Anti-Muslim racism has shifted from bodies to culture while keeping an essentialist logic

Evidence

Along with this emerging Muslim political identity, the argument goes, there has been a recalibration of racism around matters of culture rather than ethnicity. What is known as “cultural racism” emphasizes languages, beliefs, and traditions over biology and makes them the focus of fear and hostility. Anti-Muslim cultural racism takes on board some of the psychological coordinates of phenotype racism but redirects them to aspects of life and behavior instead of to the body. Michel Wieviorka describes this shift as depending on the construction of Muslims “as a natural category, and [where] their behaviour, real or imagined, is informed in some way or another by an essence, by innate attributions or an almost genetic cultural heritage.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 156

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines “cultural racism” as racism redirected from biology to culture, with Wieviorka’s essentialist formulation — a key analytic term for reading Hamid and Naqvi.
• XREF: This cultural-vs-phenotype racism distinction parallels the dress ‘immodesty’ panics cross-cultural analysis where class/identity signaling replaces biology. — connects to: European veil bans rest on cultural racism casting Islam as premodern — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 313; European multiculturalism backlash revitalized anti-Muslim racism as cultural racism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 313; Bodily notions of inherited difference preceded fully secular modern racism. (+1 more)