Mareike Riedel — Islamophobia, Racial Discrimination Law, and the Question of Self-Identification

19 published claims from this book.

• Anti-discrimination law requires groups to self-identify as racialized before they gain protection
• Australian anti-discrimination law treats race as a social construct shaped partly by others’ perceptions.
• Australian disability law already punishes discrimination based on imputed attributes
• Australian federal law does not protect religion against discrimination
• Australian statutes list allied race concepts without defining their relationship to ‘race’.
• Both self-identification and actuality requirements shift legal focus from discriminators’ attitudes to victims’ identity
• Courts deny Muslims anti-racism protection when they lack shared self-identification
• Courts deny Muslims race discrimination protection absent proof of self-unification.
• Courts deny Muslims racial discrimination protection because ‘race’ is ill-defined in law.
• Full racialization requires external ascription and internal adoption to eventually coincide
• Muslims get racialized via projected religious ancestry regardless of self-understanding
• NSW law denied Muslims race protection absent linkage to a specific ethnic origin
• Outsider racialization failed to overcome an internal lack of self-identification as a group.
• Race as a legal category is left undefined in statutes.
• Racial discrimination can precede and constitute a group’s own racialized self-understanding
• Racial identity has multiple dimensions that statutes fail to specify
• Secularized, Protestantized Muslims will assimilate first; dissident observant ones never will
• The legal self-identification requirement for ethnic groups constitutes self-racialization
• The self-identification requirement entered law via ‘ethnic’, not via race itself