Muslim Victimization in the Contemporary US: Clarifying the Racialization Thesis

Abstract

This article draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews with Muslim and non-Muslim Americans in 2016 to specify how Muslim "racialization" is shaped by the racial politics of the United States (US). Anti-Muslim bias is not experienced by religious Muslims as a whole, but by people whose bodies are read to be affiliated with the Islamic religion-often erroneously-because of their perceived racial characteristics. Self-identified black, white, and Hispanic Muslims with no visible markers of their religion do not experience anti-Muslim harassment, while non-Muslim Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs who embody an imagined "Muslim look," cope with fear and aggression from strangers on a daily basis. These findings are notable for two reasons. First, our respondents demonstrate how racialized religion is mutable: they are active in constructing how Islam is read on their bodies in public. Second, our findings demonstrate how hate crime categorization in the US obscures the role that racism plays in religious victimization. We urge scholars who study anti-Muslim acts to include non-Muslims in their analyses, and advocate for the re-conceptualization of identity-based hate crime categories. Excavating the corporeality of criminal victimization in particular can help to understand the ways in which biases are experienced in the contemporary US.

Embodied Othering Encounters with Muslim(‐Looking) Passengers: Riding across Amsterdam, Tallinn, Leipzig, and Turku1

“…Hindus, Sikhs, Arabs, Middle Easterners, South Asians, and those with similar skin tones who embody an imagined "Muslim look" are all becoming the same, Muslim (Devadoss 2020;Hopkins et al 2017;Love 2009Love , 2020. Muslim(-looking) people become the target of the racialization of Islam based on the idea that a group of (accurate or not) Muslim people are associated with phenotypical and cultural characteristics (Hancock 2020;Kaufman and Niner 2019).…”

Discourse on modern terrorism

“…For example, European countries rely on terrorist profiles that include factors such as nationality and place of birth, while the USA subjects citizens and residents of 14 countries (13 of which are predominantly Muslim) to enhanced security checks 30 . In a broader context Sarah Kaufman and Hanna Niner point out that in USA self-identified black, white and Hispanic Muslims with no visible marker of their religion do not experience anti-Muslim harassment, while non-Muslim Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs who embody an imagined "Muslim look", cope with fear and aggression from strangers on a daily basis 31 . These examples clearly portray the issue of unnecessary identification of terrorism with certain religious or sometimes even national affiliation, thus treating those labeled individuals as second-class citizens, i.e.…”

The Criminalization of Muslims in the United States, 2016

“…Rather, Muslim respondents in our study uniformly discussed the ways in which their communities were being spoken about, a different discursive task than commenting on an imagined "other". Their experiences are discussed in a separate paper, Kaufman and Niner (2019). In addition, three non-Muslim respondents denied having any knowledge of the ways in which Islam was being discussed during the election.…”

“…The first sub-group was composed of nine Sikh, Hindu, and self-described Christian Middle Eastern respondents who feared for their own safety at the hands of anti-Muslim Americans and were trying to make sense of an historical moment that endangered their well-being. Their stories recall the experiences of other Americans impacted by the gaze of those who presume, mistakenly, to "know" them (Dawkins 2012;Sanchez and Schlossberg 2001), discussed in a separate article (Kaufman and Niner 2019). The second sub-group of respondents who did not speak of Muslims as a threat (n = 61), were largely college-educated, self-described politically "liberal" from minority religious and racial groups.…”