Islam’s racial function shifts with changing Muslim demographics.

Evidence

In the period after the Oklahoma City Bombing until 2010, Muslims were targeted for profiling on the assumption that they were a visibly alien presence in society. South Asian, Arab, and those Islamicized because of their underlying racial features or dress were surveilled, detained, deported, and subject to both state and vigilante violence. A decade after 9/11, lawmakers and activists turned their attention to Islam itself. Islam was redefined to mean a political ideology incompatible with the Constitution, a threat to the homeland that justified increased surveillance and racial profiling of anyone who claimed it as their religion. While in the early 2000s it was assumed that one could tell Muslims apart, as the War on Terror progressed, the worry was that stealth jihad and indeed stealth Muslims like the main characters in Homeland or Sleeper Cell— white or Black Muslims who pass as “regular” Americans would challenge the professed values of our nation. Once again, Islam was depicted as alien and incompatible with American values and was used to Islamicize people and subject them to both social and legal violence. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 262 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The most significant lesson in the current recodification of racism in America is that racism as a phenomenon stays constant while its signifiers change visual and affective registers—from black to brown, from Jew to Muslim, at the center of which bifurcations remains a fictive white Christian interlocutor who demands and exacts racialized superiority. Islam is the new Judaism, Muslims the new Jews, Islamophobia the new anti-Semitism, and brown the new black—all in the racialized imagination of a white-identified supremacy that must first alienate (both in itself and of itself) in order to rule. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 633 (#expands, via linked claim)

Through conversations with Muslim men and women, I was able to uncover how their lives slowly transformed from being viewed as marginally American as a result of their ethnic identities to being seen as anti-American and unwanted because of their religious identity. The stories and testimonies of ordinary American citizens in this book reflect how cultural and political shifts can create newly racialized meanings in a society that is organized along racial lines. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 150 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Cold War’s end positioned Islam as communism’s replacement global threat — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 240; People who seem white can be raced non-white on the basis of Islam alone. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 252; Cultural and political shifts can racialize religious identity — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 150 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Islam’s racialization shifted from visible markers to belief itself as stealth fears grew #corroborates (0.85) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 262
• Cultural and political shifts can racialize religious identity #corroborates (0.75) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 150
• Racism persists while its targets shift from black to brown and Jew to Muslim #expands (0.75) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 633