.) When we look at Ngrams comparing terms used for Black Americans, three things are apparent. First, use of both the N-word {1786} and Negro {1550s} peak during the Civil War and at the tail end of the civil rights movement; however, Negro has until recently dwarfed all other terms, even though it is out of date and considered offensive by some (Figure 3.4). Certainly, the deliberate use of outdated terms is one way to signal intentional insult. Imagine a White speaker emphatically using Negro when we could assume he is aware of the alternative and generally accepted terms such as Black. Though older speakers may have been socialized to use now-bygone terms, even the most aged of speakers are likely today to be aware of such changes in convention, and breaks with convention carry symbolic power. Second, use of the N-word has remained surprisingly high from the mid-1800s on. Finally, African American {1969} developed only quite recently, while Afro American {1853} has always been rare (Figure 3.5). Figure 3.4 N-Word Ngram Students often are not aware that most generally consider Colored people {1610s} an offensive term and prefer people of color {?}. Admittedly, it is an odd distinction. Unlike other terms that are preferred over alternatives because they are endonyms (e.g., Native American vs. Indian), there does not seem to be an obvious reason to favor of color over Colored aside from convention. It may be that Colored serves as a reminder for much of the language and hatred of the segregated South, but its semblance to of color makes the distinction confusing for some. The related Ngrams are below (Figures 3.6 and 3.7). Colored starts to fall out of favor around 1970, and of color replaces it beginning around 1988 to 1989. Initially, though, of color declined with Colored. It was only later that it gained acceptance and became a replacement. While of color solves some problems when trying to reference those who are not White (as if whiteness were the absence of color), it is relatively imprecise. I encourage students to say and write Black when they mean Black. If they mean “those who are not White,” non-White is sometimes permissible. (This distinction is related to the common practice in quantitative sociological analysis of dichotomizing race to Black/non-Black or White/non-White because of limitations of many datasets or for ease of interpretation.) Even this, however, is problematic, as it normalizes Whiteness while othering all other identities. Whenever possible, specificity is preferred. Figure 3.5 African American Versus Afro American Ngram Figure 3.6 Person of Color Versus Colored Person Ngram Figure 3.7 People of Color Versus Colored People Ngram The confusion over these terms is not isolated to people of color. Students are equally confused about how to refer to Whites. Many will use the term Caucasian {1807}. It has a ring of intellectualism, so students will use it to appear more erudite. The term, however, comes from a misunderstanding about race that began in 1795 when the German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach (1865) theorized that the ancestral homeland of White Europeans was in the Caucasus Mountain region of what is today the border between Russia and Georgia. While scientists discredited the theory long ago, use of the term has persisted. White {c. 1600} is a better term. LANGUAGE AS A FORM OF “OTHERING” Many of us who are instructors worry about what some of our less-thantactful students might say in classroom discussions about contentious issues such as those that sociology is wont to address, but we often worry about the wrong kind of tactlessness. Fears about egregious and inappropriate use of the N-word are largely hollow. What should be of far greater concern is language that is much more subtle and, thus, much more dangerous. It is usually something along the lines of, “Professor, why are they [meaning Blacks] so much more likely to be poor?” Because students are not accustomed to openly discussing topics such as race that are largely taboo in American culture, they do not think critically about the vocabulary they employ. Too often, it becomes “we” versus “they.” Students rarely do this in an intentionally malicious manner, however. As in the example above, it is often an honest attempt at understanding or benevolence (albeit condescending); however, the employment of this kind of language can be alienating to the “theys” in the class and is an insidious route by which racism is reified. Along with we/they–us/them dichotomies, students are often prone to phrases such as “you people” or “the Blacks.” The inclusion of pronouns or articles has the unintended effect of distancing the speaker from the subject, further exacerbating racism. TALKING ABOUT TALKING ABOUT RACE It is one thing to read and think about these racial terms and quite another to take the understanding and apply it in one’s life. Most people loathe confrontation, especially with people whom they love and respect. It often happens that a friend or family member will unwittingly say something quite hateful or ignorant, and regularly, classmates—and at times even faculty—will speak in ways that may give one pause. While sociologists are trained to spot these instances, they are often much less obvious to others. As I half-jokingly tell my students, any sentence that begins, “I’m not a racist, but . . .” (or less frequently, “Not to sound like a racist, but . . .”) almost invariably is followed by a blatantly racist statement. If we were quick enough, we might try to catch these folks after the but and ask if what they are about to say in any way is in conflict with what they just said. In effect, it would be wonderful to be able to kindly make salient people’s cognitive dissonance. Alas, even the most motivated among us rarely do this. More often than not, we avoid the confrontation altogether, typically hoping that the conversation will change topic as quickly as possible. In many ways, this is an abdication of our civic duty to confront such ignorance. It is all too easy to rationalize such interactions, arguing that we do better in the long run to model appropriate speaking and thinking instead of risking the wholesale dismissal of our ideas and expertise. It takes both confidence and a soft touch to deal with this topic. I, along with my fellow authors and the editors of this volume, hope that if you began with any reticence toward learning about race and the problems that come along with it, you are a bit more confident about the topic now. Even if this is the case, though, you likely still have some reservations about how to discuss such topics with others, particularly family, friends, and other loved ones who use outmoded language and hold damaging beliefs. Here are two important tips. First, it is important to be prepared for others to be dismissive. Do not take it personally. Dismissiveness is a reaction prompted by misunderstanding and unrecognized privilege. Open, respectful dialogue is the only way to overcome that misunderstanding. Second, even when one follows the above advice, not every battle needs to be fought. As much as you might lament it, you cannot change the world in a day, and you are not even likely to rearrange a person’s thinking and speaking in an afternoon. Be selective in your critiques, and keep your goals long and broad. CONCLUSION Racial and ethnic dynamics change over time, which means the language used to refer to the dynamics changes over time. The meanings inherent to the terminology around race and ethnicity are about power and dominance. By fighting to replace ascribed exonyms with endonyms, groups have correspondingly challenged the structural oppression the terms themselves have reflected. By contextualizing public discussions about the proper use of language when identifying racial and ethnic groups, we help recognize and, ultimately, critically engage the historical legacy of colonialism and racism and discard the misguided belief that it is all a matter of being politically correct. New understanding often leads to more questions than answers. If you have reached the end of this essay and are unsatisfied by the absence of simple, straightforward answers, I hope you recognize, first, that you are not alone and, second, that the confusing language around race and ethnicity is a symptom of both the messy and lamentable history of the topic and the complexity of social interaction. It is only by engaging in this topic that we can move together toward a more equitable future. Bradley Koch is an associate professor of sociology at Georgia College. He teaches Introduction to Sociology, Research Methods, Social Problems, Society and the Individual, and the Senior Seminar. His research interests include religion, music, and teaching and learning. Brad blogs at http://socingoutloud.com/. NOTE 1. I use the 1800 to 2008 corpus of terms with a smoothing of 3 years for all Ngrams below. Suggested Additional Resources Google. (2013). Google Books Ngram viewer. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/ngrams Pew Research Center. (2012). The rise of Asian Americans. Pew Research Center: Social & Demographic Trends. Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/asianamericans Taylor, P., Lopez, M. H., Martínez, J. H., & Velasco, G. (2012). When labels don’t fit: Hispanics and their views of identity. Pew Research Center: Hispanic Trends. Retrieved from http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/04/when-labels-dont-fithispanics-and-their-views-of-identity QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION 1. What fears do you have about using or hearing inappropriate language regarding race? What prior experiences do you have with these issues? How does this illustrate the complex and “messy” nature of race and identity that the author discusses in this essay? 2. Can you identify currently acceptable racial or ethnic terms not mentioned in the essay that you believe still reflect historic and ongoing oppression? Reaching Beyond the Color Line 1. Make your own Ngrams. Choose a race or ethnicity with different labels (e.g., African American and Negro [or negro]), and go to the Ngram website to investigate the changes in the use of these terms over time. 2. In small groups, role-play a situation in which someone uses inappropriate or outdated racial terminology. Stage a mock intervention in which group members attempt to correct the lone member’s thinking and speech. 3. Interview older members of your own family about their ethnic and racial identities. What terms do they use? What terms do they prefer? How have the terms that others have used for them changed over their lifetime? 4. Ask people in the course of everyday interactions what terms they prefer. Devise other ways to determine what terms your peers use and prefer. REFERENCES Asim, J. (2007). The N word: Who can say it, who shouldn’t, and why. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Blumenbach, J. (1865). The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach [1775–1833]. London, UK: Anthropological Society. Cahill, S. E. (1986). Language practices and self definition: The case of gender identity acquisition. Sociological Quarterly, 27(3), 295–311. Delgado, D. (2010). Middle-class Latin@ identity: Building a theoretical and conceptual framework. Sociology Compass, 4(11), 947–964. Harper, D. (2001). Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved June 27, 2012, from http://www.etymonline.com Linton, R. (1936). The study of man: An introduction. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Michel, J.-B., Shen, Y. K., Aiden, A. P., Veres, A., Gray, M. K., the Google Books Team, Pickett, J. P. . . . Aiden, E. L. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014), 176–182. Pew Research Center. (2012). The rise of Asian Americans. Pew Research Center: Social & Demographic Trends. Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/asianamericans Taylor, P., Lopez, M. H., Martínez, J. H., & Velasco, G. (2012). When labels don’t fit: Hispanics and their views of identity. Pew Research Center: Hispanic Trends. Retrieved from http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/04/when-labels-dont-fit-hispanicsand-their-views-of-identity 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. QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION 1. What fears do you have about using or hearing inappropriate language regarding race? What prior experiences do you have with these issues? How does this illustrate the complex and “messy" nature of race and identity that the author discusses in this essay? 2. Can you identify currently acceptable racial or ethnic terms not mentioned in the essay that you believe still reflect historic and ongoing oppression? 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?