The women I spoke to told me they were repeatedly stopped and had their bodies and personal belongings searched at the airport security line by TSA agents. The encounters of Muslim American men and women when “flying while Muslim” are described in detail in chapter 2.

According to an article published in the Intercept, “Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of ‘known or suspected terrorists’ that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having ‘no recognized terrorist group affiliation’” (Scahill and Devereaux 2014).

XREF: Connects to broader surveillance and counterterrorism databases literature, and to debates about watchlist over-inclusion and false positives.

In 1990, Bernard Lewis, a historian who specializes in Islam, wrote an article titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage” for the Atlantic magazine, in which he argued that Islam inherently lends itself to fundamentalism and violence, something that Lewis does not believe is characteristic of Western Judeo-Christian societies.

According to the documents, prominent Muslim American leaders such as Nihad Awad, the executive director for the Council on American Islamic Relations, were under surveillance by the U.S. government and had their emails monitored by the FBI. Faisal Gill, a Republican party operative, was also one of the names on the list. Even though President George W. Bush had appointed Gill as a policy director for the Department of Homeland Security, he was not immune from surveillance by the government. None of these Muslim American leaders have a criminal record nor has their surveillance resulted in their arrest, but their Muslim identity was enough to raise suspicion and justify their surveillance.

In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, where he examined cultural representations of the East—which included parts of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East—in literature and showed how Western scholarship constructed knowledge about these regions, which he called “Orientalism.” Said argued that this knowledge was used to support an imperialist agenda, pointing to the ways in which foreign policy was influenced by Western scholarship that produced an understanding of the Middle East as savage, untamed, and uncivilized.

DEFINE: Clarifies Said's concept of Orientalism as a knowledge system that shapes power relations.

NSEERS was initiated in September 2002 and retired in April 2011. For almost nine years, noncitizen men from twenty-five specified nations were fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated at ports of entry to the United States. Furthermore, noncitizen men over the age of sixteen who lived in the United States prior to September 10, 2002, were required to register with an immigration office. Of the twenty-five nations specified by the program, twenty-four are Muslim-majority countries, with North Korea being the sole exception.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 national security programs and debates about religious profiling in immigration enforcement.

One of the ways the process of racialization occurs is through the gendered surveillance of their bodies: Muslim American women are watched by their fellow citizens and monitored for transgressing “Western” cultural norms, while Muslim American men are carefully observed for their potential to commit terror.

DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism of racialization as gendered surveillance — surveillance norms differ for women (cultural transgression) vs. men (terror potential).

The hijab, a headscarf many Muslim women wear to demonstrate their religiosity, marks my mother instantly as a Muslim in the public's eye. Shortly after 9/11, a gas station attendant approached my mother while she was filling up her car with gas. My parents put a sticker of the American flag on all of their cars after the terrorist attacks to show that they too were patriotic citizens. The attendant pointed to the sticker and said, "That isn't going to save you." He continued to verbally accost her because she is Muslim. My mother quickly fled the gas station, fearing for her safety. She was not used to strange men verbally accosting her in public spaces. These incidents are just a few of the many encounters my parents have had with the government and their fellow private citizens over the last fifteen years.

XREF: Connects to broader post-9/11 discrimination against Muslim Americans, relevant to discussions of patriotism, belonging, and identity.

In Forever Suspect, I share the stories of Muslim American men and women, detailing what it is like to be Muslim in contemporary America, and situate Muslim American men's and women's experiences within a sociopolitical context of surveillance society. The participants I interviewed were largely professional and strongly middleto upper-middle-class men and women. Their stories highlight how socioeconomic status does not protect one from racialization within the context of war. While much of the scholarship on September 11th highlights the global motivations and consequences of the War on Terror (Razack 2008; Maira 2009; Kibria 2011; Rana 2011; Kumar 2012), Forever Suspect is a part of a growing trend in scholarship on Muslims (Cainkar 2009; Bayoumi 2015; Maira 2016; Love 2017; Maghbouleh 2017) that uncovers where the intersections of race, gender, and religion occur for Muslim Americans in the context of this war, which is also being waged domestically in the United States.

XREF: Connects to broader sociological work on racialization and how class privilege does not erase racial marking, echoing literature on race-class intersections.

Said argued that this knowledge was used to support an imperialist agenda, pointing to the ways in which foreign policy was influenced by Western scholarship that produced an understanding of the Middle East as savage, untamed, and uncivilized. These cultural images painted Arab and Muslim men as barbaric by showing Arab women in subservient and hypersexualized roles, such as in a harem. These Orientalist images have always been gendered, with men depicted as having innate violent tendencies toward their own women. The portrait of men as inherently abusive was used to justify the conquest and colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on the grounds that it would benefit from a civilizing hand (Said 2014).

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and broader postcolonial theory; also relates to critiques of media representations.

In Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” Lisa Stampnitzky chronicles how terrorism experts and the field of studies on the subject helped to produce new definitions around terrorism, aiding in sustaining the War on Terror. She describes how political violence was once described as insurgency but later came to be defined as terrorism through the development of terrorism experts and terrorism studies. The U.S. government had a role in the creation of this field through federal funding and federal agency conferences on terror and terrorism. Early terrorism experts identified the Soviet Union as the main supporter of terrorists due to the Cold War and simmering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. At that time, terrorism was characterized as having a political motive or a clearly defined agenda. But in the 1980s, the Islamic world replaced the Soviet Union as the next major threat to the West. Influenced by the clash of the civilizations theses by scholars like Lewis and Huntington, this “new terrorism” was characterized as irrational and without political motives (Stampnitzky 2013).

XREF: Connects to how expert communities and federal funding shape public policy categories, similar to Edward Said's Orientalism critiques of how Western scholarship frames the East.

The War on Terror, preceded by Orientalism and the clash of the civilizations, has had the effect of racializing Muslim bodies. According to Rana, the current racialization of Muslims as terrorists is the product of newer racial meanings built upon older forms of racism. In a post-9/11 society, the state perpetuates a fear of terrorism within the public sphere in order to justify increased focus and spending on national security. This anxiety of Muslim terrorists produces a state of panic in the American public. Rana states, “‘The Muslim’ emerged as a category of race that was policed through narratives of migration, diaspora, criminality, and terror” (2011: 66). Another characteristic of the Muslim terrorist is that he is also a “global Muslim,” stripped of individuality based on nationality and culture.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and Huntington's clash of civilizations as historical precedents shaping contemporary racialization of Muslim bodies.

For Rana, this Muslim terrorist identity is also clearly gendered in that it is not applied to Muslim women in the same way that it blankets Muslim men’s bodies. However, Muslim women are certainly caught up in this construction of Muslim men as potential terrorists. According to Rana, “Boundary making through gendered frameworks is enacted through notions of racialized masculinity and patriarchy and the concept of racialized Muslims. In both concepts, it is women who are made vulnerable in the active practices of racializing Muslims via assumptions about Islamic patriarchy and narratives of the victimization of the imperiled Muslim woman by the dangerous Muslim man (Razack 2008)” (Rana 2011: 169). In the chapters that follow, I show how Muslim American men have been placed on terrorist watchlists and on lists in U.S. airports because they have been racialized as terrorists. They are surveilled by the government and their fellow citizens in unique ways because of this association with terror. Muslim women who wear the hijab have also come to symbolize the threat of terror but are also constructed as antimodern and anti-Western.

XREF: Connects to critical race theory and feminist work on gendered racialization, and media/counterterrorism studies on profiling.

Scholars have noted a history of categorizing Muslim women as imperiled and in need of saving (Ahmed 1992; Razack 2008; Abu-Lughod 2013). Ahmed argues that in the nineteenth century, Western understandings of Islam centered on the oppression of Muslim women. This narrative of the oppressed Muslim woman became popular during a colonial era where theories of race and culture were created to justify European imperialism. Ahmed refers to the use of feminism to support colonialism as colonial feminism. Victorian men argued that European feminism could save Muslim women from barbaric Muslim men, which justified colonialism of Muslim societies, including India and sub-Saharan Africa (Ahmed 1992). The presence of gender segregation and the hijab became telltale signs of women’s oppression rather than being understood as a religious or cultural practice. The equation of the hijab and the burqa with oppression ignores the agency that many Muslim women employ by choosing to wear the hijab.

XREF: Connects to contemporary 'white savior' critiques and debates about Western intervention framed as female liberation. QUESTION: How do contemporary Western feminist critiques of Islam echo this colonial framing today?

Hirschkind and Mahmood show that the Taliban’s restrictive policies toward women impacted those living in urban areas more than those residing in rural ones, because the lives of women living in rural areas were already in line with these policies. They also note the majority of people in Afghanistan reside in rural areas, and there has always been some flexibility in the dress code. Rural women who work in wheat fields alongside men rarely wear the burqa and are not reprimanded (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002). Furthermore, if one were to review the history of Afghanistan, one could see how U.S. foreign policy aided in the rise of the Taliban. The United States was responsible for arming conservative Islamic groups to fight against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, devoting aid to the most violent and extremist groups because they were viewed as strong fighters against the Soviet army (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002). Yet the impact of imperialism and colonialism on Muslim societies, including the oppression of Muslim women, becomes considerably less visible when cultural practices such as religion are held solely to blame.

XREF: Connects to broader historiography of U.S. proxy warfare in Afghanistan and how imperial policy is obscured by cultural explanations.

The U.S. government, which I often refer to in this book as simply the state, did not need to force surveillance upon the entire society; rather, a population anxious about another terrorist attack welcomed security and surveillance. Public support for surveillance is vital to the maintenance of a surveillance society, and the constant threat of terror provides the ideological justification for surveilling Muslim Americans. American citizens not only support this surveillance but also participate in it with encouragement by the state. At airports, in buses, on subway trains, and at sporting events, announcements continually remind citizens that safety is a top priority.

XREF: Connects to debates about the voluntary surrender of privacy in the post-9/11 and contemporary digital surveillance context.

While the numbers show that terrorism is on the decline, Americans are still fearful that another terrorist attack like the one that took place on September 11th could happen again, even though other types of violence—such as gun violence by non-Muslims—has been on the rise. Between 2000 and 2013, the FBI reported there were 160 mass killings in the United States (U.S. Department of Justice 2013). In 2012, James Eagan Holmes went to a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and shot and killed seventeen people and injured seventy more. Later that year, Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school. These shootings have not resulted in public announcements about safety and security at malls, restaurants, movie theaters, or schools. Furthermore, policy shifts on mental health issues or gun control did not occur in haste in the aftermath of these shootings, and the mass shootings did not result in increased surveillance of individuals who buy and own guns. But Muslims who had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on September 11th found themselves under intense scrutiny by the state and their fellow citizens after the attacks.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of racial/suspicion-based policing and whose violence is framed as terror.

State surveillance of Muslims in the War on Terror involves the unjustified monitoring of the bodies of Americans who are by and large law-abiding citizens. Immediately after 9/11, the FBI detained and interrogated thousands of Muslims living in the United States (Hing 2006; Cainkar 2009). In the years since, state surveillance of Muslim noncitizens and Muslim Americans has for the most part been conducted under a cloud of secrecy. However, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked tens of thousands of classified National Security Administration (NSA) documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill, revealing the far-reaching nature of state surveillance. These documents uncovered a mass surveillance operation initiated by the United States. According to the documents, prominent Muslim American leaders such as Nihad Awad, the executive director for the Council on American Islamic Relations, were under surveillance by the U.S. government and had their emails monitored by the FBI. Faisal Gill, a Republican party operative, was also one of the names on the list. Even though President George W. Bush had appointed Gill as a policy director for the Department of Homeland Security, he was not immune from surveillance by the government. None of these Muslim American leaders have a criminal record nor has their surveillance resulted in their arrest, but their Muslim identity was enough to raise suspicion and justify their surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racial/religious profiling and the surveillance state post-9/11, and to Snowden revelations.

The Snowden leaks uncovered that state-led surveillance was not colorblind but rather based on religious identity. Class privilege, service to the government, and party affiliation could not protect Muslim Americans from state surveillance or being cast as suspicious. These leaks provided concrete proof that Muslim Americans were being unfairly targeted by the state.

XREF: Connects to broader post-9/11 counterterrorism literature and the NSA surveillance debates.

The National Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) is a good example of a state-led surveillance initiative that specifically targeted Muslim men and illustrates how the state conflates gender, religion, and national identities to determine who is a threat to national security. NSEERS was initiated in September 2002 and retired in April 2011. For almost nine years, noncitizen men from twenty-five specified nations were fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated at ports of entry to the United States. Furthermore, noncitizen men over the age of sixteen who lived in the United States prior to September 10, 2002, were required to register with an immigration office. Of the twenty-five nations specified by the program, twenty-four are Muslim-majority countries, with North Korea being the sole exception. These nations each have their own unique history and culture, yet twenty-four of the twenty-five share one thing in common: Islam is the state religion. The fact that there were known terrorists from countries like England (Richard Reid, known as the “shoe bomber”) and the terrorist attacks that occurred in Spain, France, and Germany at the time NSEERS was policy and yet these countries were not on the list reflects the state’s bias toward Muslim-majority nations (Bayoumi 2006).

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of Islamophobia in US counterterrorism policy and racialized national security frameworks.

One space where state-led surveillance of Muslim bodies is overwhelmingly obvious is in U.S. airports. Muslim experiences in airports reveal the interplay of technologies coupled with practices by state agents that rely on religious, ethnic, and gendered cues. TSA uses lists such as the Secondary Security Screening Selection List and the No-Fly List—derived from the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database and the National Counterterrorism Center's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE)—to surveil Muslim passengers in airports. According to the TSA website, the No-Fly List contains approximately one hundred thousand names, while TIDE contains roughly one million names (Handeyside 2014). Passengers who find themselves on these lists either are prevented from flying (the No-Fly List) or have to endure several layers of additional security simply because they have Muslim names. The majority of the Muslim men I interviewed told me they were on some list at airports. The Muslim women I interviewed told me they were not on a TSA list like Muslim men, indicating that the state targets mostly men for surveillance through these terrorist databases. However, Muslim women who wear the hijab were subjected to profiling by TSA agents. The women I spoke to told me they were repeatedly stopped and had their bodies and personal belongings searched at the airport security line by TSA agents.

QUESTION: The gendered asymmetry is striking — men tracked via databases, women via physical profiling. Worth asking whether this disparity reflects broader policy assumptions about Muslim threat.

The surveillance of mosques is another example of how state-led surveillance unfairly targets Muslims. In 2002, the New York Police Department engaged in a massive surveillance program of Muslims in the area. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "NYPD's Intelligence Division has singled out Muslim religious and community leaders, mosques, student associations, organizations, businesses, and individuals for pervasive surveillance that is discriminatory and not conducted against institutions or individuals belonging to any other religious faith, or the public at large" (American Civil Liberties Union n.d.[a]). NYPD surveillance included mosques within a one-hundred-mile radius of New York, extending into neighboring states like Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

XREF: This connects to broader literature on post-9/11 Countering Violent Extremism and surveillance of minority communities. QUESTION: Worth investigating the legal remedies pursued and whether similar programs persist today.

In Hassan v. City of New York, the plaintiffs claimed their civil rights were violated because they were observed and monitored by the NYPD solely because of their religious identity rather than for participating in any criminal behavior. Judge William Martini dismissed this case, stating in his decision, "The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself" (Pilkington 2014).

This ruling reinforces the acceptance of the association of Islam with terrorism. It legitimizes the idea that it is necessary to treat Muslims with suspicion in order to uncover terrorist plots and threats.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on post-9/11 surveillance, Islamophobia, and how legal rulings institutionalize ethnic/religious profiling. SEED: Potential essay on how judicial language normalizes profiling by framing it as common-sense necessity rather than discrimination.

Donald Trump called for the banning of Muslims from America after the terrorist attacks in Paris in December 2015, where the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) claimed responsibility for the killing of 130 French citizens. This blanketed accusation of all Muslims reveals how the state participates in justifying the surveillance of individuals based on their ethnic, racial, or religious identities.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of state security discourse, Islamophobia, and securitization theory in critical security studies.

Without more concrete information of what constitutes terrorist activities, Americans must rely on their own perceptions of what "suspicious behaviors" are in order to be able to identify someone as a potential terrorist, and the removal of men and women from flights because they wear the hijab or speak Arabic because their fellow passengers profile them exemplifies this citizen surveillance. In May 2016, the Washington Post reported an incident where a woman wrote a note to an American Airlines' flight attendant about the suspicious behavior of the passenger sitting next to her. The passenger had dark curly hair and olive skin according to the article in the Washington Post (Rampell 2016). He was writing something that appeared suspicious to the passenger, like it was a code of some sort. After removing the suspicious passenger from the plane, the airline discovered that Guido Menzio, the man who was removed, is an Italian award-winning Ivy League mathematician who was simply writing out a mathematical formula on a piece of paper. The unrecognizable math, mistaken for code or Arabic, and perhaps his appearance cast his body as suspicious to his fellow passenger. The reasons a citizen might suspect his or her fellow passenger are not called into question but instead are taken seriously by the state.

XREF: Connects to broader security-state literature on how ambiguous terror definitions push surveillance onto ordinary citizens, who then police appearances and behaviors.

Private citizens also participate in surveilling Muslim women for offending American cultural values when they wear the hijab in public. They are often told to "go back home" by their fellow citizens, an act that contests their claim to an American identity. Muslim women have to defend wearing the hijab to strangers who feel empowered to approach them and question them about their American values. They often have to explain to people that wearing the hijab is a choice—rather than something forced upon them—in order to dismiss the assumption that they are oppressed by their faith (Gjelten 2016). … The surveillance of Muslim women's bodies in public represents how the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam has seeped into the American public's consciousness. As a result, private citizens surveil Muslim women who wear the hijab for transgressing what they think are American cultural values.

In addition to state surveillance and citizen surveillance, Muslim Americans are participating in self-surveillance. While some of this is a response to the surveillance they encounter, the state has also encouraged this practice. In 2014, President Obama unveiled a new program by the Department of Homeland Security called Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). The DHS website outlines the scope of the program, which includes understanding violent extremism, supporting communities that might be vulnerable to extremist ideologies, helping these communities to resist recruitment, and assisting local law enforcement in their efforts to prevent another terrorist attack in the United States. This program encourages Muslim Americans to surveil members of their own communities who may appear suspicious and report them to the government. … According to Germain, who is now a fellow for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, right-wing antigovernment groups commit the majority of politically motivated violent acts in the United States, not Muslims: "Focusing almost exclusively on Muslims, he added, 'reinforces the false perception that extremist violence is primarily a Muslim problem when the facts show that is not true'" (Bender 2015).

XREF: Contradicts the premise of the CVE program's Muslim-focused framing. SEED: Could anchor a piece on how surveillance policies target the minority while the actual threat comes from elsewhere.

Muslim American men and women are aware of their hypersurveillance by both the state and their fellow citizens. Because gender plays a significant role in how they are surveilled, the ways in which they self-surveil reflect their unique experiences. Chapter 4 examines the impact that surveillance has on Muslim American men and women and calls into question how citizenship in the United States is racialized, wherein some citizens are protected by the state and others are criminalized. This book shows how the racialization of Muslims occurs through the institutionalization of policies that target Muslims, which is maintained via the actions of individuals. The state, private citizens, and Muslims themselves all contribute to the hypersurveillance of Muslims.

DEFINE: Casts racialization as an institutionalized policy outcome maintained by individual actions, not just individual prejudice.

One might wonder where the outrage is for these surveillance programs initiated by the state that clearly target Muslim populations in the United States. The overt anti-Muslim rhetoric espoused by Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election campaign has led to the public's awareness of the surveillance of Muslims in the United States. When he said he would register Muslims during his campaign, he was met with outrage from a large segment of the American public. However, in the years before Trump, the American public had not protested the surveillance of Muslims that had been ongoing under both the Bush and Obama administrations. According to a 2010 Gallup Poll survey, 71 percent of Americans supported profiling individuals who fit a terrorist profile based on age, gender, and ethnicity (Jones 2010). … According to the survey, 54 percent of respondents claimed they held a positive view of Islam and 65 percent said mainstream Islam was a religion of peace, yet 58 percent still felt surveilling Muslims was an acceptable practice.

QUESTION: Why did public outrage trigger on rhetoric but not on actual policy? Worth exploring the psychology of symbolic vs. material threats. SEED: Potential essay angle: how political speech, not policy, mobilizes public outrage — the gap between abstract approval of surveillance and reaction to explicit rhetoric.

Studying the surveillance of Muslim Americans enables an understanding of how their religious identity undergoes racialization. Racialization is a theoretical framework that has been increasingly used to explain the fluidity and malleability of racial identity. … Racialization allows scholars to accurately capture the myriad of ways groups experience marginalization. The use of this concept also permits scholars to uncover the various spaces where racial experiences occur and to contextualize these experiences.

DEFINE: Defines racialization as a theoretical framework capturing the fluidity and malleability of racial identity, specifically applied to how religious identity undergoes racialization through surveillance. XREF: Connects to broader critical race theory and surveillance studies literature on how state monitoring writes racial categories onto religious groups.

Racialization is rooted in relationships of power that are institutionalized. Racializing bodies serves those who wield power in society and therefore is constantly changing and mutating based on the interests of those in power. This explains why some groups of people are vilified at one point in time over another. For example, the belief that Syrians are potential terrorists and dangerous to Western nations is perpetuated when the government wants to limit Syrian refugees from entering the United States at a time when millions of Syrians have been forced out of their country due to internal wars and political conflicts. However, as I describe in chapter 1, Syrians were once treated like white ethnics in the United States partially because of their skin tone. Is this current manifestation of their racialization based on physical appearance or visual cues, or are they racialized based on religious and national and ethnic identities? In order to understand how Syrians are racialized currently, racialization cannot be limited to just skin tone or biological differences. While Omi and Winant's definition of racialization is important and a major contribution to expanding scholarship on race, it is still tied to phenotypes, limiting an analysis of other cultural attributes that also racialize individuals.

XREF: Connects to Omi and Winant's racialization framework, which the author credits yet critiques for remaining phenotype-bound.

This understanding of race and racialization is unduly dependent on physical cues. While the visual dimension does indeed inspire racialization, I found Muslim American experience it even when they are racially visible as white. Therefore, for me to use the concept of racialization to understand how Muslim bodies acquire racial meanings, I provide a newer, updated definition of the term employing other factors that allow for bodies to be understood as racial. I define it as “the process by which bodies become racial in their lived realities because of biological and/or cultural traits as a result of the intersection and cooperation between ideologies, policies, laws, and social interactions that results in the denial of equal treatment in society.” This definition allows scholars to examine racialization as interactional—between societal institutions and individuals.

DEFINE: Provides an updated definition of racialization as incorporating cultural traits alongside biological ones, allowing racial meaning to attach even to bodies seen as white. XREF: Challenges phenotype-centered theories of race; connects to scholarship on racialization in Muslim American studies and implicit bias work.

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.

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.

DEFINE: Defines racialization as extending beyond skin tone to include cultural attributes, applied here specifically to American Muslims.

Brayne (2014) found that individuals who have been stopped by the police participate in system avoidance—where they avoid surveilling institutions that collect and share personal data, such as the labor force, hospitals, or educational institutions—showing how a surveillance society maintains social stratification and inequality.

XREF: Connects to research on mass incarceration, procedural justice, and how criminal justice contact shapes life outcomes like employment and health.

For example, SB 1070 and the hypersurveillance of undocumented immigrants has resulted in Latinx women avoiding interactions with surveilling institutions such as hospitals or law enforcement, even if they are in need of medical care or are victims of domestic abuse, out of a fear of being deported (Golash-Boza 2012).

XREF: Connects to the chilling effect of immigration enforcement on public health and victim services access — a pattern also seen in healthcare-seeking behavior literature.

These stereotypes are also reflected in citizen surveillance of black bodies: black children are more likely than white children to be reported to social services and placed into foster care, a statistic that is directly informed by the notion that black women are unfit mothers and the “welfare queen” stereotype (Roberts 2004).

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliatory Act of 1996 (PRWORA) greatly reformed welfare by requiring recipients to find employment in exchange for limited assistance from the state. This policy reflected the prominent racial attitude that black women were abusing the welfare system and having multiple children out of wedlock, ignoring the structural issues that low income black women encountered that prevented them from gaining access to decent health care and employment that pays a livable wage.

XREF: Relates to broader literature on the racialized moral panic fueling 1990s welfare reform and the 'welfare queen' trope.

Immigrant South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans were quick to remind me in the interviews that regardless of what their experiences were like since 9/11, they still valued the freedoms and opportunities afforded them in the United States compared to the countries that they migrated from. In other words, they wanted me to know first and foremost they were loyal and proud American citizens.

A common narrative that came up in the interviews with American-born Muslims was that when they were younger, they tended to socialize more with non-Muslims. This was because many of them went to schools where there were virtually no other Muslims. Many of them told me that once they got to college, they met more Muslims and they began to socialize with this group more exclusively. Nadine Naber (2005) found that a Muslim identity became more prominent for youth while in college, partially due to the need to respond to their increasingly racialized identity as Arab and Muslim after 9/11.

I also uncover how these communities' experiences were once guided by their ethnicities and now are being defined more by their religion. As a result, Arab Muslims and South Asian Muslims, who are classified differently racially, are sharing racial experiences because their religious identity racializes them in similar ways.

Muslim women who wear the hijab participate in both a form of self-discipline and a rearticulation of what it means to be Muslim and American by altering their dress (such as by wearing brightly colored hijabs) and controlling their behavior in public spaces. They are cognizant of their surveillance and try to mitigate the gaze on their bodies by appearing less timid and oppressed. Muslim men feel they cannot discuss religion or politics because they fear being associated with terrorism and silenced themselves as a result.

At the time that I conducted the interviews for this book, numerous pundits put forth the idea that the United States had finally realized a “postracial” era with the election of Barack Obama. But the experiences of Muslim American men and women directly challenge the notion that a colorblind society has been attained. Instead, America's social and political climate continues to shift, along with its boundaries.

David Tyrer (2013) argues that this fear of mosques reflects an anxiety of the proximity of Muslim bodies to whites in the United States. It represents to many non-Muslim Americans an invasion of Islam in the West.

QUESTION: What specific evidence supports Tyrer's claim about proximity driving fear? Is there data linking geographic proximity directly to anxiety levels?

In 1942, a Michigan court ruled against naturalizing Ahmed Hassan because Arabs were not white, while in Massachusetts, a Syrian man was able to access citizenship because the court ruled in 1944 that Arabs were eligible for citizenship (Lopez 2006; Love 2017).

I show that Muslim American men feel a sense of disempowerment because they are under hypersurveillance by the state, which can lead to lower political participation.

One might assume that in a politically liberal city such as Chicago, anti-Muslim sentiments would be fewer. Yet the experiences of the Muslim Americans I interviewed suggest that these negative sentiments transcend political ideology. In other words, anti-Muslim feelings and Islamophobia are present regardless of the political leanings of the local population.

Because of the exaggerated concern about Muslims as a threat to national security, state authorities and members of the general public are interested in attitudes held by Muslims living in America. Who are they, and are they anti-American? Will they bring sharia law—Islamic law—to the United States? Pew's (2011) study titled Muslims in America: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism attempted to answer some of these questions by surveying Muslims in the United States. They found that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemn Islamic extremism, but fewer than half of Muslims interviewed feel that the U.S. government's efforts to combat terrorism are sincere, and more than 80 percent felt satisfied with life in America.

I show how Arabs who are Muslim are seen as incompatible culturally with Western values. Arabs have experienced periods of both exclusion and inclusion since they first migrated to the United States. Although immigration laws were once more lenient toward Muslim migrants, the Trump era is likely to become hyperexclusionary toward this group. In a political era that is marked by hypersurveillance and the costly War on Terror, Arabs who are also Muslim continue to move away from whiteness, regardless of their actual skin tone or pigmentation.

QUESTION: How exactly does the racial positioning of Muslim Arabs shift independent of skin tone? Worth probing the mechanisms of this 'moving away from whiteness'.

As all these narratives demonstrate, a Muslim identity is a racializing agent in the current political climate of the United States. When white people convert to Islam, they experience reracialization and lose their privileges associated with whiteness (Galonnier 2015; Moosavi 2015). For Arabs who are racially classified as white, they lose this status when they wear the hijab.

QUESTION: How does this reracialization process legally and socially function for converts vs. ethno-religious Arabs? Worth tracing the cited works.

The American government has also played another role in producing the Muslim first identity by categorizing all Muslims indiscriminately through its policies. For example, state policies like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required Muslim men to register with the state, and Donald Trump's proposed travel ban have both targeted Muslims arbitrarily. South Asians and Arabs living in the United States who identify as Muslim are seen as potential threats to the state. While some may respond by downplaying their religious identity, many react by strengthening an identity that is under attack.

XREF: Connects to broader theories of how state categorization and discrimination can harden rather than suppress identity, similar to Crenshaw's work or research on minority identity formation reactance.

What this history reveals is that Muslims had difficulties becoming naturalized citizens because Islam was not associated with whiteness (Gualtieri 2009). For some Arabs, such as Syrians, their Christian identity and lighter skin tones afforded them certain key privileges that South Asians—who had darker complexions and were typically either Hindu or Muslim—were unable to access.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on racial formation and legal whiteness, such as Ian Haney López's work on whiteness as property in naturalization law.

Both Arabs and South Asians have lived in the United States since the early twentieth century, but anti-Asian exclusionary immigration policies banned South Asians from entering the United States at various points in time. For example, as a result of rampant anti-Chinese sentiments, the Immigration Act of 1917 prevented anyone from Asia from migrating to the United States, including South Asian Indians. This policy created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that prevented Asians, South Asians, and Southeast Asians from migrating to the United States.

XREF: Connects to broader US anti-Asian exclusion history, including the earlier Chinese Exclusion Act and later restrictions like the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.

This early twentieth-century overview reveals how whiteness was constructed not only in opposition to blackness through legal regulations but also in relation to other immigrant groups like Asians, which often included South Asians. Excluding these groups and denying citizenship based on religious identity helped define what it meant to be white.

DEFINE: Clarifies how the category of whiteness was constructed negatively — through exclusion of Asians, South Asians, and religious others — rather than defined by intrinsic traits.

In the United States v. Dolla (1910) and United States v. Balsara (1910), the courts ruled Asian Indians were white based on scientific evidence. But in 1923's United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Bhagat Thind, an Indian immigrant, was denied citizenship because Hindus were seen as ineligible for naturalization—one that held even though Thind was actually Sikh. This ruling was based on common knowledge and set legal precedent for the cases that would follow by determining that Asian Indians who were Hindus could not become naturalized citizens because Hindus were not considered white. This case uncovered that a religious identity, being Hindu, distanced Asian Indians from whiteness.

QUESTION: How did courts reconcile earlier rulings that treated Indians as white with the 1923 reversal based on religious identity?

Between the 1950s and 1970s, South Asian Indians once again experienced confusion about their racial status during this time. Due to their complicated history around their racial identity, many South Asian Indians chose “white” or “other” on the U.S. Census. It was not until 1980 that they were racially categorized under the Asian classification by the U.S. Census Bureau at the request of Asian Indian migrants. Some South Asians do not identify as “Asian” (Kibria 1998); their experiences are distinct from Chinese, Japanese, and other ethnic groups that have been lumped into this classification. For South Asians, their racial identification has been fluid from the moment they came to the United States, with a history of inclusion and exclusion in whiteness.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how US census categories construct race and how South Asians were once considered white under immigration law despite legal whiteness being denied in court cases.

By 1943, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) determined that Arabs were white and eligible for citizenship due to having a shared culture and civilization with Western countries. INS relied on the case United States v. Thind (1923) to argue that Arabs were not like Asians, who were ineligible for naturalization. In other words, “the INS view was that Arabs were white and fully eligible for immigration and naturalization benefits (unlike most Asians at the time) and it issued an ‘instruction’ on the matter for INS offices across the nation” (Cainkar 2009: 77). At that point in time, Arabs were racially distinguished from Asians, with their perceived closeness to whiteness allowing them to access citizenship while distancing them from cultures and ethnicities marked as incapable of sharing white European cultural values. What this history reveals is that Muslims had difficulties becoming naturalized citizens because Islam was not associated with whiteness (Gualtieri 2009). For some Arabs, such as Syrians, their Christian identity and lighter skin tones afforded them certain key privileges that South Asians—who had darker complexions and were typically either Hindu or Muslim—were unable to access.

XREF: Connects to legal construction of race and whiteness in US immigration history, which may relate to Ian Haney López's work on whiteness as property. DEFINE: Illustrates how 'whiteness' was a legal and cultural category determining citizenship eligibility, not merely a physical descriptor.

Congress passed two Palestinian refugee acts in 1953 and 1957, opening American borders to those who were being expelled after the creation of the state of Israel.

Homonationalism describes the process where Muslims are cast as inherently homophobic, which is used to align LGBTQ issues into a nationalistic agenda that perpetuates racist attitudes toward Muslims (Puar 2007). But Muslims’ ideas on same sex are becoming more progressive over time. According to the Pew Research Center (2015), in 2007, 38 percent of Muslim respondents felt “homosexuality should be accepted” compared to 45 percent in 2014.

XREF: Contrasts with the homonationalism narrative that frames Muslims as inherently homophobic — the data challenges that fixed framing. QUESTION: What accounts for the seven-point rise between 2007 and 2014? Worth investigating demographic or cohort effects.

One might assume that in a politically liberal city such as Chicago, anti-Muslim sentiments would be fewer. Yet the experiences of the Muslim Americans I interviewed suggest that these negative sentiments transcend political ideology. In other words, anti-Muslim feelings and Islamophobia are present regardless of the political leanings of the local population. An examination of Muslim American life in cities like Chicago and the Dallas/Fort Worth area sheds light on the increased racialization of Muslim Americans that has occurred in the years since 9/11.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialization of Muslim Americans post-9/11 and how prejudice operates independent of local political culture. QUESTION: What mechanisms sustain Islamophobia in liberal cities where overt expression might be socially discouraged? Is it implicit, institutional, or coded?

Omar: This lady used to be very nice with us. Sometimes she [would] call us [and] knock on the door and say, “Come, have some cake and Irish drink.” Or she would say, “Hey, come on, help me. This needs to be taken out.” We give her help, she give us. And she was nice, and we are nice together. [After] 9/11, she [told us], “You have to leave. You are terrorist.” Saher: Wow. Just like that? Omar: Just like that. “You are Afghani!” We left the house anyway. We left the house because of that. We used to be [there] for her better than her family, but suddenly, she wants us out.

DEFINE: A concrete account of how the 9/11 backlash turned even previously warm neighbors against Afghan residents.

The Arab Muslim women I interviewed were cognizant of a stark shift, from being able to pass for white to being viewed as a racial other, inciting the gazes of their fellow citizens and surveillance of their bodies. In post-9/11 society, the hijab works in similar ways to skin tone to further distance Muslims from whiteness.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on racialization and how markers beyond phenotype (clothing, religious symbols) can trigger racial othering. Builds on: "Airport surveillance targets Muslim men through lists and hijab-wearing women through body searches."

Samira told me she had very difficult experiences when she wore the hijab after 9/11. She was in high school at the time and remembers a student blaming her for 9/11. She also recalled riding the bus to work and a passenger yelling at her, “Go back to your country, bitch!” She chose to remove the hijab because she no longer felt it was appropriate for her spiritually and noticed a stark difference in her experiences. In our conversations, she told me she passed for white after she stopped wearing the hijab, which empowered her in some ways. Samira enjoyed being able to feel like an individual rather than a representative of all Muslim Arabs, who were encountering a new form of racialization and the association of their bodies with barbarism or violence.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on racialization, passing, and how visible markers of identity trigger discrimination.

It is clear in the stories here that the women interviewed were not accustomed to these racial encounters before they wore the hijab. The men and women I interviewed were professionals who enjoyed a middle-to-upper-class lifestyle, giving them access to predominantly white spaces. While they may have never felt completely white due to the racialization of their ethnicity, their encounters in public spaces were not hostile in the ways they have been since September 11th. Since 9/11, a Muslim identity has triggered these racial experiences. Policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act have produced the current surveillance society that has made Muslim bodies susceptible to constant monitoring.

DEFINE: Clarifies how racial encounters are triggered by religious markers and national policy, not just ethnicity. XREF: Connects to the PATRIOT Act's surveillance regime and scholarship on post-9/11 Islamophobia and racialization of religion.

Through conversations with Muslim men and women, I was able to uncover how their lives slowly transformed from being viewed as marginally American as a result of their ethnic identities to being seen as anti-American and unwanted because of their religious identity. The stories and testimonies of ordinary American citizens in this book reflect how cultural and political shifts can create newly racialized meanings in a society that is organized along racial lines.

XREF: Connects to sociological work on racialization and how religious identity becomes racialized, similar to processes described in studies of Islamophobia and secularism.

The compliance of the airline to the request of the passenger is telling. By accommodating racist attitudes toward Muslims, the message is that Muslims are not worthy of protection from humiliation and racism because the state has confirmed they are dangerous through its security policies. Passengers are able to report their fellow passengers as suspicious to flight attendants just for being Muslim and consequently have them removed them from flights. This practice normalizes fears of Muslims and thus racializes them as a threats.

Builds on: "Post-9/11 hijabs function like skin color in racializing Muslims as non-white."

The state racializes Muslim men's bodies as potential threats to national security when it places them on a security list simply because they are Muslim.

This is not to say that skin tone does not racialize individuals as suspect—skin tone may trigger surveillance in times of hyper insecurity, like when there is a terrorist attack—but the hijab triggers stops and searches routinely. Leila, a forty-one-year-old stay-at-home mom who does not wear the hijab, is a Palestinian American Muslim woman. Leila does not pass for white because of her skin tone, but because her name does not sound Muslim to most people, she is often mistaken for being Mediterranean. She told me that her experience flying was very different from that of her mother-in-law, who wears the hijab.

Sommer is able to pass as a white American because she does not wear the hijab and has a lighter skin tone. She admitted in the interview that people do not identify her as someone from a racialized ethnic group. As her testimony reveals, when she is mistaken for anything, it is a white European ethnic. Because her husband Anglicized his name and is also light skinned, he was not on the Selectee List or subjected to random stops and searches.

QUESTION: How does this pattern of 'passing' connect to broader discussions of colorism within racialized minority communities?

The impact of hypersurveillance is that those who are under a watchful eye begin to participate in their own self-discipline. Nadine Naber (2006) coined the term internment of the psyche to describe how Arab Muslims she interviewed in San Francisco responded to the fear and anxiety of state surveillance immediately after 9/11. Some of her participants expressed deep paranoia, while others altered their actions and behaviors, like avoiding too much time in public spaces, in order to prevent their surveillance.

DEFINE: Defines the coined concept 'internment of the psyche' and illustrates it with concrete post-9/11 behavioral examples.

Bilal's Muslim name triggers suspicion even though he no longer identifies as a Muslim, revealing how this interaction is best described as racial as opposed to religious discrimination. Bilal is not discriminated against because of his beliefs, but rather his body is essentialized as a threat because his Muslim name categorizes him as a potential terrorist.

DEFINE: Distinguishes racial discrimination from religious discrimination via essentialization of the body versus actual beliefs. XREF: Connects to critical race theory concepts about racialization and how markers (like names) trigger suspicion independent of actual identity.

On Monday, November 20, 2006, six imams were removed from a U.S. Airways flight as they tried to head back home to Phoenix from the North American Imams Federation conference in Minneapolis. The New York Times reported that a fellow passenger passed a note to a crewmember claiming there were six suspicious Arabs on the plane who had said the word Allah several times and cursed the United States’ “involvement with Saddam Hussein” (Sander 2006). In the note, the passenger also provided the seat numbers for the imams. As a result of this note, the imams were handcuffed, removed from the plane, and then interrogated for several hours by the FBI. The imams were released because they posed no threat to national security.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of post-9/11 racial and religious profiling in American security settings.

On March 13, 2011, Irum Abbasi, an American Muslim of Pakistani descent, was pulled off of a plane because a Southwest Airlines crew member thought she heard Abbasi say “It’s a go” on her cell phone. Abbasi actually said, “I have to go” because her flight was about to take off, but her hijab rendered her suspect in the eyes of the flight attendant, resulting in her removal from the plane and a search of her body. After she was cleared to return to the plane, the pilot refused to allow her back on because the crew was uncomfortable with her presence. She was issued a voucher and placed on the next flight (Quraishi 2011).

QUESTION: This demonstrates how a crew member's suspicion, once declared, could not be retracted even after the passenger was cleared. Worth exploring the institutional dynamics of security suspicion.

In March 2016, an Arab Muslim American family was removed from a United Airlines flight after they asked a flight attendant for help securing a booster seat for their young child. The mother wears the hijab. The couple were asked to show their tickets and then removed from the flight because of safety concerns (Ellis and Johnson 2016).

Muslim Americans were aware they were being watched in airports and as a result carefully monitored their own actions and dress in these spaces, revealing how Muslims participate in self-surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on Foucauldian self-surveillance and panopticism, where subjects internalize the watching gaze.

Surveillance intersects with and depends on both religious signifiers and gender in this process of racialization. Muslim men’s experiences differed from Muslim women’s, and Muslim women who wore the hijab were treated differently in airports than those who did not. The interviews in this book show how surveillance of Muslim bodies has become institutionalized via the state’s placement of innocent Muslim men on a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) list called the Secondary Security Screening Selection List. Muslim men on this list were informed that their names were similar to those of people on a government security list who posed a threat to national security and that they must go through additional security measures. Muslim women who wore the hijab were more likely to be routinely subjected to “random” stops and searches than Muslim women who did not wear the hijab; this public spectacle of being pulled out of the security line and having one’s body and belongings searched because one wears the hijab is another way that a Muslim identity is racialized as a threat to national security.

According to Kleiner, “Critics of airline passenger profiling have argued that computerized screening programs—such as CAPPS I, CAPPS II, Registered Traveler and the new Secure Flight program—are inherently ‘biased against passengers with connections to areas of the world whose behavior or policies conflict with the interests of the United States—namely the Middle East. As such, critics believe that profiling promotes an unconstitutional categorization of travelers by ethnicity, race, religion or a combination of all three’” (2010: 115). Consequently, Americans who have a Muslim name are vulnerable to profiling because of the overrepresentation of Muslim names on these lists.

XREF: Connects to debates about surveillance, civil liberties, and how security systems encode biases against certain populations.

Utilizing these lists does not curtail terrorism but rather justifies discriminatory practices by the state. Profiling in airports also creates a sense of distrust between communities of color and law enforcement (Ramirez, Hoopes, and Quinlan 2011). Lyon argues that in a post-9/11 society, the reliance on technology for surveillance has not made surveillance less biased but produced a system of social sorting: “[Passengers] . . . are coded to categorize personal data such that people thus classified may be treated differently. People from suspect countries of origin or with suspect ethnicities can expect different treatment from others” (2007: 162).

XREF: Connects to broader literature on algorithmic bias and how technical 'neutrality' masks pre-existing social hierarchies.

In 2015, the Intercept published an article about the “Spot Referral Report” that TSA agents use to determine suspicious behavior. Those listed on this document include exaggerated yawning, excessive complaining of the screening process, excessive throat clearing, widely open staring eyes, gazing down, and even a pale face from recently shaving a beard (Winter and Currier 2015). Anyone could be considered suspect based on these behaviors, yet my interviews revealed that not everyone is routinely stopped and searched in airports.

QUESTION: What distinguishes who actually gets stopped despite these broad criteria? The author indicates interviews reveal unequal application — worth exploring the selection mechanism. SEED: Could spark an essay on how ostensibly neutral security protocols encode racial or demographic bias in practice.

The ACLU defines racial profiling as “the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion or national origin” (American Civil Liberties Union n.d.[d]). Based on this definition, racial profiling is not limited to discrimination based on skin tone but can include traits associated with religion or ethnicity. Religious signifiers, such as a Muslim name and clothing, inspire racial profiling in airports, which is captured in the phrase flying while Muslim, revealing the racial nature of this encounter, as it is a reference to driving while Black—abusive stops and searches of African American drivers that is triggered by skin tone.

DEFINE: Clarifies that the ACLU's definition of racial profiling encompasses religion, ethnicity, and national origin, not just skin tone — as illustrated by 'flying while Muslim.'

All the men interviewed for this study were at some point informed that they were on a TSA list or that their names were very similar to a name on a TSA list—a circumstance known as a false positive. The Muslim men were not told what list they were on or why, but after conducting the interviews, it became clear they were on the Selectee List, which subjected them to interrogation by TSA agents about their travel. Because they were on this list, several of the men interviewed were subjected to several layers of security checks after they stepped foot in the airport. These men were unable to use the self-check-in kiosk to retrieve their tickets. Instead, they had to get them at the ticket counter, where TSA agents interrogated them about their travel before issuing the tickets. Once they had their tickets, some noticed there were four Ss printed on them. These Ss marked them as those who should be stopped and searched at the security line, where they were often pulled out of the line to have their bodies and bags searched. Additionally, because of the Secure Flight Program, they were sometimes interrogated again and searched at the boarding gate because the flight passenger list had been compared to the Selectee List, marking them for yet another layer of surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on post-9/11 racial profiling and surveillance of Muslim Americans in air travel.

Asked what this heightened security entailed, Hamza described requirements consistent with being on the Selectee List. He had to check in with a ticket agent, where he had to answer a series of questions about where he was traveling and why. At the security checkpoint after he showed his ticket to a TSA agent, he was always singled out, pulled out of the security line, and subjected to the handheld magnetometer and a pat down.

What resonated with Bilal was the differential treatment he had in airports compared to his non-Muslim traveling companions. His traveling companions were able to use the self-check-in kiosks, while Bilal was unable to do so. Passengers who are allowed to enjoy the full privileges of citizenship may still experience the inconvenience of long lines at security checkpoints where they have to take their shoes off and pull out their laptops, but they are not isolated from the rest of the passengers on a regular basis and interrogated by TSA agents. Bilal's Muslim name triggers suspicion even though he no longer identifies as a Muslim, revealing how this interaction is best described as racial as opposed to religious discrimination. Bilal is not discriminated against because of his beliefs, but rather his body is essentialized as a threat because his Muslim name categorizes him as a potential terrorist.

DEFINE: Distinguishes racial from religious discrimination: discrimination here operates on an essentialized body, not on actual belief or identity.

There were a few cases where Muslim women mentioned facing this type of surveillance, but it was always when they were traveling with a Muslim man.

XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of gendered surveillance of minority communities, where women's experiences differ based on group composition.

Because Naveed was on the Selectee List, he had to go through additional security, being searched and interrogated at the terminal gate. Naveed thought his status as a platinum flyer should protect him from this surveillance. But privileges associated with class do not protect Muslim bodies from surveillance in a nation engaged in hypersurveillance. Muslim men are left feeling humiliated in front of their fellow passengers. Most of the men interviewed felt they have no choice but to comply with their surveillance rather than contest it.

XREF: Connects to discussions of racial and religious profiling intersecting with socioeconomic status, and to literature on surveillance studies and Foucauldian compliance under state power.

This public display of security segregates passengers into two groups: those who are a potential threat, and those who are worthy of protection from this threat. The fact that nearly all the names called out for additional security were Muslim names supports the claim that the Selectee and No-Fly lists target Muslims. In this instance, American Airlines performed security in front of some passengers by racially profiling its Muslim clientele. It is no surprise, then, that passengers feel justified in reporting Muslims as suspicious to flight attendants on airplanes; they take their cues from the state. When the state participates in racially profiling passengers based on a religious identity in a public fashion, citizens feel justified in reporting their fellow passengers as suspicious for doing things like speaking Arabic or wearing the hijab when flying.

XREF: Connects to surveillance-state literature on how state practices legitimize public behavior (e.g., Foucault, Goffman).

But Anwar was not aware that he was marked for surveillance the minute he stepped into the airport because he was placed on the Selectee List. He assumed it was his behavior, like carrying only a backpack, or his appearance that triggered TSA’s suspicion of him. But many passengers fly with only carry-on luggage and are not subjected to intense interrogation by TSA agents. When I asked if there were markings on his ticket, he told me they were marked with four Ss, which, unknown to Anwar, ensured he would encounter more security as he navigated through the airport.

QUESTION: How does the Selectee List and the four-S marking system work in practice? What broader categories of travelers end up on it?

The secrecy that surrounds these lists is daunting for Muslim American men. They are told they are on some list, but it is never specified which one, creating a state of uncertainty. Some are told their names are similar to one on a “terrorist watchlist,” making these men fear being associated with terrorism. This feeling of being watched but not knowing why or when, makes Muslim American men feel vulnerable. Although all the men interviewed are American citizens, they are still situated on the margins of society because their bodies are monitored and watched.

XREF: Connects to broader literatures on surveillance, racial profiling, and the psychological effects of being surveilled as a citizen.

Muslim men and women are sometimes swept into one another’s surveillance, even though gender does predict what type of surveillance Muslim American men and women will routinely encounter in airports.

Agents escorted them to another room where they proceeded to interview them about where they were from, what their favorite types of food were, and what they did on their vacation. After hours of questioning, the agent finally said to them, “I guess you’re not terrorists.” This comment shows that Muslim bodies are equated with their potentiality to commit terror until proven otherwise.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racial profiling, surveillance studies, and Islamophobia in post-9/11 security practices.

The profiling of Muslim men in airports is not random, but systemic. Even after TSA agents interrogated Muslim men and it was determined it was safe for them to board an airplane, they were still subjected to surveillance the next time they flew. … The examples provided previously show that the state is not targeting specific nationalities or ethnicities, but Muslims in general. This is why a Pakistani Muslim American man had similar experiences in airports as a Lebanese Muslim American. State surveillance impacts Muslim men, not just Arab men.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of post-9/11 racial/religious profiling and state surveillance of minority communities.

It is likely the FBI terrorist lists are inundated with names of individuals from the same twenty-four Muslim-majority countries that have been placed under suspicion since 9/11, explaining why the people I interviewed either were on the list or triggered a false positive. As a result, these Muslim men were surveilled because of their religious identity—because Muslim-majority countries are prioritized for surveillance.

QUESTION: Are the FBI's terrorist lists actually built from the same 24 Muslim-majority countries prioritized since 9/11? This is framed as likelihood, so it invites verification.

Bilal recalled that shortly after 9/11, he was "randomly" stopped and searched in customs upon returning to the United States from Canada because of his Muslim identity. Bilal was on the Selectee List, but this encounter was the result of a TSA agent profiling him upon reentry into the United States after he had already been through airport security in Canada because of his ethnic identity and then his religious one.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of post-9/11 security measures, surveillance, and the Selectee List as forms of institutionalized bias.

Bilal: I've been searched very thoroughly at lots of airports. Actually, when I came back to Chicago about six months after 9/11, I was coming in from Canada after doing this hip-hop project. I was stopped at the border and this was the most ridiculous invasion of privacy I've experienced as a result of being a Muslim. The guy asked me my name and asked me if I was Muslim and then proceeded to read my journals, and was just flipping through my journals and just sitting there for twenty minutes reading my journals that I had on my carry-on bags. It was really a bit much.

XREF: Connects to broader documentation of post-9/11 racial profiling and surveillance of Muslim travelers at US borders.

Bilal's darker skin may have incited the security agent to ask if he was Muslim. When he confirmed the officer's suspicion that he was a Muslim, the TSA agent proceeded to search his personal belongings. Bilal's American passport should have granted him reentry into America with ease, yet because he was a Muslim, the borders tightened when he attempted to come back in. His status as an American citizen did not protect him from being profiled because his Muslim identity negates his status as an American.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of surveillance, security theater, and how minority identities complicate formal legal citizenship. QUESTION: To what extent does official policy versus individual officer behavior drive this profiling outcome?

The supposed randomness of the act of surveillance perpetuates the false notion that security is colorblind. The experiences of Muslim women in this sample contradict the notion that these searches are random, confirming that it is a form of profiling guided by a racialized understanding of religious identity. Its appearance of ambiguity supports the myth that in a democratic society, no one is treated unfairly due to the color of one's skin or one's religious identity. Yet Muslim women who wear the hijab are routinely subjected to stops and searches, revealing the bias toward Muslims in this practice. The notion of the randomness of these stops and searches works to dismiss claims of racial injustice by Muslim Americans. Consequently, most of the participants admitted they did not complain to a TSA agent but instead endured the humiliation of being singled out.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on colorblindness myth and how procedural rhetoric legitimizes discrimination.

Comparing the experiences of Muslim women who wear the hijab to those who do not wear it demonstrates how clothing can become a racial marker for Muslim women because it triggers surveillance. … Experiences like this suggest that the hijab is what motivates TSA agents to stop and search Muslim women.

QUESTION: This raises a question about whether the hijab functions as a racial marker in other institutional contexts beyond the TSA, such as employment or housing. DEFINE: Illustrates how clothing can serve as a racial marker by triggering surveillance, extending race beyond phenotype.

This juxtaposition of Muslim women who wear the hijab versus those who do not is evidence that it is bodies that are identifiable as Muslim that are subjected to consistent and repetitive profiling. The comparison also reveals how racial privileges associated with skin tone—that is, passing for white—become muted if someone chooses to wear the hijab. The hijab marks women as foreigners who need discipline, demonstrating that clothing can work in the same way that skin tone marks someone as dangerous or a criminal.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialized surveillance and how markers beyond phenotype trigger profiling — parallels to stop-and-frisk and biometric surveillance debates. Builds on: "Airline policies normalize racializing Muslim passengers as threats."

The impact of hypersurveillance is that those who are under a watchful eye begin to participate in their own self-discipline. Nadine Naber (2006) coined the term internment of the psyche to describe how Arab Muslims she interviewed in San Francisco responded to the fear and anxiety of state surveillance immediately after 9/11. Some of her participants expressed deep paranoia, while others altered their actions and behaviors, like avoiding too much time in public spaces, in order to prevent their surveillance. I also found that Muslim Americans responded to their surveillance by monitoring their own actions and behaviors in order to prevent hypersurveillance, particularly in airports.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's panopticon concept of internalized surveillance and self-monitoring discipline. DEFINE: Clarifies the term 'internment of the psyche' coined by Nadine Naber regarding post-9/11 surveillance effects. Builds on: "Airline policies normalize racializing Muslim passengers as threats."

These actions may seem insignificant, but they reveal that for Muslim Americans, airports have become what Foucault (1995) called a panopticon, a space where discipline is unpredictable and ever present. In this panopticon under the watchful eye of the state and private citizens, Muslim Americans are not free to be themselves but must constantly demonstrate they are loyal and trustworthy citizens to escape discipline. Sarah told me that when she and her husband fly, they avoid reciting any Islamic prayers because they fear it will frighten their fellow passengers.

DEFINE: Applies Foucault's panopticon concept to airport surveillance, clarifying its meaning through a concrete example. XREF: Connects to Foucault's disciplinary power theories and broader literature on surveillance states. Builds on: "Airline policies normalize racializing Muslim passengers as threats."

Muslim Americans experience what DuBois referred to as "double consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—where they are incapable of being one self but instead are made up of multiple selves because they have to shift their identities in public—because of their hypersurveillance in spaces like airports. This inability to be one's true self, to even speak one's native language out of fear of surveillance, reflects the psychological wage Muslim Americans experience because of their racialization.

XREF: Connects DuBois's double consciousness concept from The Souls of Black Folk to contemporary racialization of Muslim Americans.

This expression of anger was unusual, but the sentiment was not. Muslim Americans do not want to irritate TSA agents because they fear the consequences of contesting this behavior, like being detained or prevented from flying. Hamza was the only interviewee who told me he filed a complaint with TSA about being on a list. Perhaps because Hamza is a lawyer, he knew his rights and felt more confident filing a complaint, but in general, the response by the majority of the Muslim Americans interviewed was to minimize surveillance through self-discipline instead of resisting or challenging it.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's concept of self-surveillance and the internalization of disciplinary power in modern security states. QUESTION: What conditions would shift Muslim Americans from self-discipline toward active complaint or resistance? Builds on: "Surveillance causes its subjects to self-discipline their own behavior."

When I asked how the airline responded to his request she told me, “The manager of the plane told him this is your assigned seat or you have two empty seats in the back of the plane. And he chose to sit in the back.” Although the flight attendant told the passenger it was not the airline’s policy to allow customers to choose their seatmates, the attendant accommodated his request by allowing him to sit in the back of the plane. The compliance of the airline to the request of the passenger is telling. By accommodating racist attitudes toward Muslims, the message is that Muslims are not worthy of protection from humiliation and racism because the state has confirmed they are dangerous through its security policies. Passengers are able to report their fellow passengers as suspicious to flight attendants just for being Muslim and consequently have them removed them from flights. This practice normalizes fears of Muslims and thus racializes them as a threats.

In racialized social systems, rewards are allocated along racial lines (Bonilla-Silva 2001). U.S. airports constitute a racialized social system where bodies are organized into those worthy of protection and those who are a potential threat. Being able to fly without suspicion is a privilege. The ability to print out a boarding pass and get through security without being stopped and searched is also a privilege. Travelers who are identified as Muslim are often denied these simple rights regardless of their statuses as citizens. Power is exerted on a Muslim population when they have to take extra precautions to avoid profiling and surveillance from TSA agents. They must avoid wearing items that could set off the metal detector and overtly display signs of helpfulness and cooperation. As a result of being observed in public spaces, Muslims monitor their own behaviors and actions. They internalize the surveillance as a form of discipline.

XREF: Connects to surveillance studies and Foucauldian discipline theory, plus Bonilla-Silva's racialized social systems framework.

The interviews confirm that state-initiated surveillance is racially motivated and gendered. Profiling based on religious, ethnic, or racial identity contradicts the basic provisions of the Fourth Amendment, which states that stops and searches are illegal without probable cause. Relying on physical cues rather than behaviors as a basis to determine criminality results in a judicial system that is inherently flawed. It also does not make America any safer from a potential violent attack.

XREF: Connects to debates on surveillance, counterterrorism policy, and civil liberties literature. SEED: Could be developed into an essay on why profiling is both unconstitutional and ineffective as counterterrorism.

Muslim women are repeatedly told that beauty is equated with showing more of one's body and the practice of wearing the hijab is beneath American standards of beauty. It creates assumptions of what constitutes American beauty and situates Muslim women outside of this norm. Thus through a rejection of American cultural norms such as beauty, the hijab works as a racializing agent on Muslim women's bodies. One of the privileges of whiteness is the uncontested association of it with citizenship and its unquestioned rights to resources (Garner 2006): you are viewed and treated like a valued member of society, something that has been denied to racialized groups in the United States.

Private citizens justify monitoring Muslim bodies for participating in religious practices and rituals they view as threats to American society. Surveillance of culture is racialized when cultural practices are essentialized as innate to Muslims, subjecting them to intense scrutiny.

Muslim American women who wear the hijab are made to feel like they are oppressed, bad for society, un-American, and even unattractive. The mentioned interactions reveal that Muslim women are told that the removal of the hijab would be an act of citizenship. Their interactions with private citizens show who wields power in defining who is an American. Private citizens participate in the rearticulation of what it means to be an American. At a time when the nation is engaged in a War on Terror, a Muslim is excluded from this definition.

Racialization of culture is not a new phenomenon. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues white Americans participate in cultural racism toward African Americans, where cultural differences replace biological differences. For example, the stereotype of African Americans as lazy or not hard working is attributed to deficiencies in black culture, so they are blamed for any inequities in education and wealth (Bonilla-Silva 2002). The pitting of Muslim values against American values is another example of cultural racism. Cultural racism does not replace the reality that skin tone still matters in a racialized society but highlights the importance of racialized cultural attributes.

XREF: Builds on racial formation theory and connects to contemporary 'model minority' and 'cultural poverty' discourse debates. DEFINE: Defines cultural racism as a mode where cultural attributes replace biological ones as the basis of racial blame.

Racialization of Muslims is not just a state-led process but one that also occurs through interactions in daily life. Racialized meanings attached to Muslim bodies by the state are politically motivated, such as to get public support for maintaining and investing in a surveillance state or foreign policy like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Private citizens internalize the messages given to them by both the state and the media and then interact with Muslims in ways that reflect their misperceptions of Islam.

The hijab thus signals to non-Muslim Americans a foreign unwanted presence in the United States. These experiences also clearly demonstrate how the hijab mitigates the privileges that whiteness affords. White women lose their privilege of whiteness when they wear the hijab. The white women's experiences are no different from the Pakistani and Indian women who also wear the hijab. They too are marked as potentially Arab. The hijab becomes a racializing agent, and those who wear it are told to "go back home" by their fellow private citizens, which denies them the ability to claim their national identity.

Muslim American women who did not wear the hijab were not subjected to the same verbal harassment or the same watchful eye as those who did, regardless of skin tone. The hijab is clearly equated with foreignness, and as a result, Muslim women's bodies are under the gaze of their fellow citizens. They are racialized through this surveillance as forever foreign and never American.

XREF: Connects to discussions of how visual markers beyond skin color drive racialization and surveillance in the US.

Because the War on Terror does not engage with a specific nation but instead with a region defined as Islamic, Muslim women who wear the hijab are also marked as being from a part of the world that is associated with terror instead of a specific nation. As a result, they are subjected to being watched, yelled at, and in some cases, even aggressively approached. Even though Irum was not told to go back to a specific country, she was told she does not belong in her own country. This statement highlights the "us" and "them" that is constructed in order to signal who is to be watched and who belongs. A Muslim identity situates someone as the "them" that does not belong here, even though it's not specified where the Muslim belongs.

XREF: Connects to Orientalism and other work on how broad enemy categories ('terrorist', 'Islamic region') substitute for specific nation-state targeting, producing diffuse suspicion.

Because private citizens are unable to distinguish between Muslim countries, they equate Islam with an ambiguous region of the world. They are unable to distinguish the various nationalities and ethnicities that Muslims comprise. Scholars have shown how Islam is most commonly conflated with the Middle East (Volpp 2003; Naber 2007; Cainkar 2009; Love 2017). Thus South Asians who are identified as Muslim can also be marked as Arab when they wear the hijab, but it is important to note this was not always the case.

XREF: Connects to broader work on racialization and misrecognition of identity, such as studies on how outsider status projects homogeneous categories onto diverse groups.

Another way that Muslim Americans are surveilled is through the gaze. Foucault writes that the gaze is a powerful tool of control and discipline (Foucault 1995). The gaze is the intent watching of people. It is a form of surveillance utilized by those in society who wield power. An examination of the gaze provides insight into power dynamics in society. The gaze is also dangerous, because it has been used to intimidate and show racial domination over African American women (hooks 1992). Muslim American women who wear the hijab told me they encountered hostile stares by white citizens. The gaze on their bodies is a tool of intimidation and control. Not only did the gaze make them feel unsafe; they also were cognizant their bodies were being surveilled for any illegal activity. Private citizens are able to enforce discipline on Muslim American men’s and women’s bodies through their surveillance.

DEFINE: Clarifies Foucault's concept of the gaze as a tool of control and discipline.

The gaze on Maham’s body felt to her like she was being implicated in the attack. The hijab is the object of the gaze because it signifies Islam, and Islam is equated with terror. The gaze took away from Maham the right to feel the shock and anger of the terrorist attacks with her fellow citizens. She was no longer a member of a national community but was singled out through the gaze as someone who did not belong and was the object of suspicion and anger. This is one of the ways that Muslim women who wear the hijab are racialized. Maham became the target of surveillance because her religious identity equates her to a foreign threat to the United States.

Afia felt she was protecting them from having to witness other parents treat their mother differently because of her religious identity. She did not want them to feel embarrassed or ashamed of their religious identity. At the same time, the gaze limited her ability to participate in her children’s school activities.

The gaze is not harmless but a powerful tool that limits the abilities of Muslim Americans to participate in society as Americans. It strips Muslim Americans of the right to respond to terrorist attacks like every other American citizen: with shock, sadness, fear, and anger. It also limits the mobility of Muslim Americans in their everyday lives by making them feel unwanted or unwelcome in public spaces. The gaze works to prevent Muslims from feeling a sense of belonging in their own country, a privilege associated with social citizenship (Glenn 2002).

XREF: Connects to Glenn (2002) on social citizenship and to broader literature on surveillance and belonging for marginalized groups.

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.

DEFINE: Clarifies the concept of 'cultural racism' as distinct from traditional racism, explaining how essentialized religious practices become grounds for scrutiny and political justification.

Reema, a Pakistani Muslim American and mother, started wearing the hijab after she traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform a religious pilgrimage called "Umrah." Reema lives in an affluent suburb of Chicago and works in the financial industry. She told me that after the pilgrimage, something clicked with her. She just felt the desire to start covering her hair. I asked her if she noticed any changes in her experiences when she returned to the United States. She told me that because of her skin tone, prior to 9/11 people thought she was either Latina or Indian. She never passed for white and was rarely identified as Pakistani. But after she started wearing the hijab, her experiences did change.

XREF: Connects to broader research on religious dress, racialization, and how visible markers alter social perception and treatment. Builds on: "Post-9/11 hijabs function like skin color in racializing Muslims as non-white."

Muslim men rarely told me they were surveilled for their cultural values the way Muslim women who wear the hijab were. However, there was one interview where Saleem, a Lebanese American doctor, told me of an encounter he had with a nurse and a patient that highlighted this dichotomy of the “good” and “bad” Muslim. Although he was born in Lebanon, Saleem is an American-born citizen because his father was naturalized. He moved to Chicago to complete his medical residency. He told me people think he is a European immigrant when they encounter him because he has a lighter skin tone. He said that when they realize he has a Muslim name, their interactions became more hostile. He recalled an incident where his patient demanded a new doctor after he realized that Saleem was a Muslim by reading his name tag.

XREF: Dissonance between physical appearance and name-based signaling; connects to literature on name-based discrimination in hiring and service encounters.

The surveillance of beauty is another way that Muslim American women who wear the hijab are surveilled for their cultural practices. Whiteness has become a marker of beauty and privilege both in the United States as well as in countries that make up the southern hemisphere, such as India (Hunter 2011). This is evidenced by the increased interest and use of skin lightening creams both in the United States and internationally. Hunter (2011) refers to “racial capital” as a material benefit people possess based on their skin tone. In a racialized society, the lighter one’s skin tone, the more access one has to economic resources such as jobs or social networks (Glenn 2009; Hunter 2011). Muslim women who wear the hijab were told wearing it made them ugly; they are also racialized for their beauty.

XREF: Connects to concepts of racial capital and colorism, which resonate with discourse on beauty standards and economic privilege across postcolonial contexts.

The comments reflect an association among beauty standards, whiteness, and nationality. Nasreen was told that she is “good,” but the hijab does not make her “better”—it must make her worse. Nasreen was made to feel she could become more beautiful and consequently more American without it. These neighbors implied that Nasreen was a race traitor because choosing to wear the hijab is giving up one’s whiteness, something scholars note that white converts to Islam often encounter (Galonnier 2015; Moosavi 2015). Nasreen’s neighbors acted as gatekeepers of what it is to be an American by trying to police physical beauty. By wearing the hijab, Nasreen was not losing her beauty but her standing and status as a citizen.

XREF: Connects to literature on beauty standards, race, and national belonging — relates to scholarship on Islamophobia and assimilation in immigrant contexts. Builds on: "One of the privileges of whiteness is the uncontested association of it with citizenship."

The state does not provide a description of what entails "suspicious behaviors," leaving the public to rely on their own assumptions and stereotypes of what constitutes terrorist activity. The social construction of a Muslim terrorist occurs through the interactions of Muslims with private citizens. Private citizens made comments, sometimes in the form of an innocuous joke, to their Muslim friends and acquaintances about their association with terrorism.

DEFINE: Illustrates how 'suspicious behaviors' remains undefined by the state, so meaning gets constructed through everyday citizen interactions.

These jokes are far from harmless and remind Muslims their bodies are associated with terror. They also let Muslim Americans know they are not trusted in their own country.

In this case, Jamil felt it was their skin tone that incited this interaction. The student did not know Jamil was a Muslim, but his ethnicity triggered the assumption that he might be a terrorist. Jamil's experience was somewhat unusual. The majority of the Muslim men I talked to told me they were usually targeted as a terrorist after they revealed their Muslim names.

By asking Aziz if he was there, this professor created the association of him with Islamic extremism and terrorism. This stigmatized Aziz in front of his fellow classmates by suggesting he was capable of being disloyal and dangerous to his own country because he was a Muslim. The power dynamic in this relationship prevented Aziz from registering a complaint against his professor because he feared it would impact his grade and status in the program, as well as potential job opportunities.

The interviews reflect the rising trend in employment discrimination for Muslims in the United States (Acquisti and Fong 2015). While highly educated professionals who are Pakistani and Indian were once characterized as a model minority, in today's era, Muslim American men are losing racial privileges they once were afforded because of how their religious identity racializes them.

Maham, who wears the hijab, was putting her young kids to bed when there was a knock on the door. … And [the agent] said, "Someone jotted down your license plate, sir, as you left [the post office]." So someone went out of their way to not only watch me at the post office, but basically got our license plate number, turned it in to the police as someone suspicious mailing something, and then the police [were] able to track license and registration and find us.

XREF: Connects to surveillance and bias-by-race/religion themes, echoing how ordinary citizens police perceived outsiders.

This particular interaction highlights how racial privilege operates in society. Even though the FBI agents behaved in a way that indicated they understood there was no real terrorist threat, they stated they had to respond to a private citizen's call. If Maham was a real threat, the FBI agents would have gone to the post office and seen what was in the package that Maham mailed earlier that day. If they were able to track her down from the license plate, surely they would have been able to find her package and see what was in it, especially if national security was at stake. Perhaps they would have even searched her home. The ever-present threat of terror has created an environment where a citizen can have the state come and surveil a Muslim citizen simply for mailing a package.

The interactions between Muslim Americans and their fellow private citizens reveal a power dynamic where one has the authority to watch and monitor the other. In a post-9/11 society, a slight majority of Americans support curtailing the civil liberties of Muslims in the name of increasing national security (Sullivan and Hendriks 2009). … In the case of post-9/11 America, this distrust is rooted in xenophobic attitudes toward Islam and Muslims. Muslim Americans are treated differently than the rest of the population because they are categorized as potential terrorists and threats to Western values due to their religious identity. This justification of their surveillance is a part of their racialization.

XREF: Connects to literature on surveillance studies and racialization theory, as well as post-9/11 civil liberties discourse.

These experiences reveal that the United States is a racialized social system that now allocates different rewards and privileges based on a Muslim identity. It is important to note that a racialized society creates unique experiences based on gender. Muslim American men and women encounter differential experiences in this racialized social system that mark Muslim women as a threat to American values and Muslim men as a threat to national security. The War on Terror has created an era of hypersurveillance and the institutionalization of a racialized Muslim identity, one where the state and private citizens watch and monitor mosques and Muslim bodies. As a result, South Asian and Arab Muslim men's and women's location on the racial hierarchy is shifting based on their racialized religious identity. Although immigrant Muslims and their American-born offspring may have always been viewed as foreigners, now they are suspect and dangerous to society. The current racialization of Muslim Americas has to be understood within the context of American policies, both foreign and domestic, in the War on Terror, but it is also an ideological tool espoused by the state to justify surveillance of Muslims. Thus racializing Muslims as a threat to both cultural values and national security is a necessity in maintaining a surveillance state, and private citizens play an important role in this racialized, gendered surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racial formation theory and securitization, echoing how racial categories get constructed and deployed by state institutions.

One of the consequences of this racialization is the denial of individuality. Muslim Americans are denied their individuality in public spaces and are forced to navigate society within the confines of an externally imposed collective identity. Because individualism is a key characteristic of American citizenship, when people are denied their individuality but instead are treated as a collective, they do not enjoy the privileges that citizenship should afford.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialized surveillance of religious minorities post-9/11, and to theories linking citizenship to individual recognition.

In addition to increasing the surveillance capacity of the state, the USA PATRIOT Act criminalizes individuals who inadvertently fund terrorism through donations to charitable organizations. It is not just individuals who commit terrorist acts who are punished, but anyone associated with terrorism.

QUESTION: What leeway do charitable donors actually have to prove lack of intent? Worth verifying the legal boundaries and any cases of prosecutions of inadvertent donors.

Muslim women who wear the hijab are thus stuck in between a rock and a hard place. They self-surveil because they are under scrutiny, yet they also see this as an opportunity to exert their agency and redefine the meanings associated with Islam. They try desperately to contest the stereotype of a Muslim through their behavior and actions while under surveillance.

Muslim American men told me one of the biggest changes they experienced after 9/11 was feeling they had to censor themselves in public spaces. Because Muslim men were more likely to be targeted by the state via TSA lists at airports and were not under the same kind of surveillance by strangers as Muslim women who wear the hijab, their responses to racialized surveillance differed. They told me they avoided discussing particular topics, such as religion or foreign policy, out of fear of being identified as a Muslim and associated or seen as sympathizing with terrorism. … For Muslim men, an increase in their religiosity can also incite suspicion about Muslim men.

Racialized surveillance can become deeply internalized when Muslim American children are taught to self-discipline and self-surveil. At a young age, Muslim American youth are learning they are not like other American children but are held to different standards. One of the consequences of this racialization is the denial of individuality. Muslim Americans are denied their individuality in public spaces and are forced to navigate society within the confines of an externally imposed collective identity. Because individualism is a key characteristic of American citizenship, when people are denied their individuality but instead are treated as a collective, they do not enjoy the privileges that citizenship should afford.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialized surveillance of minority groups and how internalized self-policing shapes civic identity.

Being labeled as oppressed is in itself a form of oppression that Muslim women who wear the hijab encounter frequently. They are under pressure to demonstrate that they are not voiceless but have agency. This stereotype of them as antifeminist and weak is humiliating for them. By countering this impression, they are doing two things simultaneously. First, they are regaining their dignity by making their agency visible. Second, they are also contesting the prevalent notion that Muslim men are abusive.

XREF: Reverses the typical Western feminist framing of the hijab as purely a symbol of oppression toward a view of the label itself as the oppressive force.

By altering their appearances, Muslim women are trying to limit their racial experiences in public spaces. The uncomfortable gaze and the scowling looks create a hostile environment they have to navigate. Ironically, Muslim women feel they lack choice or free will in how they dress not because Muslim men oppress them, but because they are under the watchful eye of their fellow citizens.

XREF: Ties to broader literatures on the surveilling gaze, racialized dress in public space, and how minority groups code-switch appearance for safety.

Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, a Muslim woman who wears the hijab was physically attacked by a man in Boston. Several of the Muslim women I interviewed told me they avoided going out in public when not necessary out of fear for their safety. … For many Muslim women who wear the hijab, the act of avoiding public spaces when an event occurs, such as a terrorist attack, results in self-imposed house arrest. The fear for their physical welfare limits their mobility in public spaces. Private citizens are able to place boundaries on public spaces through social interactions with Muslim Americans. They accomplish this by creating a hostile and unwelcoming environment.

DEFINE: Introduces the idea that private citizens can effectively restrict public space through creating hostile environments, extending the boundary concept to private social actors.

According to Brayne, system avoidance is when individuals who are subjected to hypersurveillance avoid surveilling institutions like medical and financial organizations (Brayne 2014). There are signs in this chapter that Muslim Americans are beginning to exhibit this behavior. When Muslim men go to great lengths to silence themselves because they want to downplay or make invisible their religious identity in order to avoid surveillance, it may very well be a sign that they will also avoid institutions that they fear may surveil them. When organizations, like CAIR, that are supposed to help advocate for Muslims are also under surveillance, Muslims are left even more vulnerable, with little recourse for social justice. In many ways, it feels as if Muslims have nowhere to go.

XREF: Connects to the concept of system avoidance as studied by Brayne, and to broader sociology of surveillance.

A surveillance society thrives when individual privacy is sacrificed for national security. In a surveillance society, it is not just the state and private citizens who surveil. It is only complete when those surveilled begin to self-surveil.

DEFINE: Clarifies what makes a surveillance society 'complete' — self-surveillance, not just state monitoring.

A surveillance society thrives when individual privacy is sacrificed for national security. In a surveillance society, it is not just the state and private citizens who surveil. It is only complete when those surveilled begin to self-surveil. To clarify, not everyone has an equal chance of being surveilled. The state designates which bodies require vigilant monitoring, and a surveillance society becomes oppressive when it unfairly monitors and watches particular groups of people based on their race, ethnicity, religion, and gender, resulting in a loss of privacy and consequently one's civil liberties.

DEFINE: Defines a surveillance society as reaching full form only through internalized self-surveillance, not just state monitoring.

Muslim women described the various ways they altered their behavior and dress in public spaces because of their constant surveillance. They told me stories of how they were careful to wear colorful hijabs and smiled more often in public to avoid appearing morose or oppressed. They attempted to reclaim their American identity while wearing the hijab because they knew they were being surveilled.

QUESTION: How does the psychological load of constant performance under surveillance affect long-term identity and belonging?

Many women told me they felt it was their duty as Muslims to represent Islam in a positive light and in order to counter the stereotypes that have racialized them. Monitoring one's behavior and actions like this is a form of self-discipline enacted by the threat of surveillance.

DEFINE: Links community self-policing to the mechanism of surveillance discipline, explaining how stereotypes become internalized as behavioral regulation. Builds on: "Surveillance completes when the surveilled begin self-monitoring."

For many Muslim women who wear the hijab, the act of avoiding public spaces when an event occurs, such as a terrorist attack, results in self-imposed house arrest. The fear for their physical welfare limits their mobility in public spaces. Private citizens are able to place boundaries on public spaces through social interactions with Muslim Americans. They accomplish this by creating a hostile and unwelcoming environment.

Builds on: "Racialization denies citizenship privileges by eclipsing individual identity."

Muslim women who wear the hijab are under a lot of pressure to change or control their dress because of fear of violence from strangers and pressure from family members and loved ones who want to protect them. The interviews I conducted confirm Lori Peek's (2012) findings that refusing to take off the hijab can create stress for Muslim women with their family members.

Several of the Muslim women I interviewed admitted they tried to dismantle the myth that they were oppressed by wearing colorful hijabs. They felt darker colors made them appear oppressed and morbid to their fellow citizens. … By changing the color of her hijab, Ayesha was responding to her surveillance. She altered her dress because the gaze made her so uncomfortable that she wanted to avoid it, exemplifying how powerful discipline can be. In this case, external surveillance became internalized and self-imposed. Ayesha did not feel she had the freedom to dress as she would like but instead had to think carefully about what she would wear in order to avoid the gaze on her body.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's concept of panopticism and the internalization of disciplinary power.

Private citizens, through their surveillance of Muslim women’s bodies, create an environment where Muslim women feel pressure to alter and change their dress because of these antagonistic stares. The act of changing one’s attire to disrupt the gaze reveals that although there is a power dynamic in these social interactions, Muslim American women still exert some agency in response to their surveillance. By altering their appearances, Muslim women are trying to limit their racial experiences in public spaces. The uncomfortable gaze and the scowling looks create a hostile environment they have to navigate. Ironically, Muslim women feel they lack choice or free will in how they dress not because Muslim men oppress them, but because they are under the watchful eye of their fellow citizens. Controlling for dress is one of the ways Muslim women participate in the discipline of their own bodies while they rearticulate what it means to wear the hijab.

Being labeled as oppressed is in itself a form of oppression that Muslim women who wear the hijab encounter frequently. They are under pressure to demonstrate that they are not voiceless but have agency. This stereotype of them as antifeminist and weak is humiliating for them. By countering this impression, they are doing two things simultaneously. First, they are regaining their dignity by making their agency visible. Second, they are also contesting the prevalent notion that Muslim men are abusive. In this way, not only are Muslim women rearticulating what it means to be a Muslim woman; they are also redefining and challenging common sense understandings of who a Muslim man is—that is, someone who oppresses them or subjugates them.

SEED: This counterintuitive framing — that liberation discourse can itself be a form of oppression — could anchor a piece on allyship, saviorism, or the unintended harms of well-meaning advocacy.

Nazia, a naturalized citizen who is Indian American, no longer wears the hijab, but when she did, she tried to positively represent Islam while wearing it. In order to dismantle the association of Islam with violence and terror, Nazia felt she had to create a new association with Islam. … Nazia's comment highlights that Muslim women are under constant pressure to demonstrate that they are ordinary Americans; they have to do a lot of work to demonstrate that they are just like everyone else. They are aware of their power to confirm or dismiss racialized understandings of their bodies through their actions and dress. They take cues from their interactions with private citizens and shift their behavior accordingly. Muslim women carry with them the responsibility of dismantling myths about Muslims, which often places limitations on their behaviors.

Maham: I am very particular about my actions because I am identified as a Muslim. I think very carefully before I make any action, because I know that I’m not just representing me [because] the majority of the world doesn’t see me as me. They see me as, “This is this Muslim woman. She obviously is. She’s got that scarf on, and she just did this. Can you believe it?” Or, “Oh, wow. She did that. Isn’t that wonderful?” I am the poster child for my religion, as far as I’m concerned, so you have to be that much more careful.

Muslim women who wear the hijab are thus stuck in between a rock and a hard place. They self-surveil because they are under scrutiny, yet they also see this as an opportunity to exert their agency and redefine the meanings associated with Islam.

Not only do Muslims self-surveil; they also surveil one another. Reema, a single mother, told me how she monitors her kids' behavior as well.

Irum told me that most of the volunteers for this organization were women as opposed to men, reflecting the gendered nature of this type of work.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on the gendered division of care work and emotional labor.

It was her identity as a mother that drove her to become a sort of ambassador of Islam. In her studies on gender and work, Hochschild (2001; 2003) reveals that even when women are employed in the labor sector along with their husbands, they come home to do the unseen and unpaid labor of childcare, housework, and community service. As mothers, Muslim women were driven to make these spaces more inclusive for their families. They know the impact anti-Muslim sentiments can have on their children's lives growing up in America. They wanted to protect their children from this racialization.

XREF: Connects to Hochschild's "second shift" concept and broader feminist sociology literature on gendered household labor division.

Volunteering by Muslim women is a gendered form of resistance to racialization. Because they are more likely to encounter racism through their interactions with their fellow private citizens, they seek to feel some sense of control over this interaction.

Because Muslim women were not surveilled by the state like Muslim men, they felt more agency in resisting their racialization. Muslim women work to rearticulate the narrative that surrounds Muslims in America through their actions in public spaces. These efforts did not come without a price. Muslim women often felt exhausted and stressed because of this responsibility that has been placed on their bodies.

Another common sentiment expressed by Muslim women was how surveillance induced stress in their lives. Arab Muslims report high rates of depression and anxiety since 9/11 (Abu-Raiya et al. 2011). Some of the Muslim women I talked to admitted they felt stress because of their surveillance and the need to respond to it. The pressure to represent an entire collective in a positive way eroded Muslim women's individuality, causing them emotional stress, tension, and strain.

QUESTION: Relevant to ongoing discussions about minority communities bearing the burden of representing their collective under state surveillance.

Maryam's fear reflects the impact surveillance has on American citizens. Muslim Americans did not feel the protection that citizenship should entail but rather worried the state could detain them and deny them due process because of their association with terror. The fear of being deported and detained comes with a psychological cost.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on surveillance and minority communities, and to the psychological toll of state suspicion.

The USA PATRIOT Act brought back some of the language surrounding patriotism that was used to justify the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II (Cole 2003). Specifically, the language used in the Enemy Alien Act, enacted in 1798, gives the president the authority to deport, detain, or expel any citizen of a country at war with the United States (Cole 2003). This act was a precursor to the internment of Japanese noncitizens and citizens alike. Muslims recognize that if another terrorist attack on the scale of the 9/11 occurs on American soil again, they could be detained and deported without due process or even interned.

XREF: Connects to Cole's work on constitutional law and the Enemy Alien Act lineage; parallels historical cycles of ethnic profiling in U.S. national security.

This fear is one of the motivating factors that drove Maryam to actively work to counter the racialization of Muslims. Maryam volunteered for a few Muslim organizations in the Chicago area that did work to dismantle the stereotypes of Muslims, such as by hosting community events and lectures on Islam. As a mother of young children, she was compelled to do this work to ensure her children would grow up in a society that accepted their religious identity. But this work did not come without a cost: "It's been a big source of stress for me. I think it's been a big source of stress for a lot of people." Volunteering is time-consuming.

This incident was not an isolated one. Her children were with her at a restaurant when another customer yelled at them to "go back home." Nasreen told me how her children internalized these collective experiences.

XREF: Plausibly connects to literature on racial socialization and the psychological effects of discrimination on children.

Nasreen: And that's when my kids felt like, where do we belong? And they would tell me, "Mom, where do we belong? What are we? What are we? Are we Arab? Are we American? Because we're"—and I'll never forget this—one of my daughters says, "We're terrorists."

A number of studies on discrimination and mental health found that discrimination experienced by Arab Americans who are Muslim since 9/11 is correlated with an increase in psychological stress (Moradi and Hasan 2004; El-Sayed and Galea 2009). Surveillance that is triggered by racialized understandings of bodies creates a hostile environment, which can lead to an increase in hypertension, stress, and depression. There is a psychological cost that young people endure because of their racialization. The term racial battle fatigue, psychological stress responses that people endure from exposure to constant racial microaggressions, could accurately reflect what Muslim Americans go through because of their racialization (Smith, Allen, and Danley 2007).

XREF: Connects to literature on racial battle fatigue and the health effects of discrimination, extending Black racial-stress frameworks to Arab/Muslim Americans.

Aziz is unable to talk about his political beliefs or his views on U.S. foreign policy because he worries he will be misunderstood or misrepresented. He is cognizant that although he is an American citizen, he has been marked as a foreign other and a potential threat. His allegiance can be questioned easily because of his religious identity. For Muslim men, an increase in their religiosity can also incite suspicion about Muslim men. Aziz gets uncomfortable when he is asked questions about his religion at work because he worries that he is being “bucketed” as a type of Muslim, the “bad” kind. Aziz self-surveils through silencing himself because of the anxiety of surveillance. The inability to contribute to public discourse is a form of political disempowerment.

In a society where citizenship has a history of being associated with whiteness and Christianity and where a heightened sense of nationalism reflects the overall political tone, many Muslim American men are afraid to speak openly against the government because they did not want to be seen as terrorist sympathizers, as Adil's testimony highlights. This fear of being associated with terrorism is not mere paranoia but steeped in the political and cultural context in the United States after 9/11. In addition to increasing the surveillance capacity of the state, the USA PATRIOT Act criminalizes individuals who inadvertently fund terrorism through donations to charitable organizations. It is not just individuals who commit terrorist acts who are punished, but anyone associated with terrorism.

This experience highlights the contradiction in the dominant notion that Muslim men force their wives or kids to wear the hijab. In this example, Reema's husband desperately wanted to avoid any surveillance or negative interactions, so he tried to persuade his wife to remove her hijab. The fear that Muslim men felt from the state was real, and the attempt to control Reema's dress reflected the stark difference in how men responded to their surveillance compared to women. Muslim men did not express the desire to transform the narrative of Muslims through their actions. Instead, they wanted to make invisible their religious identity. Their participation in self-surveillance reveals how citizenship is racialized in America.

QUESTION: Why do Muslim men opt for invisibility while women bear the visible marker of faith? This gendered asymmetry in surveillance response deserves deeper exploration.

The speech highlighted something important. For Muslims to be seen as American, they have to do extraordinary things to demonstrate their patriotism and loyalty to the United States. Former president Bill Clinton's speech at the convention also drew attention to this sentiment that Muslims have to prove they are loyal and patriotic citizens. He said, “If you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together, we want you” (Beinart 2016). Muslim Americans must pass a litmus test on their patriotism before they are able to claim their American identity.

QUESTION: What specific 'extraordinary things' are expected, and how do these expectations compare across other minority groups?

Saleem: I feel I was a bit naive, in the sense that I thought that Americans were more open-minded, more accepting of people from other cultures. And I don't know whether it's my experience in the Midwest—whether it's different on the coasts. But I feel like I was naive in the sense that I was expecting people to be more open, more curious, more liberal, and they're not. … Saleem has been stopped and searched several times at airports. He was called a fascist by a patient in the hospital. He told me that when he applied for a job he received an email saying the position was for American citizens only. When he told them he was an American citizen, the person refused to believe him. He felt this treatment was because he has a Muslim name. As a result, Saleem feels rejected from his American identity: “There are certain times where I feel extremely alienated from mainstream America, and I know that a lot of minorities do . . . [Even] despite the fact that I'm a professional—you know, middle-upper class.”

Because Aziz felt he was constantly judged, he told me he has changed some of his actions. For example, after a terrorist attack in India, he made sure to contact his friend who grew up in India to inquire about his family's safety in order to show him he condemned the terrorist attack. He knew his friend was not from the region where the attack occurred, but he also worried his friend would have negative feelings toward him because he was Muslim. September 11th brought an intense questioning of citizenship for South Asian and Arab Muslims. Aziz's interview revealed that his citizenship was contested because his religious identity marked him as a foreigner.

Although the purpose of these Muslim organizations is to work hard to protect the civil liberties of Muslims in the United States, their status is also tenuous. The state has questioned Muslim organizations, such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), about their associations with terrorism in an attempt to discredit their efforts (Shane 2011). The Snowden leak also revealed that Nihad Awad, the executive director for CAIR, was under intense surveillance by the U.S. government. If the civil rights organizations that are supposed to provide Muslims with civil liberties protections are being surveilled, it is no wonder that Muslim American men feel they are unable to speak out about the injustices they experience. Because they work to avoid any associations with terrorism, they may be deterred from participating in efforts to stop their surveillance if there is a threat the organization or group could be targeted for even more surveillance or marked as a terrorist organization.

Because religious symbols are gendered, the experiences of Muslim women and men with racialization do not mirror one another. It is therefore imperative to understand the locations where gender, religion, and race intersect. In addition to understanding how Muslims are racialized differentially, as I chronicle in the previous chapters, scholars should also recognize how responses to racialization are also gendered.

But Ibrahim Cooper, a spokesperson for the Council on American Islamic Relations, worries this information could be used to surveil that population: "Unfortunately in today's environment, we have to have concerns about the possible misuse of this data. We've had too many problems in the post-9/11 era when the American government singles out Arab Americans or Muslim Americans for profiling" (cited in Bahrampour 2016).

QUESTION: This raises the question of whether demographic data collection serves progressive policy goals or enables state targeting of vulnerable communities.

The term invisible minority reflects how many Arabs have been marginalized, yet their experiences with racism have largely been ignored because they are racially classified as white according to the U.S. Census (Tehranian 2010).

QUESTION: How would data collection and civil rights protections shift if Arabs were counted as a distinct racial category? This tension between classification and lived experience invites further investigation.

Although in this book I show that South Asians and Arabs encounter similar experiences because they are Muslim, African American Muslims' encounters with a racialized religious identity may differ because of their unique history with racism in the United States.

XREF: Connects to intersectionality theory and how overlapping identities shape discrimination experiences differently.

Although this language may seem inclusive, it only presents Muslims in relation to threats of terror. Muslims are represented as useful to society because they will help identify the potential terrorists. Thus the construction of whiteness and the rejection of Muslims from it is a shared ideology among liberal and conservative whites.

While one may experience social isolation or questions about one's American identity such as "Where are you really from?" because of an ethnic identity, a Muslim identity incites hostility like "Go back to where you came from!" As the previous chapters show, Muslim bodies are subjected to surveillance by both the state and their fellow private citizens. In this era of hypersurveillance, South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans are under undue stress to prove they are American.

QUESTION: This suggests a meaningful distinction between how ethnic vs. religious identity is perceived in America — worth exploring how that plays out across other religious minority groups.

Many of the experiences I documented happened under the Obama administration—a Democratic one. Policies on national security that target Muslims have not been radically different under a Democratic president compare to a Republican one. Obama did not eliminate the USA PATRIOT Act or stop the hypersurveillance of Muslims; in fact, the surveillance of Muslims thrived under the Obama administration.

XREF: Challenges the partisan assumption that civil liberties protections differ sharply across parties; connects to broader debates about the continuity of national security policy.

There are political, economic, and social motivations behind the process of racialization. For example, the need to maintain a surveillance industry is driven by the idea that terrorism is one of the greatest threats to Americans. This surveillance industry needs bodies to watch and monitor; therefore racializing a Muslim body as a potential terrorist becomes a necessity to keep the surveillance industry well resourced.

QUESTION: To what extent do security industries actively manufacture threats to justify their own funding and expansion? This raises questions about institutional incentive structures behind racial profiling.

The Muslim Americans I interviewed lived in suburban neighborhoods and had access to resourced public and private schools. They were middleto upper-middle-class citizens who had access to resources that have historically been denied to many African Americans due to structural racism, like residential racial segregation and disparities in the American public education system. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the borders of the United States to professionals and highly educated immigrants from Pakistan, India, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, and so South Asians and Arabs migrated to the United States after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, which subjected housing and employment practices to legal action if they were discriminatory in practice.

XREF: Connects to comparative analysis of Muslim American and African American class positions — a through-line relevant to the book's broader argument about race and class.

Therefore, this book does not contend that Muslim has become a race but rather that South Asians and Arabs who are Muslims are moving down the racial hierarchy because of the racialization of their Muslim identity.

DEFINE: Clarifies the book's thesis: Islam is not becoming a race per se, but Muslim identity is being racialized, shifting racial standing.

Maryam's statement clearly highlights the impact the hijab has on one's racial identity: "Before I started wearing the hijab, I never felt like a minority. It wasn't until after I started to wear the hijab that I realized what it was like to be a minority in this country." The hijab stripped her of her whiteness.

DEFINE: Illustrates how racial identity is socially constructed through visible markers, here the hijab altering perceived whiteness.

The term Islamophobia is widely used to capture the anti-Muslim sentiments that have been on the rise since 9/11. But Islamophobia has not always been understood as a form of racism. Runnymede Trust defined the term in 1997 as a “fear of Islam” (Richardson 1997). Since 9/11, there has been a spike in studies on Islamophobia, with the majority of them treating Islamophobia and racism as distinct concepts (Garner and Selod 2015), but in the last few years, there has been a growing body of scholarship that situates Islamophobia as having everything to do with race and racism of Muslims (Meer and Modood 2010; Meer 2013; Tyrer 2013; Garner and Selod 2015; Love 2017).

DEFINE: Clarifies the original 1997 Runnymede Trust definition of Islamophobia as 'fear of Islam' and traces its evolution into a racial concept.

Because race in the United States has typically been understood as solely a black-and-white paradigm, there is a tendency to equate Muslim experiences as racial only if they can be compared neatly to black experiences in the United States. This way of thinking is reflected in Samuel Jackson’s claim. But Jackson’s statement is problematic because it relies on the assumption that Muslims are not already black. African Americans make up the largest American-born Muslim population in the United States (Pew Research Center 2011).

XREF: Challenges the black-and-white racial paradigm by showing Muslim and black identities overlap substantially.

Glenn argues that it is not just the state who acts as a gatekeeper of citizenship but also private citizens. She states that formal citizenship pertains to the law and polity, while substantive citizenship encompasses the ability to act upon the rights citizenship entails: “Citizenship is not just a matter of formal legal status; it is a matter of belonging, including recognition by other members of the community.

This act of denying Muslims their American identity is a racializing act and is accomplished through hypersurveillance. The belief that to be American is to be white is resurfacing as Muslims are made to feel they are incapable of being loyal to America because their bodies are equated with terror and their values are somehow antithetical to Western or American ones.

But we are not defined by just one identity but by our multiple intersecting identities, and the racial hierarchy is not static. Therefore, this book does not contend that Muslim has become a race but rather that South Asians and Arabs who are Muslims are moving down the racial hierarchy because of the racialization of their Muslim identity.

DEFINE: Clarifies the book's thesis: Muslim is not becoming a race itself, but Muslim identity is being racialized, shifting these groups downward in a non-static racial hierarchy. Builds on: "Census data collection may enable surveillance of Muslim Americans."

The term invisible minority reflects how many Arabs have been marginalized, yet their experiences with racism have largely been ignored because they are racially classified as white according to the U.S. Census (Tehranian 2010). … I continue with this work by identifying how the racialization of a Muslim identity became institutionalized by the state and was maintained by private citizens and Muslims themselves.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on the racialization of Muslim and Arab identities in post-9/11 America. Builds on: "Census data collection may enable surveillance of Muslim Americans."

When identified as Muslims, whether through the hijab or a Muslim name, the racial classification as white stops applying to Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqi Americans. Whiteness comes with certain benefits, like being able to walk into a store without being stared at, monitored, or verbally harassed; boarding a flight in the airport without having your body searched several times, and not having to monitor what you say out of fear that someone will report you to law enforcement. It affords individuals these tangible material and social benefits (Harris 1993). … Arabs who are Muslim are being ejected from the racial classification of white because their religious identity marks them as the other, and South Asian Muslims are simultaneously losing their footing as honorary whites. The men and women I interviewed enjoyed class privilege, but in a society deeply invested in a war to combat and prevent terror, their socioeconomic status does not protect them from this differential treatment in society.

DEFINE: Shows how 'white' is a conditional social classification, not a fixed ethnic identity — religion can eject someone from it. XREF: Connects to scholarship on racial formation and how race is socially constructed rather than biological.

Racializing Muslims is not a partisan practice but rather one that is motivated by political gain. It is a shared act that occurs in what appear to be liberal cities like Chicago as well as more conservative cities like Dallas and Fort Worth. The Muslim Americans I interviewed had similar encounters in both cities. Many of the experiences I documented happened under the Obama administration—a Democratic one. Policies on national security that target Muslims have not been radically different under a Democratic president compare to a Republican one. Obama did not eliminate the USA PATRIOT Act or stop the hypersurveillance of Muslims; in fact, the surveillance of Muslims thrived under the Obama administration. … While Trump's rhetoric was overt, the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton relied on more subtle and nuanced ways to perpetuate the stereotype that Muslims are only understood as a threat to national security. Clinton said in her first presidential debate, "We need to be cooperating with Muslim nations and with the American Muslim community. They're on the frontlines. They can provide information to us that we might not get anywhere else. They need to have close working cooperation with law enforcement in these communities, not be alienated and pushed away." Although this language may seem inclusive, it only presents Muslims in relation to threats of terror.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how national security and surveillance policies persist across Democratic and Republican administrations, echoing critiques of the security state that outlast party control.

I avoid making the claim that the South Asian and Arab Muslims I interviewed are on the bottom of the racial hierarchy because they still enjoy many of the economic and social privileges that have been historically denied to African Americans. Referring back to Samuel Jackson's comment at the beginning of this chapter, Muslims are not the new black but are moving closer to the bottom of the racial hierarchy, further away from whiteness.

XREF: Connects to Samuel Jackson's 'new black' comment referenced in the chapter, and echoes broader scholarship on Muslim racial positioning in America.

Having a Muslim name or wearing the hijab does not make one more likely to commit acts of terror. An individual's propensity to commit domestic violence and abuse may reveal who is more likely to commit acts of violence in the United States than who is not (Freeman 2017).

QUESTION: Curious how strong this predictive correlation is and whether it covers both lone-wolf and organized terrorism.

The inefficient use of billions of dollars in resources toward surveillance that targets a whole population, the majority of whom are law-abiding citizens, based on racial stereotypes does not prevent terrorism. Instead, it strips citizens of their civil rights and the civil liberties they should be afforded through citizenship. When a society supports national security over civil liberties and expands the power of the state, freedom and democracy are weakened.

QUESTION: Are there credible empirical studies measuring whether population-wide surveillance actually reduces terrorist attacks relative to its costs?

The either/or of civil liberties versus national security is a dangerous one. It produces an ideology that it is OK to sacrifice the rights of some people over others. This way of thinking has led to some of the worst human rights abuses in history, including the internment of Japanese Americans.

XREF: Connects to arguments about the trade-off framing of security versus privacy in surveillance debates.

Statistics show that Americans have a 1 in 45,808 chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist attack, based on data collected from 1975 to 2015 (Nowrasteh 2016). Americans are more likely to die due to health issues, like heart attacks and cancer, or even an animal attack, than from foreign terrorism. Yet the fear of Muslims and terrorism drives support for increased surveillance.

The racialization of Muslims is also tied to social structures and cannot be understood only as a product of the miseducation of the population about Islam. While it is important to educate the public about Islam and Muslims, this alone will not eliminate racism against them. As long as there is economic and political utility to racializing Muslims, it will continue.

According to a report on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) by the Government Accountability Office, violence committed by white supremacists and alt-right groups has resulted in almost the same number of deaths of innocent Americans as those committed by Muslims (Government Accountability Office 2017). The main difference is that Muslim terrorists committed fewer attacks, while domestic white terrorists committed more attacks, killing fewer in each assault. And yet, even with this data, President Trump has said he would revamp the CVE program by only focusing on "radical Islamic terrorism" ignoring the increased violence that is perpetrated by white supremacists, white nationalists, and antigovernment groups.

The covert ways in which the Obama and Bush administrations implemented these policies did not incite protest. Both Bush and Obama utilized rhetoric that made it appear their policies were targeting not Muslims but terrorism. In his State of the Union address in 2002, George W. Bush said of Islam, "Let the skeptics look to Islam's own rich history—with its centuries of learning, and tolerance, and progress" (CNN 2015). Similarly, Obama avoided using the term Islamic radical terrorism in an attempt to distinguish Islam from terrorism. The rhetoric used by both presidents presented to the public the notion that Islam and Muslims were not targets of discrimination or racism by the state but rather that these policies were focused on terror. In contrast, the public today is more aware that Trump's overt anti-Muslim and Islamophobic rhetoric is racist toward Muslims.

XREF: Connects to literature on how euphemistic framing legitimizes state discrimination; parallels research on dog-whistle politics.

While Muslims are more aggressively targeted, as I've shown, both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama participated in surveillance of Muslims. Yet there were no protests at airports when Bush prevented Muslim noncitizens from twenty-four countries from entering the United States immediately after 9/11. The covert ways in which the Obama and Bush administrations implemented these policies did not incite protest. Both Bush and Obama utilized rhetoric that made it appear their policies were targeting not Muslims but terrorism.

But these practices, as shown in this book, are not effective in reducing terrorism but instead create racial hierarchies. Statistics show that Americans have a 1 in 45,808 chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist attack, based on data collected from 1975 to 2015 (Nowrasteh 2016). Americans are more likely to die due to health issues, like heart attacks and cancer, or even an animal attack, than from foreign terrorism. Yet the fear of Muslims and terrorism drives support for increased surveillance.

XREF: Relates to surveillance-state scholarship and Islamophobia literature on how security regimes encode race.

According to a report on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) by the Government Accountability Office, violence committed by white supremacists and alt-right groups has resulted in almost the same number of deaths of innocent Americans as those committed by Muslims (Government Accountability Office 2017). The main difference is that Muslim terrorists committed fewer attacks, while domestic white terrorists committed more attacks, killing fewer in each assault.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about which domestic threat level is prioritized by law enforcement and media coverage.

I also asked about race and ethnicity and what role each played in their daily lives in order to understand which experiences should be attributed to their races or ethnicities and which were related to their religious identity.

XREF: This connects to the reader's own interview/methodology practice, distinguishing overlapping identity dimensions.

The stereotype of black women as unfit mothers can be seen through the contrasting experiences of two women, Lenore Skenazy and Debra Harrell. In July 2014, Debra Harrell, a black working mother, was arrested and her nine-year-old daughter was taken away from her by the state because she sent her daughter to the park to play alone while she worked at McDonalds. She gave her daughter a cell phone but did not want to leave her alone in their home because of a recent burglary that happened in her building (CBS/AP 2014). In 2008, a few years earlier, Lenore Skenazy, a white middle-class mother and author, wrote a story about how she allowed her nine-year-old son to ride the train in New York City alone. While both mothers were criticized for their parenting, Debra Harrell was criminalized while Lenore Skenazy was credited with starting a new parenting philosophy, free-range parenting (Skenazy 2015).

SEED: This stark juxtaposition of two nearly identical parenting decisions with opposite outcomes is a compelling essay angle on how the free-range parenting movement is racially coded and selectively embraced. XREF: Connects to broader research on racial disparities in Child Protective Services involvement and the criminalization of Black motherhood versus valorization of white parenting philosophies.

Although Syrian Christians were able to have some success accessing whiteness, particularly through naturalization, they were also not treated as fully white in the United States. Sarah Gualtieri (2009) chronicles the experiences of Syrian immigrants and their status as Syrians and Americans in the early twentieth century in Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora.

XREF: Relates to racial formation theory and the construction of whiteness in US immigration law, connecting to the broader history of naturalization and racial prerequisites. Builds on: "Arab Americans gained citizenship via legal whiteness in 1943"

Because there is a large Palestinian presence in Chicago, the Palestinian Muslims I interviewed socialized amongst themselves. The same was true for the Pakistani and Indian Muslim communities in both Chicago and the Dallas/Fort Worth area. While Pakistanis and Indians would mix, most of the people I talked to were married to someone who was also from their ethnic background. The “Muslim first” classification in some ways could be seen as a response to the racialization of a Muslim identity, but socioeconomic status and migratory patterns still matter in terms of whether or not South Asian and Arab Muslims are integrated.

XREF: Contrasts with the 'Muslim first' label, showing interethnic marriage remains limited even when religious identity is invoked.

This anti-sharia fear is one that is being used to garner fear of Muslims in America. The belief is that Muslims are trying to institute Islamic law in America, which is not the case. Anti-Muslim activists like Gabriel Brigitte from ACT for America promotes the idea that Muslims are trying to Islamicize America through sharia law. Politicians, like the mayor of Irving, have introduced anti-sharia bills to legislator partially for political support from their constituents who fear Muslims in America.

XREF: Relates to broader Islamophobia research and the moral panic literature on immigrant groups.

It should be noted that Sikhs have continued to be mislabeled as Muslims since 9/11 and have therefore been consistent targets of Islamophobia. Individuals with darker skin tones may experience anti-Muslim harassment after a terrorist attack or during a politically charged election cycle. In the Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy, David Tyrer argues this just confirms how Muslims are raced, because the visual religious cues worn by Sikhs are misinterpreted as Muslim.

XREF: Connects to the broader concept of Islamophobia as a racialized phenomenon, similar to Edward Said's orientalism and other work on racialized religion.

Interviews were done before the implementation of body scanners at airports. These testimonies reflect Muslim American men's and women's experiences with metal detectors and body searches by TSA agents.

None of the Muslim women I interviewed mentioned they were on a list and the majority traveled with Muslim men, indicating this may have been an anomaly.

QUESTION: The study's sample may not be representative; whether this anomaly reflects broader patterns is uncertain given self-selection in interviewees.

Immediately after a crisis, like a terrorist attack, darker-skinned men are targeted by the public as threats. This is best exemplified in the cases of Indian men who were attacked after 9/11 because they were mistaken for Muslims or Arabs. The misidentification of Sikhs is another example of this, which both Erik Love (2017) and David Tyrer (2013) note in their books. Because Sikhs wear the turban, they are often misrecognized as Muslim. While I do not mean to downplay their experiences, in the time period I examined, Muslim men were not targeted by strangers in the same way that women who wear the hijab were. Strangers did not consistently harass them in public because of their skin tone.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on post-9/11 racial profiling and misrecognition, including Love (2017) and Tyrer (2013) on Sikh misidentification.

The Stop Islamization of America campaign organized by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer rallied around preventing the building of the Park 51 Islamic center near the World Trade Center site. They have been classified as a hate group that perpetuates Islamophobia in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Terrorist attacks in Europe have been used by anti-Muslim politicians and hate groups in the United States to justify banning Muslims, bring back internment camps, and deport and detain them.

While Will Smith coined the term to discuss African American males’ experiences on predominantly white college campuses, the term is useful to understand how Muslims too experience stress as a result of their racialization.

XREF: Connects to broader racialization and minority stress literatures (e.g., Claude Steele's stereotype threat, critical race theory).

Hughey (2012) shows how groups with what would appear to be opposing political viewpoints, like white nationalists and white anti-racists, actually make meaning of whiteness via similar ideologies on race. It is important to draw on this work because it can be used to show that anti-Muslim sentiments are pervasive and not limited to white Southern Republicans.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 2009. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics .” In Feminist Legal Studies. Edited by Joanne Conaghan. New York: Routledge, 57–80.

XREF: This references Crenshaw's foundational intersectionality work, which connects to broader feminist legal theory and critical race studies.