Citizens conflate Muslim nationalities so South Asians get slurred as Arab

Evidence

Maham, a thirty-eight-year-old Indian American woman, told me, “I was filling gas the other day and [a man] driving by yelled out of their window, ‘Go back to your country, you camel jockey!’” Camel jockey is a racist slur used against Arabs and Middle Easterners. Irum, Reema, and Maham’s encounters confirm that Islam is racialized and equated with foreignness. Because private citizens are unable to distinguish between Muslim countries, they equate Islam with an ambiguous region of the world. They are unable to distinguish the various nationalities and ethnicities that Muslims comprise. Scholars have shown how Islam is most commonly conflated with the Middle East (Volpp 2003; Naber 2007; Cainkar 2009; Love 2017). Thus South Asians who are identified as Muslim can also be marked as Arab when they wear the hijab, but it is important to note this was not always the case. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 259

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading goal of how a faith gets racialized; racialized conflation into ‘ambiguous region’ supports the religion-race mechanism. — connects to: Racializations of South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims were intertwined from capitalism’s start; Terrorism racialization evolved from Arabs to Iranians and South Asians from the late 1960s — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 215
• SHARE: The specific ‘camel jockey’ slur and South Asians-marked-as-Arab detail could be shared with someone studying post-9/11 racialization.