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Muslim Victimization in the Contemporary US: Clarifying the Racialization Thesis

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Abstract

This article draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews with Muslim and non-Muslim Americans in 2016 to specify how Muslim “racialization” is shaped by the racial politics of the United States (US). Anti-Muslim bias is not experienced by religious Muslims as a whole, but by people whose bodies are read to be affiliated with the Islamic religion—often erroneously—because of their perceived racial characteristics. Self-identified black, white, and Hispanic Muslims with no visible markers of their religion do not experience anti-Muslim harassment, while non-Muslim Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs who embody an imagined “Muslim look,” cope with fear and aggression from strangers on a daily basis. These findings are notable for two reasons. First, our respondents demonstrate how racialized religion is mutable: they are active in constructing how Islam is read on their bodies in public. Second, our findings demonstrate how hate crime categorization in the US obscures the role that racism plays in religious victimization. We urge scholars who study anti-Muslim acts to include non-Muslims in their analyses, and advocate for the re-conceptualization of identity-based hate crime categories. Excavating the corporeality of criminal victimization in particular can help to understand the ways in which biases are experienced in the contemporary US.

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Notes

  1. This is among what the FBI calls “single-category” bias incidents, or 6063 out of 6121. See the FBI’s reports at: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016 and https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/topic-pages/victims.

  2. See Masucci and Langton (2017) for more detail on hate crimes from 2004 to 2015.

  3. See the 2015 report at https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/hcv0415pr.cfm.

  4. Commonly defined as selecting a group to study because the participants meet particular criteria and then using the findings as evidence for the criteria (King et al. 1994).

  5. We used small focus groups and one-on-one interviews typical of a mixed-methods study, ranging from 40 minutes to over two hours. In one-on-one interviews, we emphasized life history narratives in order to understand the development of respondents’ beliefs and experiences. In focus groups, we were able to develop group knowledge in an attempt to observe the dynamic built among participants (Wilkinson 1999). We employed a “mini” focus group methodology (Morgan 1997), with two to five people from shared social groups, so that participants would be “highly involved” both with one another and with the interview material.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the support of Trinity University, especially the Mellon Initiative 2016, led by Ruben Dupertuis; the Department of Communication; and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. The research would not have been possible without the brilliant collaboration of Drs. Habiba Noor and William Christ.

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This study was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, as a Trinity University Summer Undergraduate Research Institute.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Sarah Beth Kaufman & Hanna Niner

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Kaufman, S.B., Niner, H. Muslim Victimization in the Contemporary US: Clarifying the Racialization Thesis. Crit Crim 27, 485–502 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-09428-2

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