Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

The hijab overrides whiteness as a racializing agent on any wearer.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@selod_forever_2018, loc. 412

6 min read

The hijab overrides whiteness as a racializing agent on any wearer.

Evidence

Maham dresses like many other American women who live in an urban area like Chicago—­she wears black or darker colors. She feels her black hijab matches the colors of her clothes. Black is not an unusual aesthetic for individuals who live in large cities. (In fact, in a 1994 New York Times article on fashion, John Tierney theorizes about the affinity New Yorkers have for black clothing.5) But Maham is not seen or treated like any ordinary American citizen who prefers to wear black. The hijab marks her as someone who is morbid. The librarian tried to explain that she was assuming this was a cultural practice of Maham’s, regardless of the fact that she was wearing jeans and a black sweater that day. Cultural practices like wearing the hijab are viewed as unattractive and as an eyesore in American society. Muslim women are repeatedly told that beauty is equated with showing more of one’s body and the practice of wearing the hijab is beneath American standards of beauty. It creates assumptions of what constitutes American beauty and situates Muslim women outside of this norm. Thus through a rejection of American cultural norms such as beauty, the hijab works as a racializing agent on Muslim women’s bodies. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 412 (#expands, via linked claim)

The surveillance of beauty is another way that Muslim American women who wear the hijab are surveilled for their cultural practices. Whiteness has become a marker of beauty and privilege both in the United States as well as in countries that make up the southern hemisphere, such as India (Hunter 2011). This is evidenced by the increased interest and use of skin lightening creams both in the United States and internationally. Hunter (2011) refers to “racial capital” as a material benefit people possess based on their skin tone. In a racialized society, the lighter one’s skin tone, the more access one has to economic resources such as jobs or social networks (Glenn 2009; Hunter 2011). Muslim women who wear the hijab were told wearing it made them ugly; they are also racialized for their beauty. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 292 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Because there are very few countering representations of Muslims as normal, law-­abiding, patriotic American citizens, the dominant narrative of Muslims as terrorists, misogynists, and sexual predators who are antifeminist and anti-­American is definitive. These cultural practices are seen as essentialized, inherent characteristics of Muslim bodies. For many Muslims, these labels are applied when they are identified as Muslim through visual clues like skin tone and clothing or nonvisual clues like having a Muslim name. Religious clothing that has acquired racial meaning racializes bodies in a similar way to skin tone. The hijab signifies foreignness and provokes the assumption that those who wear these symbols are “others” who are not American and not white. The hijab symbolizes a threat to Western feminist ideals and is associated with the forced submission of Muslim women to Muslim men (Razack 2008). But for Muslim men and women who do not wear religious signifiers, their Muslim names also racialize them even if they are phenotypically white. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 91 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The hijab signals foreignness so strongly it overrides ethnicity and skin tone — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 349; Hijab converts white-passing women into racialized outsiders — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 404; The hijab functions like skin tone by marking bodies as racial others (+16 more)

Broader Connections

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