Religious dress is read by co-workers as a sign of violence and self-oppression

Evidence

The suspicion co-workers directed toward Mariam was constructed in relation to Islam and her marriage to Altaf. Her donning of the hijab articulated a religious transformation and a social construction of learnable religious beliefs that amplified this distrust, because Mariam’s co-workers translated her Islamic garb and practice into signs of violence and danger—code words for terrorism—that they condemned through verbal taunting and social boundary making. Also, the presence of a phenotypic racism based on a passive anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment intensified through Mariam’s association with Islam and her shift in dress, which marked her as both a racialized black immigrant and a Muslim. Finally, to her co-workers, conversion and the donning of Islamic garb called forth gendered notions of self-oppression. They interpreted her transformation as a social threat, eliciting direct engagement and verbal responses whose intent was to limit Mariam’s social position within the workplace to an inferior and subordinate status. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 858

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — modern hijab policing operates through the same moralizing that once targeted Seneca-era silk or sumptuary violations, now fused with terrorism discourse and racialization.
• SHARE: Send to a friend working on post-9/11 racialization or workplace discrimination studies — the conflation of religious practice with ‘self-oppression’ as a boundary-making mechanism is a sharp, specific observation.