Private citizens hold state-like power to report Muslims for punishment

Evidence

Muslim American men were more likely to be treated as violent threats to national security. The public has internalized the construction of Muslim men as potential terrorists and consequently refers to them as such through offhanded comments and jokes. The laws and policy shifts in this country in the name of national security have made labeling someone a terrorist a serious offense, and Muslim Americans are cognizant the state has the ability to take punitive action against them without due process because America is engaged in a War on Terror. Private citizens hold enormous power over Muslim Americans because of their ability to report them to the state. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 345

Categorization

• XREF: The reader’s guiding question about how surveillance lands differently on men vs. women — here is the male side of the asymmetry, grounded in state punitive capacity.
• QUESTION: How does ‘censorship/offhanded joke’ escalate into actual state reporting? The passage asserts the power but the mechanism of citizen-to-state referral is worth chasing later.