Cultural difference is racialized into immutable grounds for excluding Muslims from citizenship

Evidence

Surveillance of culture is racialized when cultural practices are essentialized as innate to Muslims, subjecting them to intense scrutiny. For example, any abuse that Muslim women experience at the hands of Muslim men is reduced to religious cultural values perpetuated by Islam. The Taliban’s treatment of women in Afghanistan is an example of this culturally fueled racism. Muslim women were constructed as in need of saving from Muslim men, which in turn justified the invasion of Afghanistan (Razack 2008 Abu-Lughod 2013). Another example of this is the misconception that Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab. Private citizens chastise Muslim American women who wear the hijab because for them it represents subservience to patriarchy, rather than being understood as a choice. Wearing the hijab is treated as a cultural aberration to American societal values and individuals who wear it are understood as antimodern and antifeminist. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 274 (#expands, via linked claim)

By definition, Racial Muslims do not experience full religious freedom protections afforded to religious minorities. Nor are they considered to have an American national identity, even if they were born in the United States or possess US citizenship. Rather, Racial Muslims are a suspect race, permanent foreigners, and national security threats who warrant exclusion, purging, or incarceration to protect real (White Judeo-Christian) Americans. Their mere presence on US soil poses a national security threat. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 76 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The racialized Muslim developed as a geographically external other that was demonized not only through notions of the body, but also through the superimposition of cultural features onto Muslim and non–Muslim groups. Because this process was not based exclusively on phenotypic or physical di√erence (although this was often imputed), some have been able to use a strategy of dissimulation—that is, disguising or concealing religious di√erence—to keep themselves from being interpreted in racial terms. In the American context of racial formation, for instance, Islam represented a liberatory identification for African Americans; however, this presented a threat to white Christian supremacy that was then used to further racialize immigrant and black Muslims. Thus, the figure of the Muslim became racialized through social and cultural signifiers across national, racial, and ethnic boundaries. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 106 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ethnopopulists frame internal minorities as foreign fifth columns to justify their exclusion. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 30; Muslims get racialized via projected religious ancestry regardless of self-understanding — Mareike Riedel, Islamophobia, Racial Discrimination…, 64; Islamic identity rendered immigrants non-white in citizenship cases regardless of legal test — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 154 (+25 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural practices become racialized when they are essentialized as innate to Muslims #expands (0.95) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 274
• Racial Muslims are denied American national identity despite citizenship or birth in the US. #corroborates (0.93) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 76
• Muslims were racialized through cultural signifiers rather than phenotype alone #expands (0.92) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 106