Shared experience of war’s harm can dissolve racialized threat perception

Evidence

So I stopped. Instead, I turned the discussion to Michigan Wolverines and Detroit Lions football, our favorite MMA fighters, and the pandemic. When it was time to leave, the discomfort I had had was gone, and any preconceived notions of who John was—and wasn’t—were retrenched. A mix of admiration and pity colored my new perspective of John, coupled with the feeling that a person most Muslims would count as their foe would ultimately become my friend. He was a white man from a part of the city I associated with racism because of past personal experiences. However, the wages of war had washed away the menace of his whiteness, and the despair that descended on him when he returned from war—with little to return to—drove me toward places I otherwise avoided. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 190

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that war ‘washed away the menace of his whiteness’ reverses the usual direction of fear—Muslim author left feeling admiration for white veteran—and reframes Islamophobia’s victims and enforcers as mutually wounded.