Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept.

Evidence

In the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, the story of the race concept followed a path toward secularization through the emergence of scientific racism and, subsequently, eugenicist philosophy that was shored up in the ideology of white supremacy throughout Europe and the Americas. Racism in its modern, Enlightenment form privileged biological di√erence as natural di√erence without including religion, which was seen as a discrete form of prejudice and persecution. Hence, the modern form of racism displaced religion and, consequently, Islamophobia as racism. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 156

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense claim: that the secularization of racism made religion-based prejudice theoretically invisible to the modern concept, thereby hiding Islamophobia’s racial nature. Paradigm-shifting for how we categorize racism’s scope.
• XREF: connects to: Empiricism replaced religion as the ideology that blocks totalizing social thought. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 721; Race gained social hegemony as religion declined, becoming a secularized civic theology — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1345; Anti-Catholic nativism decayed as intellectuals found race a more respectable enemy frame. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 567 (+5 more)