The threat of dissimulation requires reading race from bodily appearance.

Evidence

There is also room to understand that race is not simply about skin tone; culture can also race bodies. Garner and Selod argue, “The process of racialization entails ascribing sets of characteristics viewed as inherent to members of a group because of their physical or cultural traits. These are not limited to skin tone or pigmentation, but include a myriad of attributes including cultural traits such as language, clothing, and religious practices” (2015: 4). This targeting of cultural attributes and practices as racialized markers of difference is especially salient in the case of Muslims in America. Furthermore, culture is often gendered. For us to truly uncover how bodies acquire racial meaning, it is important to understand how the process of racialization is gendered and has gendered consequences. For example, religious practices, such as gender segregation in mosques, are treated as evidence of the misogyny of Muslim men rather than understood within the context of religious doctrine. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 89 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Race serves as invisible border line demarcating both who formally belongs or not and what can or cannot be said about it. The border line is inscribed not at the level of personal relation, of social and sexual intercourse or the excitement of avant-garde aesthetic expression, but in the crevices of political divides and formal relations of power, of institutional access and full membership in the polity, of educational standards and citizenship requirements. Nonracialism squeezing out any possibility of antiracism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 909 (#complicates, via linked claim)

This was a reductionist view of race, one that neglected the importance of the body as a signifier of status, and as signifier of group belonging (Blumer 1958) in its own right. The racial body had served from the earliest days of conquest, and still serves today, as an imperfect but effective tool and marker: for both domination and resistance, for the assignment of identity and the recognition of difference, for the maintenance of social control and the drawing of boundaries among groups, and for claims of solidarity made both by the powerful and the powerless. To understand race as a variety of ethnicity, then, was to neglect stigma, exclusion, privilege, and violence, all characteristics inherent in “the mark of race,” the phenomic, “ocular” dimension (Van DeBurg 1992; Joseph 2006), as well as to such related radical and nationalist organizations as the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, and the Partido de la Raza Unida. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 54 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Race when invoked to categorize humans almost invariably operates as threat and disruption — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1842; Cultural traits like language, clothing, and religious practice can racialize a group.; Race functions as an invisible borderline mark of formal belonging and permissible speech. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 909 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural and religious practices can racialize a body just as skin tone does #complicates (0.85) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 89
• Race functions as an invisible borderline mark of formal belonging and permissible speech. #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 909
• Reducing race to ethnicity erases the body as a marker of domination and resistance #complicates (0.80) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 54
• Cultural traits like language, clothing, and religious practice can racialize a group. #complicates (0.78)
• Racist depiction of minorities as ugly and uncool shapes later self-conscious bodily practices #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2833