Culture-clash explanations attribute immigrant violence solely to culture and erase structural racism.

Evidence

Human Visas does not offer proof that cousin marriage is the violent practice described by Anders Hede in his study of cousin marriage. Instead, the argument hinges entirely on the assertion that women in the West have more freedom, autonomy, and equality because they are not generally a part of extended kinship networks and are not subjected to arranged marriages, as are Muslim women. The divide is between those who live as autonomous individuals and who make decisions without the influence of kin and community and those who live their lives within communities, the two sides serving to illustrate not only the unbridgeable cultural divide between the West and non-West but the non-West as a place of danger for women. Any factors that might serve to complicate this picture of autonomously acting individuals – for example, immigration as a condition that Muslim communities are compelled to negotiate or the racism that drives communities into themselves – all remain outside the cultural frame. The problem of violence, and what are viewed here as its repercussions, such as the creation of an immigrant underclass, originate only in culture, and Westerners, imagined as living autonomously and outside culture, remain privileged in this formulation. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 268

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-panic literature on Islamophobia and to work on how cultural explanations mask structural causes — parallels the framing critique in the broader literature on secularism and race.