Muslims are racialized by reading terror as learned and simultaneously embodied

Evidence

In the emerging Muslim racial scheme, this potential is found in the bodies of those who are read as Muslim based on phenotype, dress, and bodily comportment, as well as religious belief and practice, and then essentialized as potential terrorists. In the biological metaphor of naturalization, cultural and social traits can be transmitted—that is, terror and its ideology are understood as socially and culturally learned and simultaneously internalized in the body. The metaphor becomes quite literal when the body is used as a weapon or instrument of terror. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 408

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the mechanism by which cultural traits get ‘internalized in the body’ — the racializing trick that fuses learned behavior with biological essentialism.
• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘body as weapon’ trope dissolves the learned/innate distinction that normally governs cultural analysis of crime and terror.
• XREF: connects to: The moment of being mistaken for Muslim is a direct lesson in racialization’s power