Treating all Muslims as suspect constitutes cultural racism by homogenization

Evidence

Surveillance of culture is racialized when cultural practices are essentialized as innate to Muslims, subjecting them to intense scrutiny. For example, any abuse that Muslim women experience at the hands of Muslim men is reduced to religious cultural values perpetuated by Islam. The Taliban’s treatment of women in Afghanistan is an example of this culturally fueled racism. Muslim women were constructed as in need of saving from Muslim men, which in turn justified the invasion of Afghanistan (Razack 2008 Abu-Lughod 2013). Another example of this is the misconception that Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab. Private citizens chastise Muslim American women who wear the hijab because for them it represents subservience to patriarchy, rather than being understood as a choice. Wearing the hijab is treated as a cultural aberration to American societal values and individuals who wear it are understood as antimodern and antifeminist. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 274 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Racialization constitutes a group of people in homogenizing and essentialising terms regardless of their own self-understanding. Such a process underpins the contemporary racialization of Muslims. Gotanda (2011, 188) observes that the ‘power of racialization is that the “Muslim terrorist” is imposed upon groups regardless of their subjective wishes’. Racialization, Gotanda notes, transform a person of a certain religion or nationality to a person of a certain ancestry by projecting a common descent. For Muslims, Gotanda suggests, the ‘ancestral link is not through Africa and slavery as for African Americans or through the national homeland as for Asian Americans but through religion – the faith of the ancestral homeland’. (ibid.) Eventually, a racial category emerges (e.g. ‘the Muslim’) that flattens and erases internal diversity and differences based on a projection of a shared descent to which racial meanings are attached. — Mareike Riedel, Islamophobia, Racial Discrimination…, 64 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anti-Muslim racism denies individuality by marking all Muslims as a blameworthy collective; American Islamophobia rests on homogenizing all Muslims into one monolithic culture.; Homogenizing Islam as a monolithic culture anchors all Othering frames (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Recourse to Muslim culture masks Islamophobia while homogenizing all Muslims #corroborates (1.00) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 172
• Racial Muslims are treated as suspect race and permanent foreigners #corroborates (1.00)
• Cultural racism targets Muslims’ beliefs and traditions as if they were inherited essence. #corroborates (1.00)
• Anti-Muslim discrimination is justified by invidious reference to Muslim cultural practices #corroborates (1.00) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 108
• Cultural practices become racialized when they are essentialized as innate to Muslims #corroborates (1.00) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 274
• Muslim Americans are racialized even when visibly white, so racialization must include cultural traits #corroborates (1.00) — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 88
• Muslims are racialized as a social group rather than a religious one #corroborates (1.00)
• Muslims get racialized via projected religious ancestry regardless of self-understanding #corroborates (1.00) — Mareike Riedel, Islamophobia, Racial Discrimination…, 64
• Anti-Muslim racism operates through a distinct racial logic #corroborates (1.00) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 77
• Surveillance justified by religious identity constitutes racialization of Muslims #corroborates (1.00)
• European multiculturalism backlash revitalized anti-Muslim racism as cultural racism #complicates (0.90) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 313
• Anti-Muslim racialization is unstable, contested, and co-produced with anti-racism #complicates (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 193