Islamophobia operates as a form of cultural racism, not a distinct phenomenon.

Evidence

Taras (2012: 4) notes that ‘Islamophobia thus entails a cultural racism that sets Muslims apart. As a result, the Islamic migrant is constructed as someone burdened by alien attributes and as a carrier of antagonistic, threatening values’. For Cole and Maisuria (2007), Islamophobia is a product of racism, and therefore racist abuse can also be viewed in the lens of Muslims being a ‘risky’ group. They state that ‘Islamophobia, like other forms of racism, can be cultural or it can be biological, or it can be a mixture of both’ (Cole and Maisuria, 2007: 106). — Irene Zempi and Imran Awan, Islamophobia, 22

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions Islamophobia definitionally inside racism scholarship, which matters because much of the debate turns on whether it is a separate category.
• XREF: Echoes the corpus claim that British Islamophobia runs on a black-white antiracism frame that marginalised Asian struggles (Islamophobia and the Novel).