Comparative racialization conflates distinct groups into one fungible suspect figure

Evidence

The conceptual linkage of connection and comparison relies on a logic of fungibility in which a number of objects, things, and ideas are conflated into a particular racial figure. The fungibility of comparative racialization imagines the racialized Muslim as a potential terrorist threat connected, for example, to border crossing by Latinos and militancy among African Americans (Ahmad 2004, 1278). Comparative racialization operates not only at the level of di√erent populations, but also at the level of di√erent processes, such as migration, labor, and informal economies. The act of migration, then, becomes a suspect activity in which particular kinds of labor are deemed part of underground and illicit activities. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral panic literature (Cohen) and the learned example about ‘the moral dimension of social reaction is essential to Cohen’s concept of moral panic’. — connects to: Racialization technologies are deployed on internal class others before foreign enemies; Distinct racial conspiracy movements merge when a shared adversary framework emerges — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 174; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism described — fungibility as the operational logic linking border crossing, militancy, and immigration into one racial figure — is a dense conceptual innovation worth sitting with.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 235