Airport surveillance of Muslims requires participation from the state, private citizens, and Muslims themselves

Evidence

Airport surveillance unfairly targets Muslim passengers when TSA agents rely on visible cues such as Muslim religious signifiers like the hijab to determine which bodies should be stopped and searched and when Muslim men are subjected to hypersurveillance because their names either appear on a TSA list or are similar enough to one of those on it. This distrust of Muslims by the state sends a clear message to society that Muslims should be watched, monitored, and feared. As described earlier, private citizens also participate in this hypersurveillance of Muslim bodies by reporting them to flight attendants as suspicious because they wear hijabs or speak Arabic, because of the association of Arabic with the “enemy” (Naber 2006). I show that Muslims are aware that it is not just the state that surveils them in airports but also private citizens and that they consequently participate in self-surveillance as a result of their hypersurveillance. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anchors the reader’s ‘Global Racial Enemy’ map slot and connects to Beydoun et al.; also the self-surveillance move parallels the reader’s surveillance canon.
• SEED: The insight that Muslims know private citizens, not just the state, surveil them — and self-interrogate accordingly — is a strong essay angle on how diffuse surveillance undermines belonging.