The move from biological to cultural racism lets prejudice be renamed cultural critique

Evidence

In the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which were heavily influenced by a concessionary multiculturalism, culture and ethnicity replaced race and racism as the tools for analyzing di√erence and identity.∞∂ As the ”post-race” argument has gained dominance, explanations for the displacement of the concept of race have themselves been essentialized according to culturalist reasoning. By this, I mean that the race concept often is operationalized as a debunked concept premised on a faulty biological notion of scientific racism; it then follows that Islamophobia cannot be racism, because religion is a social practice and is not biologically preordained (although this, of course, assumes a secular logic of religious belief and practice). Islam as religion, then, is translated as a cultural practice, and Islamophobia results from a belief in Islam’s cultural or religious inferiority. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 113

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article’s theme of moral panic where class/identity/political signaling gets rebranded; both show discourse about a group being shifted onto ‘culture’ to escape the racism label. — connects to: Cultural racism locks groups into immutable genealogies as biological racism did — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 554
• DEEPTHINKING: The core insight — that debunking biological race legitimized a culturalist essentialism that reproduces racism’s work without its name — is dense and paradigm-shifting in its implications for understanding contemporary Islamophobia.