Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims’ upper-middle-class position drives their assimilationist religiosity-over-racism framing

Evidence

Sheehi argues that Middle Eastern (both Arab and Iranian) and South Asian Muslims, who make up 45 percent of American Muslims, are overwhelmingly upper-middle class. This class position explains their assimilationist approach, which allows them to “maintain a sense of ethnic belonging while also benefiting from the class privileges that are firmly rooted in middle-class white America.” Not surprisingly, he adds that even while some CAIR chapters and other groups have endorsed Black Lives Matter and taken anti-racist positions, they prefer to eschew talking about race and racism altogether. Thus, they engage Islamophobia in terms of religious tolerance rather than as the racism that enables empire. … Nazia Kazi similarly highlights the class background of mainstream Muslim organizations. Her important ethnographic research shows that “without fail, Muslim sermons, panel discussions, and community events” include “a condemnation of ISIS, terrorism, or violence against civilians.” While it is not wrong to denounce such violence, to do so without a similar denunciation of the far greater violence of the United States lends itself to an acceptance of the war on terror as the appropriate way to deal with groups like ISIS. In trying to gain legitimacy in the mainstream, Kazi argues that these “good Muslims” fall into a “slippery slope” between condemning violence and “being an implicit advocate for the US ‘war on terror.’” This process validates imperial ethnocentric racism, which categorizes people as either “good” or “bad” Muslims based on their support for empire and gives credence to the war on terror. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 718

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the vault cluster by linking Islamophobia framing to class position rather than only imperial design; dialogues with Razack’s class analysis of the Muslim as threat. — connects to: Most Arab and South Asian American Muslims are upper-middle class, shaping their politics — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 718; Upper-middle-class status drives mainstream Muslim groups to avoid race analysis — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 730; Religious identity racializes Arab and South Asian Muslims along shared lines (+2 more)
• QUESTION: The ‘45 percent upper-middle class’ figure invites verification of Sheehi’s underlying dataset on Muslim American class composition.

Broader Connections

• Upper-middle-class status drives mainstream Muslim groups to avoid race analysis #corroborates (1.00) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 730
• Class position drives Muslim organizations’ assimilationist, race-averse strategy #corroborates (0.85)
• Religious identity racializes Arab and South Asian Muslims along shared lines #responds-to (0.80)
• Race analysis better captures anti-Muslim discrimination than religious-discrimination framing #qualifies (0.70) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 317