The global racial system shaped Muslims’ place in the U.S.

Evidence

The Muslim body as an important site of the racial imaginings of sovereign power has its own particular history of survival in the United States (Roediger 2008). To trace the place of Muslims in the U.S. racial scheme, I take as an epistemological starting point the theory of a global racial system. Following the influential theory of racial formation as a structural model for understanding power relations as driven by racial divides (Omi and Winant 1994), as well as discursive critiques of race and racism (Goldberg 1993, 2002, 2009; Silva 2007), several scholars have elaborated the global racial system as one that was formed in relation to struggles for decolonization and the march of global capitalism (Mullings 2005; Winant 2001, 2004). Thus, the global racial system pervades social systems that span numerous, dynamically related historical, sociological, and geographic scales. The figure of the racialized Muslim is a contemporary example of this system. Incorporated into the U.S. racial formation through the domestic and global War on Terror, it can be traced to multiple histories and conceptual frameworks. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 98

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘global racial system’ framework that organizes the whole chapter.
• XREF: connects to: The 1924 Asiatic Barred Zone placed nearly all Muslims outside admissible whiteness; Pre-1970s Muslim-targeted discrimination belonged to older white-supremacy systems; Arab Americans’ racial exclusion from whiteness tracks the rise of US global empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 248 (+2 more)