Racism functions as practices that ascribe and legitimate social positions

Evidence

Surveillance of culture is racialized when cultural practices are essentialized as innate to Muslims, subjecting them to intense scrutiny. For example, any abuse that Muslim women experience at the hands of Muslim men is reduced to religious cultural values perpetuated by Islam. The Taliban’s treatment of women in Afghanistan is an example of this culturally fueled racism. Muslim women were constructed as in need of saving from Muslim men, which in turn justified the invasion of Afghanistan (Razack 2008 Abu-Lughod 2013). Another example of this is the misconception that Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab. Private citizens chastise Muslim American women who wear the hijab because for them it represents subservience to patriarchy, rather than being understood as a choice. Wearing the hijab is treated as a cultural aberration to American societal values and individuals who wear it are understood as antimodern and antifeminist. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 274 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Sherene Razack writes that using hate as an analytic “discourages the thinking that is required to make sense of the high numbers of murdered Indigenous women, police shootings of Black people, and a range of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust, settler colonial massacres and violent dispossession.” Hate is framed as an individual problem that the state condemns and helps to resolve. It is also an emotion, psychologized as an individual pathology that can be combated like a disease, rather than sets of policies that are enacted for political interests. This approach regards Islamophobia as an individual problem of hate between people, not as a structural issue connected to state policies or media representations. — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 34 (#expands, via linked claim)

I have introduced three abolition campaigns that were eventually more or less successful to make the point that social circumstances transform and popular attitudes shift, in part in response to organized social movements. But I have also evoked these historical campaigns because they all targeted some expression of racism. U.S. chattel slavery was a system of forced labor that relied on racist ideas and beliefs to justify the relegation of people of African descent to the legal status of property. Lynching was an extralegal institution that surrendered thousands of African-American lives to the violence of ruthless racist mobs. Under segregation, black people were legally declared second-class citizens, for whom voting, job, education, and housing rights were drastically curtailed, if they were available at all. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 59 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racism is a hegemonic practice that is articulated with, not necessary to, capitalist formations; Racism exists as a variable spectrum, not a single invariant form; Framing discrimination as individual hate obscures its structural and policy-based causes — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 34 (+31 more)

Related

• Racialization operates through cultural traits and social interactions, not only physical cues. (similarity 0.87)
• Cultural racism substitutes cultural traits for biological ones in racializing groups. (similarity 0.87)
• Cultural racism substitutes cultural difference for biological difference as a racial logic (similarity 0.85)
• Cultural racism targets Muslims’ beliefs and traditions as if they were inherited essence. (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural traits like language, clothing, and religious practice can racialize a group. (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural and religious practices can racialize a body just as skin tone does (similarity 0.83)
• Religious cultural practices get read as evidence of Muslim men’s misogyny rather than doctrine. (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural practices become racialized when they are essentialized as innate to Muslims (similarity 0.83)
• Muslims move down the racial hierarchy rather than becoming a new race (similarity 0.82)
• Racism creates races through practice, and the practice hides itself as its own evidence (similarity 0.82)
• Cultural and religious practices become racialized markers treated as inherent traits. (similarity 0.81)
• Slavery, lynching, and segregation each institutionalized a distinct form of racism (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Muslim racism collapses diverse names, skin tones, dress, and nations into one imagined enemy. (similarity 0.81)
• Islam has functionally become a race in law within the last twenty years (similarity 0.80)
• Hate must be cultivated and performed, not merely felt (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Framing discrimination as individual hate obscures its structural and policy-based causes #expands (0.75) — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 34
• Cultural practices become racialized when they are essentialized as innate to Muslims #exemplifies (0.75) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 274
• Slavery, lynching, and segregation each institutionalized a distinct form of racism #exemplifies (0.70) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 59
• Bigotry functions in US history as governance to control diversity and build unity #expands (0.65) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 300
• A society is either racist or not; gradations are evasions. #contradicts (0.65)
• Racism exists as a variable spectrum, not a single invariant form #qualifies (0.60)
• Racism has no universal structure but only historically specific forms #qualifies (0.60)
• Racism is rooted in concrete material conditions, not ruling-class conspiracy or error #expands (0.60)
• Racialization operates through cultural traits and social interactions, not only physical cues. #expands (0.60)
• Cultural and religious practices can racialize a body just as skin tone does #expands (0.60) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 89