Muslim identity ejects Arab Americans from legal whiteness and its social benefits.

Evidence

When identified as Muslims, whether through the hijab or a Muslim name, the racial classification as white stops applying to Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqi Americans. Whiteness comes with certain benefits, like being able to walk into a store without being stared at, monitored, or verbally harassed; boarding a flight in the airport without having your body searched several times, and not having to monitor what you say out of fear that someone will report you to law enforcement. It affords individuals these tangible material and social benefits (Harris 1993). Arabs who are Muslim are being ejected from the racial classification of white because their religious identity marks them as the other, and South Asian Muslims are simultaneously losing their footing as honorary whites. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 473

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core religion-vs-race racialization mechanism: religious identity reclassifies racial identity, defining what ‘racialization’ means in her account.
• SEED: The concept of whiteness as a bundle of monitored/unmonitored freedoms — being searched, watched, reported — could anchor an essay on how surveillance functions as the new boundary of racial privilege.
• XREF: connects to: Islamic identity exceeded skin color in rendering Arabs non-white for citizenship; White domestic terrorism still shapes immigration policy because Arabs are visually raced as terrorists; Arab Americans’ racial exclusion from whiteness tracks the rise of US global empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 248 (+1 more)