Each moral panic permutation gives the black folk-devil greater power

Evidence

In Paul Gilroy’s examples, the visual imagery of panic combines criminality and illegality with the racial signifier of blackness: ”The cavalcade of lawless images—stowaways, drifters, pimps and drug dealers … extends into the present in the forms of muggers, illegal immigrants, black extremists and criminal Rastafarians (dreads). The black folk-devil has acquired greater power with each subsequent permutation” (Gilroy 1982, 145). At the time, blackness in the U.K. was the predominant political identification for people of color; in ”Police and Thieves,” Gilroy discusses Afro-Caribbeans as criminals and Asians as illegal immigrants. Both are racialized pictures of criminality that are reconstituted in moments of crisis. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 914

Categorization

• XREF: Gilroy’s folk-devil analysis directly parallels the Muslim folk-devil construction in the book’s core argument.