More than Nothing: The Persistence of Islamophobia in ‘Post-Racial’ Racism

Junaid Rana is associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The summer of 2010 unfolded with all sorts of right-wing conspiracies in the United States, while still seeming more like a foreboding of things to come. With the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy nearing, the place of Islam in the American public sphere took another turn. A concerted effort by conservative activists focused on the now ubiquitous terms “9/11” and “Ground Zero” as a rallying cry ultimately to purge Muslims, and for that matter, immigrants, from the United States. The main dispute started with the proposed construction of a mosque near Ground Zero.

The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’

The contentious debate over the Park51 community centre and mosque sparked a strange furore and public conversation across the United States. Should people of the Islamic faith be allowed to build a place of worship so close to the site of a national tragedy? Is Ground Zero hallowed ground? Whom is this place sacred for, and is the United States really a country of multi-faith coexistence?

 

Originally named the “Cordoba House”, evoking the flourishing and coexistence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in Spain from the eighth to eleventh centuries, the project was redubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque” by conservatives to mobilise opposition through the use of religion as a battleground over freedom and democracy. The argument for right-wing activists is uncomplicated: since the 9/11 attackers were Muslims, the presence of an Islamic community centre desecrates the memory of those who perished at Ground Zero. Further, disavowing the explicit purpose of the Park51 centre to be a site of progressive Islam to promote the creative arts and provide social services including language classes, conservative activists portrayed the project as a madrassa where terrorists would be trained and plots to undermine America would be hatched.

 

While the national conversation that emerged from this controversy centred on religious rights, the limits of tolerance, and the defence of a certain notion of freedom, Muslim Americans continued to feel the repercussions of xenophobia, religious exclusion, and everyday forms of violence that rapidly increased after 9/11 and intensified through the summer and autumn of 2010. Such quotidian consequences are far from fleeting, or the result of a temporary condition involving special circumstances. Rather, this backlash has become ordinary as part of the summation of histories of violence and persecution sanctioned by several centuries of the US racial state. This historical continuum is centrally about the linkage of Islamophobia with the racialisation of Islam and Muslims, and the general atmosphere of anti-Muslim racism in the post-9/11 era. In their rearticulation of the proposed project, the strategy of the anti-Park51 activists is based on a political rhetoric that is the hallmark of cultural racism. Mobilising a stereotype of Muslims as threatening by equating them solely with a culture of violence and a notion of terrorism as a socialisation process, the assumptions and the logic of Islamophobia use the argument of culture as learned to imagine an essential difference that is hard-wired through innate qualities. This sort of racism shifts the terms of a solely naturalised biological difference to a cultural notion of difference that is nonetheless crafted through a racial logic and that emerged in the United States as a neoconservative strategy in the 1970s.

 

In addition to this strategy of homogenisation that combines Islam and terrorism, the deployment of the concept of sacred ground introduced a religious component to the debate. Yet, it was clear that this was more the notion of conflict placed within the context of religious war and the conservative notion of a clash of civilisations. As the political argument ensued, demands continued for the primacy of Ground Zero as sacred ground that excluded Islam—one need only recall the metal girder in the shape of the Christian cross left by workers in the World Trade Center debris—thus positing that American religious values are exclusively Judeo-Christian. Despite the multi-faith background of those who perished in the tragedy of 9/11, this debate pivoted on emotions that have come to the fore in the last decade, which has been widely dubbed the “Age of Terror”. By arguing that the site of Ground Zero is hallowed ground that must exclude the proximity of Islam and Muslims, the anti-Park51 activists are exploiting a sense of the necessary exclusion of Islam from public life in the United States. While high-profile Republican politicians have joined the opposition to the Park51 project, numerous politicians, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, have argued in favour of the Islamic centre. Despite the support, the sentiment of anti-Muslim exclusion is based on an overarching argument of religious difference—the notion that “they (Muslims) do not value what we (Americans) value”—and naturalises this difference. Values and moral standards in this argument of a religious clash are imagined as hard-wired through social processes in which “they are simply not like us”. What appears as a religious war quickly becomes a race war.

 

Drawing on affective responses that include a sense of betrayal, grief, mourning, honour, and the inviolability of the memory of certain lives, the underlying question that emerges from this debate involves calculating the worth of a wide array of lost lives—not only in the context of Ground Zero but those dead because of the “Global War on Terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and numerous other places. This question of value can be posed in terms of the twenty-first century as the Age of Terror in which the global social order has rendered certain lives worth more than others, or as Judith Butler has eloquently argued, “grievable” as opposed to those which are not.¹ More value is given to those lives in which social and political meaning is attached to “a life worth living”, versus those deemed irretrievable. The inability to grieve the loss of life and the suffering of others renders conflict and war an uncontested site of political struggle. In Butler’s psychoanalytic reading, it is through the process of mourning the loss of life that one comes to terms with the emotions encapsulated in grief and moves towards possible recuperation or redemption. Without this process of grief and mourning, those who are not grievable are left without sympathy. It is through frames of representation that one is open to understanding these processes, and as Butler maintains, in the contemporary moment the potential of liberal humanism is constructed in the context of the Global War on Terror.

 

Meanwhile, along with this discussion of the Ground Zero mosque came an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes and denunciation of plans to build mosques in any part of the United States. Religious typecasting through homogenisation and the essentialising of religious difference converted the historical meaning attached to 9/11 into a violent message sent loud and clear: religious freedom is not applicable to all. Eligibility for freedom, so often controlled in the United States by the access to rights, is predicated on a normative idea of an American citizen–subject, defined in relation to white supremacy and privilege. With mosques and Muslims under attack, an association with Islam is now a standard source of political vilification. For example, during the US mid-term election season of autumn 2010 and the rise of the Tea Party under the far-right wing of the Republican Party, racist discourse was attached to oppositional political ideology. Political pundits disagreed as to the validity of claims of racism, given that the point of attack seemed to be President Barack Obama, who it was claimed was a socialist at best and a Muslim at worst. And although many have come to the defence of the Muslim faith in response to such accusations, the meaning of this logic that binds Islam to socialism by Obama’s right-wing opponents is disturbing. One, because of the historic meaning attached to both Islam and socialism as foreign to the American way of life that at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the denial of naturalisation rights to those deemed Muslim (or even Muslim-like in the case of Arab Christians) and to the deportation of Russian dissidents assumed to be communists.² As regards the right to practise a religious faith, Islamophobic views are more vociferous than calls for mutual respect and tolerance. Further, the use of Islam as a term of disparagement raises the role of religion in relation to racism in the United States. And, indeed, the connection of Islamophobia to racism must be examined, particularly at this moment of supposed post-racialism when discourses of race have nevertheless become ever more present. The monotone nature of the debate necessitates further inquiry into the status of Islamophobia and the degree to which it can be overcome in the post-9/11 era.

Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Racism

To begin with, is Islamophobia a form of racism? That is an unsettled question. Academics and activists of many persuasions find themselves in all sorts of twisted positions trying to explain a counterintuitive claim. Islam is a religion, so how can it be racialised when there is so much heterogeneity present in Muslim populations? As a quick response, variety in addition to social hierarchy and cultural practices may be some of the important starting points in the racialising of Muslims. Elsewhere, I have argued that Islamophobia is a central, though not exclusive, aspect of the modern concept of race and the development of anti-Muslim racism.³ My argument is based on the long history of the race concept and the linkage to concepts of religious difference that combine ideas of culture with biological, naturalised difference. In many ways, my previous arguments attempted to describe the conditions of anti-Muslim racism and their wide effects in the post-9/11 period. As a historical idea, race is a flexible concept that has changed over time and has attached itself in multiple ways to its objects of oppression. Others have examined these issues specifically, considering anti-Arab racism,⁴ legal cases and hate crimes,⁵ and representational practices.⁶ As a model of systematic oppression, religion has certainly played an important role in the edifice of racist thought, most often through forms of white Christian supremacy that reject, for example, the rights and eligibility of Jews and Muslims as humans. Islamophobia is most certainly not always racist. But when does it become so, and is it possible to combat such beliefs and practices through anti-racism?

 

As historian Mae Ngai has argued, racism is often attached to particular notions of nationality, culture, gender, and labour.⁷ In the making of modern America, the twentieth century was remarkable for the use of legal policies to create racialised notions of anti-immigrant attitudes. A similar process is evident in the conjoining with racism of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim beliefs. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, social scientists have recorded this phenomenon from a wide range of vantage points without clearly identifying or delineating a theory of race and racism at work in the racialising of Muslims. Following a number of scholars, I have argued that race is a malleable and flexible concept used to control and dominate Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims—as well as other brown-skinned groups that fall into a broad category labelled “Muslims”.⁸ Although I have written about the body as a material and cultural register of these forms of anti-Muslim racism following recent theorisations of the global racial system, the argument that I have made needs to be theorised further in terms of the complex globality of racism. In this essay, I argue that the increasing waves of Islamophobia in a global context have taken on the features of racist hatred and fear. In the next section I examine this phenomenon through recent ethnographies of post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism. In the remaining section, I conclude by discussing the interactive performance exhibit by Wafaa Bilal entitled “Domestic Tension” that took place in 2007. By turning to aesthetic practices I explore the insights the creative arts provide as an object of ethnographic analysis. Further, this specific project presents an example of the global status of anti-Muslim racism, Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the affective registers of these potentials as they are mediated by interactive technologies.

Muslims after 9/11

Numerous ethnographies have captured the complex social experiences of Muslims in the post-9/11 era. As might be expected, many of these ethnographic examples and other social-science research do not come to clear conclusions about the racial nature of anti-Muslim sentiments. Although many of the studies consistently demonstrate the existence of forms of discrimination, xenophobia, prejudice, and violence, and although racism against Arab, South Asian, and Muslim Americans is widely acknowledged, how race is actually deployed is often unclear. Much of this has to do with the paucity of theorisations of race and racism that clearly outline the relationship of race to religion and culture, and more specifically to Islam and Muslims.

 

Many of these ethnographies have strengthened understandings of both the repressive conditions in the post-9/11 era and its possibilities of dissent. For example, Sunaina Maira’s recent monograph is the most explicit account of Muslim-American youths and their encounters with notions of citizenship and belonging in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in a medium-sized town in New England.⁹ Importantly, Maira demonstrates the imbrications of empire and the notion of imperialism in the everyday lives of these youths as they navigate systems of education, labour, leisure, home-life, and popular culture. She argues that these experiences inform an active kind of critical dissent and analysis of everyday life that is mobilised through narratives of civil rights and US foreign policy. Maira chronicles how racism is enacted against Muslim-American youths via a mixture of Orientalist depictions, imperial engagements, and state policing that translates into the violent backlash of hate crimes. Her work does much to integrate notions of active analysis that dissects the problem of anti-Muslim racism and its everyday effects. Similarly, Moustafa Bayoumi’s book on what he calls portraits of young Arab Americans mostly in the New York area provides powerful oral histories of the lives and travails of these youths after 9/11.¹⁰

 

A number of studies have focused on urban experiences of social exclusion in the post-9/11 era through intersectional and comparative analysis. In her study of Arab and Muslim Americans in the Chicago area, Louise Cainkar describes suspicion, physical vulnerability, and exclusion after 9/11 that have historical antecedents in social and political contexts that developed well before 2001. In what she calls “cultural sniping”, Cainkar argues that Arab Muslims are more vulnerable to hostility, verbal and physical, in certain social contexts than non-Arabs and non-Muslims. In particular, women in the hijab or veil are more susceptible to violent attacks because Islamic garb is interpreted by non-Muslims as a rejection of American culture. Cainkar’s extensive surveys and ethnographic fieldwork demonstrate that violent attacks and harassment against Muslims changed the landscape of reactions to 9/11 and the misunderstandings in popular and state interpretations of Islam, while also leaving uncertain the future of the incorporation of Arabs and Muslims into American life. Although Cainkar prefers to make her argument at the level of sociological theories of exclusion and violence instead of the concept of race and racism, her study shows the complex nature of these dynamics and the need for a more flexible theory of racism.¹¹

 

Similarly, Jamillah Karim’s ethnography of Muslim-American women takes a comparative approach that examines African-American and South Asian–American Muslim women in Chicago and Atlanta to describe how race, religion, and gender are entangled in notions of racial and gender justice.¹² Following the work of Carolyn Rouse in her study of African-American Muslim women in Los Angeles,¹³ Karim looks to everyday Islamic practices as a source of liberatory potential. Indeed, Islam for these women becomes a means of combating racism, sexism, and other oppressions through the creative and practical aspects of conduct, belief, and ethical frameworks.

 

Nadine Naber’s work on Arab Americans in the San Francisco area corroborates much of this scholarship as regards racialisation and activist responses. Her ethnographic work shows how an intersectional analysis of race, gender, class, religion, nationality, and sexuality is constructed and challenged in the post-9/11 era. Whether in private or public social spaces or in the context of social-justice organising, Muslims in San Francisco are racialised in ways that are generally related to the history of racialisation in the United States and as a particular variant of the racialising of Arabs and Muslims.¹⁴

 

In my own work, I have examined how certain Muslims are incorporated into the global racial system through the logics of labour migration, the global economy, popular culture, and state policing. In particular, I argue that working-class Pakistani migrants bare the brunt of a certain type of post-9/11 policing that racialises populations deemed threatening through ideas of terrorism, illegality, and criminality which depend on class and gender stereotypes.¹⁵ It is in this sense that South Asian Muslims are tied to Arab Americans and other Muslim Americans as being potentially dangerous and requiring state systems of surveillance, policing, and control.

 

These ethnographic works on the post-9/11 period, although they keenly articulate the specific nuances of social changes in urban and global settings, also point to the historical genealogies of the challenges facing Muslim Americans. Additionally, their reliance on analyses of race, gender, and class in particular to understand how religion and nation are articulated points to the need to develop more thorough theories of race and racism as they pertain to anti-Muslim sentiment. To further this theoretical debate I now turn to an example that considers processes of racialisation through aesthetic practices, performance, somatic representation, and affective renderings of the post-9/11 world. In doing so, I wish to highlight how bodies are racialised and productive of emotions and feelings that can be fruitfully explored with theories of affect.

The Aesthetics of Grievability

In my paintball prison, I seem to be filling quite a range of roles for different people. Symbol of the anti-war movement; lightning rod for hatred and racism; subject of intellectual discussion; diversion for the bored; company for the lonely. And catalyst for flirting, heartfelt confessions and existential philosophical discussions. People debate the meaning of life, tearfully bare their souls or recount the minutiae of their daily lives while I am getting shot at.¹⁶

 

In May 2007, Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal began a month-long live interactive art project in Chicago entitled “Domestic Tension”. The far more provocative title “Shoot an Iraqi” was rejected by the Chicago gallery hosting the performance piece, but that succinct name was later used for the book Bilal wrote with journalist Kari Lydersen to document the complex events that led to the concepts at the core of the project. As an archive of emotions, feelings, and affective responses, the monograph mixes documentary, memoir, and political critique to chart the driving forces of the exhibit alongside the day-to-day happenings. Following a straightforward premiss, Bilal lived in the exhibit space for a month in an improvised room with a bed, desk, computer, exercise bike, and a paintball gun rigged to a webcam. With a computer and an Internet connection, anyone in the world could find Bilal’s website and remotely watch him in his art-gallery room; more importantly, the viewer had the option of aiming and shooting the paintball gun. The results of the exhibit were striking, touching as they did upon the themes of war, violence, death, racism, foreign policy, and twenty-first-century combat technologies. The project rawly depicted the ease with which users engaged in online warfare that, in addition to the website camera, included Bilal’s daily visual blog recordings of his emotional state uploaded onto YouTube.com, and a textual archive in the form of an interactive chat room in which users posted comments. The exhibit proceeded as a cathartic event for Bilal and a public confrontation addressed to the ethical systems that place value on life, death, violence, and war.

 

The immediate point was to challenge the naked aggression of those who hid behind computer screens in their comfort zones as they anonymously engaged in war-like behaviour. Simultaneously, the project reproduced a simulation of war-like conditions depicting the everyday affects of pain, suffering, and prolonged stress. Shaped by the challenges faced after the abrupt deaths of his father and brother after 2004 and in the context of the war in Iraq, Bilal used the platform of art to weave personal history, feeling and emotion, technology, and war into an interactive performance of communal mourning.

 

In the simple sense, as a performance it was a chance to have a controlled interaction with the artist that would elicit certain bodily and emotional responses. The interaction with the work of art through the technological medium of the Internet framed the relationship in which the choices were limited to silent observation or direct participation. Firing the paintball gun, writing in the chat room, or actively choosing to prevent others from firing the gun were some of the choices possible for the audience. In the last of these options, the viewer potentially became an artist through the creativity required to stifle the firing of the paintball gun.

 

For Bilal, this showdown with the anonymity of the webcam-controlled paintball gun acted as a conduit into his own experience of living in a combat zone. As he later recounted in the book in great detail, and as was evident in his daily video blog, emotions were generated throughout the process of the exhibit, emerging from his own narrative as an exile, refugee, and bereaved migrant. The death of his father and brother, the latter the victim of a US unmanned drone attack, and his ambivalent migration to the United States, were all sources of loss that in this project actualised a process of mourning.

 

As the month proceeded, conditions quite rapidly began to take an emotional toll of Bilal in what he describes as the evocation of post-traumatic stress disorder: the sounds of paintballs whizzing by uninterrupted, and the constant clicking noise of the gun firing them; the smell of the fish-oil substance from the paintballs splattered all over the walls, making everything a garish yellow colour; the bodily response to continuous stress conditions that included insomnia, nightmares, paranoia, pain and additional inexplicable health problems; the restriction of human contact to a video blog, chat room, and visitors to the exhibit and gallery. Bilal’s body became the affective archive to document the aesthetic experiment between artist and viewer.

 

In becoming this repository, this interactive project, Bilal encapsulated many of the sentiments and values that demarcated the limits of sympathy and the possibility of recuperation and resolution. Borrowing from Judith Butler (see above), I refer to this as an aesthetics of grievability and mourning. Butler argues that the hope for such a process comes in the form of a politically left liberalism that can begin the work of sympathetic inclusion and coexistence through grief and mourning. In contrast to this position, I argue that Bilal’s “Domestic Tension” performance richly demonstrates the impasse present in the post-9/11 era in which Islam and Muslims are deemed forever unrecuperable. A racial system operates that represents Islam and Muslims as a threat to what Butler would refer to as an exclusionary multicultural liberalism in which freedom and democracy come at the cost of eliminating dangerous others. It is thus that grief and mourning become sites from which racist hatred and violence emanate as an affective response.

 

The notion of a religious war as a race war pits Islam and Muslims against American values of freedom, democracy, and even multiculturalism, in which individual rights come at the cost of collective civil rights. In other words, the sacrifice of one group as beyond saving allows for the maintenance of a social order. Following Foucault’s analysis of the biopolitical, Butler argues for a left progressivism that chooses to maintain life, yet in these circumstances of a race war it is death that is assigned to someone like Bilal—an Iraqi, a Muslim, an immigrant, a foreigner, and so on. As his project demonstrates, the use of technology expedites the transference of such social anxieties, but it also transforms certain experiences of the social world in which racism becomes a raw force of power, redemption, and violent revenge.

 

Bilal’s aesthetics of grievability provides an acute sense of these complex affective registers in the post-9/11 world by tapping into a mutual space in which hate, grief, and fear are wielded as potentials towards mourning and recuperation for some, and racial violence, vengeance, and a position of irreconcilability for others. Although this follows Butler’s argument of grievability, this source of mourning that marks some as more vulnerable and precarious is also a process of culpability that yields racial hatred. Thus, racism in the post-9/11, “post-racial” era is a source of powerful reiterations of the history of racial violence in the United States and globally. As Bilal’s project testifies, the imperial project of racism is global and multi-sited. As a project of ethnographic simulation and performativity, “Domestic Tension” reveals how grievability is transformative but also productive of crude potentials and forms of racist persistence. In other words, why shoot the Iraqi, or even further, why remark on the shooting? As Bilal documents throughout his book, racism is tied to a “cold flippancy” that appears calculated, rational, and even necessary to some. Such a logical thought-process comes at the behest of the power of fear and retribution in which racist practice takes the place of sympathy and non-violent engagement.

 

One lesson to be derived from Bilal’s “Domestic Tension” leads towards an understanding of racism and the power of affect. As a paradigm of value, grievability provides insight into the connection of Islamophobia with anti-Muslim racism as not just a practice of violence but the construction of feelings, emotions, beliefs, and values that enable the biopolitical practices of life and death. For scholars of race, the ethnographic archive created in Bilal’s “Domestic Tension” project has the potential to capture this theoretical complexity by examining how racial boundaries, structures, prospects, and persistence are active in affective registers. Bilal’s aesthetics of grievability demonstrates these possibilities and their limitations during the War on Terror and the contemporary moment of technological social interaction.

 

Yet, what might be the direction to combat this global form of racism? Bilal offers hope in the form of creative and aesthetic practices of political organising. Towards the end of his month-long stint, the sound of flying paint-balls was shut down by an ingenious programmer and group of activists who formed a human shield to prevent users from firing the gun. As Bilal writes himself, the ultimate strategy became one of survival and mixed hope. He might get through his protest art project, but scores of others will be killed by military weapons in the theatres of US imperial wars. To change the acceptability of this death toll, if we follow Butler, means to come to terms with the common humanity of imagined adversaries. What Bilal’s project demonstrates is that we will need a lot more ingenuity in the form of action for something to come from such sympathy.

Endnotes

1. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009).

 

2. See David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003).

 

3. Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 2 (2007), pp. 148–61.

 

4. Notable recent studies of anti-Arab racism include Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); and Steven George Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes from and What It Means for Politics Today (London and Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press, 2006).

 

5. On US law and attitudes towards American Muslims, see Muneer I. Ahmad, “A Rage Shared by Law: Post–September 11 Racial Violence as Crimes of Passion”, California Law Review 92, no. 5 (2004), pp. 1259–330; Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); and Kathleen M. Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: American Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).

 

6. See, for example, Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

 

7. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).

 

8. See Rana, “Story of Islamophobia”, and Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

 

9. Sunaina Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

 

10. Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?

 

11. Louise Cainkar, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/11 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009).

 

12. Jamillah Ashira Karim, American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

 

13. Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

 

14. Nadine Naber, “The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11”, Cultural Dynamics 18, no. 3 (2006), pp. 269–92, and “Introduction: Arab Americans and US Racial Formations”, in Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11, ed. Jamal and Naber.

 

15. Rana, Terrifying Muslims.

 

16. Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance under the Gun (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008), pp. 110–11.