The hijab triggers routine airport surveillance more reliably than skin tone alone.

Evidence

Arab and South Asian Muslim women who did not wear the hijab were able to avoid the hypersurveillance in security lines that Muslim women who wear the hijab could not. While some women, like Sommer, were able to pass as white, even women with darker skin tones were not routinely stopped and searched at the airport like Muslim women who wear the hijab were. This is not to say that skin tone does not racialize individuals as suspect—skin tone may trigger surveillance in times of hyper insecurity, like when there is a terrorist attack—but the hijab triggers stops and searches routinely. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 228

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for how a religious signifier gets racialized — the core mechanism distinguishing religion from race in Selod’s account, connecting to Beydoun’s Muslim Ban work.
• ADDENDUM: Offers a fresh mechanism (a movable religious signifier doing the racializing work that skin tone normally does) beyond the fixed bodily markers in the sacrifice and immodesty articles.