Muslims are racially assigned to blackness while immigrants aspire to whiteness.

Evidence

Black Muslims, already racialized through ideas about skin color and slavery, became an exceptional threat through their association with a racialized Islam. Indeed, Arab Americans and South Asian Americans are linked to African Americans through this shared racialization of Islam. Thus, it is to blackness that Muslims are racially assigned, yet it is to whiteness that immigrants generally aspire for citizenship rights and class mobility. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to existing knowledge of US racial formation as binary black/white, and to the recent book evidence on how religion gets folded into racial categories. — connects to: Muslim immigrants preferred strained whiteness arguments over an easier Blackness claim; Immigrant Muslim petitioners chose whiteness claims over easier Black identification.; Arab and Muslim immigrants deliberately pursued legal whiteness despite easier Blackness claims — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 189
• SEED: Potential essay: how the black/white frame of American racism forced pre-9/11 immigrants into a binary that assigned them to blackness while they aspired to whiteness—the material stakes of racial assignment.