Surveillance-driven racialization produces measurable physical and psychological stress in Muslim Americans

Evidence

A number of studies on discrimination and mental health found that discrimination experienced by Arab Americans who are Muslim since 9/11 is correlated with an increase in psychological stress (Moradi and Hasan 2004; El-Sayed and Galea 2009). Surveillance that is triggered by racialized understandings of bodies creates a hostile environment, which can lead to an increase in hypertension, stress, and depression. There is a psychological cost that young people endure because of their racialization. The term racial battle fatigue, psychological stress responses that people endure from exposure to constant racial microaggressions, could accurately reflect what Muslim Americans go through because of their racialization (Smith, Allen, and Danley 2007). These responses include coping mechanisms, physical avoidance, exhaustion, and psychological withdrawal. Symptoms associated with racial battle fatigue can include stomachaches, migraines, and other physical responses to the stress of encountering racism in one’s daily life. Racialization through surveillance creates an environment where Muslim American women are constantly under the watchful eye of their fellow citizens and must respond accordingly. Limiting their behavior or actions in public spaces, performing American values through smiling, laughing or altering the clothes they wear or taking time to educate the public about Islam creates stress and takes a toll on the lives of ordinary Muslim Americans. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 419

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines ‘racial battle fatigue’ as a usable concept for the surveillance-racialization framework.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s map: surveillance racialization lands on the body as measurable stress — the ‘empirical anchor’ they are hunting for. Connects to Beydoun’s framework of Muslims as permanent suspects. — connects to: Ongoing minority status itself generates chronic psychological stress for reservation Indians. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 475; Online racial abuse triggers measurable physiological stress responses — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 15
• SEED: Angle: ‘racial battle fatigue’ as a biological indicator of racialized surveillance — the body as evidence in a country with little legal recognition of surveillance harm.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does racial battle fatigue scale with the visibility of markers (hijab) vs. state-list targeting — i.e. is the toll gendered in its physical manifestations?