The hijab, not skin color, triggers citizen surveillance of Muslim American women.

Evidence

The encounters the Muslim Americans interviewed had with their fellow citizens show how ethnicity and race become less prominent in their interactions when religious signifiers are present. Muslim American women who did not wear the hijab were not subjected to the same verbal harassment or the same watchful eye as those who did, regardless of skin tone. The hijab is clearly equated with foreignness, and as a result, Muslim women’s bodies are under the gaze of their fellow citizens. They are racialized through this surveillance as forever foreign and never American. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s core question about how a faith gets racialized — the mechanism here is that religious dress overrides race as the visible marker of foreignness.
• DEEPTHINKING: The core theoretical payload for this book’s purpose: surveillance racializes through visible religious signifiers, collapsing religion into race. This is the pivotal claim the reader needs.