Racializing Religion (@theTable: Intersecting Islamophobia)
By Tanisha Ramachandran.
In November 2015, after the terrorist attacks on Paris, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed the registering of American Muslims in a database, special badges identifying Muslims, and the surveillance of Mosques where, he intimated “some bad things are happening” (Hensch 2016).
Given the increase in attacks on Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim since 9/11, Trump was simply adding to the pre-existing Islamophobic rhetoric that permeates throughout North American society, culture, and politics, which identifies Muslims as terrorists who threaten the Western values of liberty and freedom. Trump’s call for heightened surveillance of Muslims and Islamic institutions, coupled with individual attacks on Hindus and, more frequently, Sikhs, in cases of “mistaken identity,” illustrates how Islam, is perceived as a racialized identity.
Prior to discussing how scholars of religion or practitioners can engage in productive dialogue, we must discuss how the conflation of race and religion, like gender, affects which traditions are represented in interfaith or interreligious dialogue, who speaks for the tradition, how the conversation is framed, and who benefits from the discussion. This involves acknowledging how race and racism, albeit unexpressed, influence interreligious discussions.
Privilege is the ability to operate and dictate norms under a cloak of invisibility that allows certain individuals and groups to benefit from unearned, unacknowledged advantages that are conferred automatically on the basis of dominant group membership. We must unveil Christian privilege, and its power source “white privilege.” Doing so will illustrate how the discussion of religion is confined within the dialectic of Christian and not Christian, white and not white.
By employing an intersectional feminist lens in religious studies, we are able to expose systems of power including social and religious norms and the institutional structures at play in the othering and subordination of those perceived to be Muslim. The intersectional feminism lens also exposes how historical legacies of colonial and imperial power manifest today in religious studies and feminism, which has replicated these structures, guised under the discourse of women’s liberation—white women saving brown women from brown men.
Taking the intersection of race and religion as a starting point highlights how Islam is not denigrated solely through what Leerom Medovi terms “dogma-line racism,” that which operates through “primary reference to the mind rather than body, ideology rather than corporeality, according to the theologies, creeds, beliefs, faiths, and ideas rather than their colour, face, hair, blood, and origin” (2012, 45). She argues that this ideological and doctrinal bigotry operates in conjunction with “colour line-racism,” which is based on the corporeal aspects of race.
I want to focus on the visible and material attributes of race that targets brown bodies as a threat in the contemporary context of Islamophobia. Kyati Joshi argues that “the racialization of religion is a process whereby a specific religion becomes identified by direct or indirect reference to real or imagined ethnic/racial characteristics” (2006, 216). South Asian phenotypes such as brown skin and black hair serve as markers of race and religion. Race, defined here through phenotype, “becomes a proxy for religion” (2006, 211). When Islamophobia operates through race, scholars of religion must recognize the need to discuss race as a primary target of religious oppression. For racialized targets of religious hatred, framing interreligious dialogue simply in terms of ideology, belief, or theology is woefully inadequate.
Hindus and Sikhs in North America have realized that the “We are not Muslims” retort initially employed after 9/11 did not shield them from hate crimes or discrimination and also gave the impression that violence or other forms of subjugation of Muslims is acceptable practice. Now, instead of spouting doctrinal or ritual difference, these communities, who have a complicated, to put it mildly, relationship in India are uniting in the United States against hate violence and racial and religious bigotry. Given the way that brown bodies are read as possibly Muslim and a probable threat, any attempt at interreligious dialogue should acknowledge how race is a constitutive element of religion.
My intention with this post is to demonstrate the need to understand how the racialization of religion affects and influences conversations between Christian and non-Christian religions in both the academy and socio-political world. Doing so exposes the unequal power structures that sanction ugly political rhetoric and sensationalized media accounts that privilege whiteness and Christianity, and exacerbate racial anxiety and religious bigotry, which I would say are the “bad things.”
Works Cited
Hensch, Mark. “Trump won’t rule out database, special ID for Muslims in US” The Hill. Nov 19, 2015. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/260727-trump-wont-rule-out-database-special-id-for-muslims (accessed on March19, 2016).
Joshi, Khyati Y. “The racialization of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in the United States.” Equity & Excellence in Education 39, no. 3 (2006): 211-226.
Medovoi, Leerom. “Dogma-Line Racism Islamophobia and the Second Axis of Race.” Social Text 30, no. 2 111 (2012): 43-74.
Tanisha Ramachandran is an associate teaching professor of South Asian religions, and core faculty in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. She has published in various journals including Canadian Women’s Studies/ les Cahiers de la Femme, and Material Religion and has given numerous talks on issues pertaining to race, sexuality, religion, and feminism. Her current research examines how material objects and visual markers – hijabs, turbans, and bindies—are deployed or function in the racialization of religions in the US and Canada by examining acts of violence/vandalism perpetuated against Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs and their houses of worship: temples, mosques, and gurdwaras, respectively.
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