Racism scholarship’s biologistic paradigms long excluded anti-Muslim discrimination as unclassifiable

Evidence

It was not very long ago that Anglophone scholars of racism understood racism in terms of biology, and specifically in terms of the black–white binary. At the same time, other scholars, especially in continental Europe, understood racism in terms of antisemitism, especially in the recent biologized forms that Europe manifested in the 20th century. When it began to be clear that these two paradigms were failing to capture some contemporary experiences, such as anti-Asian cultural racism in Britain or anti-Arab cultural racism in France, some scholars began to move away from these paradigms. Even so, the pull of these biologistic models was so strong that even today many scholars of racism understand cultural racism in quasi-naturalistic terms, seeing culture as a ‘code’ for the biological racisms that they find more intelligible. … Western European Muslims have found these scholarly hegemonies an especially galling obstacle to getting academia and fellow citizens to understand the exclusionary discourses and misrecognitions that Muslims are subject to. Following the assertive Muslim agency triggered off by the Satanic Verses affair and other Muslim controversies, as Muslims responded to such hostilities and articulated their misrecognition, they were constantly told, especially in Britain, that there is no such thing as anti-Muslim racism because Muslims are a religious group and not a race. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 588

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the intellectual history of why anti-Muslim racism was denied legitimacy: the black-white and antisemitism paradigms had no slot for a religious group.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s contested-definitions context: this is the historical backdrop behind Bleich’s push for a neutral social-scientific concept versus the race-based framing. — connects to: Anti-Muslim discrimination should be fought through existing anti-racism frameworks — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 58; Racism scholarship long confined itself to biological black-white and antisemitic models — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 583; Anti-Blackness and Islamophobia assign deviance through parallel racializing logics — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1119 (+8 more)

Related

• Racism scholarship long confined itself to biological black-white and antisemitic models (similarity 0.92)
• Anti-Muslim discrimination should be fought through existing anti-racism frameworks (similarity 0.88)
• Muslims were told anti-Muslim racism cannot exist because Muslims are not a race (similarity 0.88)
• Hostility to British Muslims predates modern biological racism and parallels antisemitism (similarity 0.86)
• Anti-racist movements often fail to see anti-Muslim bigotry as racism (similarity 0.85)
• Debates on antisemitism and Islamophobia have developed largely apart from race scholarship. (similarity 0.85)
• Anti-Muslim signification is culturally constructed rather than biologically grounded. (similarity 0.85)
• Anti-Muslim and antisemitic persecution became racism when conversion was deemed biologically impossible. (similarity 0.85)
• Race analysis better captures anti-Muslim discrimination than religious-discrimination framing (similarity 0.85)
• Anti-Muslim racism is analytically parallel to European antisemitism against Jews as Jews. (similarity 0.85)
• Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish stereotyping operates through racialization rather than mere religious prejudice. (similarity 0.85)
• Islamophobia operates as cultural racism rooted in religion, culture, and ethnicity rather than biology. (similarity 0.84)
• Racism rests on pseudo-scientific race accounts that justify inequality. (similarity 0.84)
• Miles and Brown argue anti-Muslim phenomena fit existing racism and xenophobia theories (similarity 0.84)
• Islamophobia is rarely analyzed through the lens of race and racism. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Racism scholarship long confined itself to biological black-white and antisemitic models #corroborates (0.92) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 583
• Racism has empirical grounding that Islamophobia still lacks #corroborates (0.80) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 789
• Anti-Blackness and Islamophobia assign deviance through parallel racializing logics #expands (0.75) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1119
• Structural Islamophobia and structural racism share embedded institutional stereotypes #complicates (0.72) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 130
• Racism exists as a variable spectrum, not a single invariant form #expands (0.72)
• Anti-Muslim discrimination is justified by invidious reference to Muslim cultural practices #complicates (0.70) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 108