‘Free-floating’ cultural racism sustains racial hierarchy without naming race at all.

Evidence

‘Muslim’ thus becomes a naturalized category linked to an assumed ‘mode of being’: as Paul Gilroy has previously argued about ethnicity, ‘the cultural flavour of today’s racism may mean that no mention is made of old-style biological races at all. There are of course colour-coded ways of talking about race without using the actual word’ (1993: 56). To paraphrase de Beauvoir (1953), today, it seems, ‘culture is destiny’. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 175

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gilroy’s and de Beauvoir’s formulations anchor the ‘cultural racism without the word race’ mechanism that defines the critical/decolonial framing of Islamophobia.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘culture is destiny’ inversion of de Beauvoir is a dense, paradigm-shifting compact: it reframes a liberationist slogan into a description of a new form of race-thinking, difficult to reduce to a single sentence.
• SHARE: Send to anyone working on race theory or the culture-vs-structure debate — this is the crux that bridges biological racism and culturalist discrimination.
• XREF: connects to: Racialization can proceed from cultural traits without any phenotypic difference — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 88; Cultural racism travels and can be adopted without local Jewish populations — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 225; Cultural and biological racisms cannot be sharply separated discursively — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 395 (+3 more)

Related

• Cultural-racism defenses are fallacious since all racism includes cultural components (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural racism locks groups into immutable genealogies just as biological race did. (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural racism substitutes cultural traits for biological ones in racializing groups. (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural racism locks groups into immutable genealogies as biological racism did (similarity 0.83)
• Islamophobia operates as cultural racism rooted in religion, culture, and ethnicity rather than biology. (similarity 0.82)
• Anti-Muslim racism has shifted from bodies to culture while keeping an essentialist logic (similarity 0.82)
• Racism rests on pseudo-scientific race accounts that justify inequality. (similarity 0.82)
• The move from biological to cultural racism lets prejudice be renamed cultural critique (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Muslim signification is culturally constructed rather than biologically grounded. (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural and biological racisms cannot be sharply separated discursively (similarity 0.81)
• Racism operates through biological and cultural registers that reinforce each other (similarity 0.80)
• Racialization assigns presumed negative traits to define a group. (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural racism travels and can be adopted without local Jewish populations (similarity 0.80)
• Racialization can proceed from cultural traits without any phenotypic difference (similarity 0.80)
• Racism scholarship’s biologistic paradigms long excluded anti-Muslim discrimination as unclassifiable (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Racialization can proceed from cultural traits without any phenotypic difference #corroborates (0.85) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 88
• Cultural-racism defenses are fallacious since all racism includes cultural components #corroborates (0.80) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 108
• Biological racism and cultural differentialism are racism’s two registers, not separate systems #expands (0.80)
• Cultural racism travels and can be adopted without local Jewish populations #exemplifies (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 225
• Cultural and biological racisms cannot be sharply separated discursively #qualifies (0.72) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 395
• Cultural domination has real effects without being all-powerful or all-inclusive #expands (0.72)