Crisis bigotry obscures real political and economic causes to aid the state.

Evidence

Building national unity at times of crisis by ascribing undesirable values to religious out-groups has been a pattern of governance in America’s democracy that has often obfuscated the political and economic sources of the crisis to the benefit of the state. Today’s explanations of 9/11 in terms of religion and our contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Muslim bigotry in terms of a social phobia of Islam continue this pattern at a significant cost to every American’s civil liberties. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Directly names the ‘frightened subject’ mechanism keyed to the reader’s guiding questions — fear as projection displacing politico-economic sources of crisis.
• QUESTION: The passage asserts the pattern but doesn’t yet demonstrate it; worth tracking which historical cases (chapters to come) substantiate the causal claim.