The Limits of Whiteness

Legally Armed but Presumed Dangerous: An Intersectional Analysis of Gun Carry Licensing as a Racial/Gender Degradation Ceremony

“…First, reflecting the demographics of Metro Detroit as well as self-selection into the pool of CPL applicants and holders, the vast majority of claimants were African American or white. While scholarship suggests the persistence of African American subordination despite demographic shifts (Bonilla-Silva 2014), this study raises the question of how the mechanisms analyzed here would be mobilized with respect to other racialized men, particularly those who have experienced increased criminalization (e.g., racialized immigrants; Armenta 2017; Maghbouleh 2017). Second, this article examines observations of social interaction at public gun board meetings.…”

“… 6. This man presented as white, especially alongside the higher class status communicated by his two lawyers and within Oakland County’s racial context, which is heavily informed by a Black/white binary that emphasized African American subordination (Bonilla-Silva 2014). Nevertheless, this case is a reminder of what Maghbouleh (2017) calls the “limits of whiteness,” namely, that whiteness, particularly among “racial hinge” groups such as Iranians, is a malleable group identity. With race and criminal justice mutually constitutive social institutions (Muhammad 2011), this claimant’s whiteness is arguably co-constitutive with his impunity. …”

The Racialization of the Muslim Body and Space in Hollywood

“…These processes of racial othering function within systems of oppression that racialize the Islamic world and Muslim identities within the political constructs of terrorism, ensuring domination of one group (whites) over the rest (non-whites) (Gans 2016;Goldberg 2015;Omi and Winant 2015;Selod 2015). Despite the recent rejection of the MENA category from the U.S. census for ethnoracial identification of Middle Easterners and North Africans, I show that post-9/11 films are a racial project that targets MENA identities to substantiate the Western hegemony of the WOT and create and perpetuate racial biases and racial stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists (Alsultany 2012;Cainkar and Selod 2018;Maghbouleh 2017;Naber 2008;Omi and Winant 2015;Rana 2011). Tracing histories of racial formation to imperial legacies of Eurocentric Islamophobic othering and race-making, I demonstrate how films engage in the political processes of racial construction of Muslim identities by criminalizing their gendered identity, dehumanizing their body, and devaluing their territorial and physical space in the aftermath of the WOT.…”

“…In addition to Trump's travel bans (also known as the Muslim ban); both the Obama and Bush administrations overtly institutionalized racial profiling of the Muslim man as the suspicious terrorist. Policies such as the USA Patriot Act, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, and the Absconder Apprehension Initiative were put in place, legitimizing racial profiling of Muslims and Muslim Americans of MENA and South Asian descent and establishing them as a threat to the American way of life (Alsultany 2012;Bayoumi 2006;Cainkar and Selod 2018;Mamdani 2004;Maghbouleh 2017;Love 2017;Rana 2011).…”

Racing the Muslim: Strategies for Teaching Race and Ethnic Studies in the Education Curriculum

“…The class syllabus is organized in ways that offer critical theory, expansive historiographies, and nuanced pedagogical strategies to counter the dominant and simplistic national narrative on race. By highlighting first the histories of Muslims and Middle Eastern subjects in early 1900s United States, this historicity underscores CRT's emphasis on storytelling to challenge U.S. epistemologies of race by highlighting the dynamicity and instability of race through the racial ambiguity of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and non-White "Others" (Ho, 2015;Maghbouleh, 2017;Thangaraj, 2015a). Next, by engaging with the social scientific literature concerning the contemporary moment of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, I interrogate the post-9/11 racial hysteria and its spatialization across the national landscape to foreground how race impacts specifically communities interpellated as "Muslim" and as "Arab.…”