faith traditions are denigrated and seen as suspect and un-American. White Christian supremacist projects are rooted in entrenched racial and religious privilege, along with racialized notions of who belongs within the national community. The racialization of religion is a process in which particular religions are associated with certain physical appearances and human differences come to be treated as absolute, fundamental, and heritable, like race. Modern antisemitism, for example, echoes the centuries-old conflation of religion with racial difference as a way of isolating and delegitimizing the Jew as “other.” In the United States, Christianity has been racialized as White in a way that establishes it both as virtuous and superior, while the religions of African, Asian, and Native peoples are racialized by association with phenotypical (racial) features that are seen as markers of savage, uncivilized, exotic, and inferior peoples. The racialization of religion also results in the religious dimension of discrimination becoming obscured or disappearing entirely.42
The racialization of religion occurs in a specific social and historical context. Centuries of European domination over such racially different groups as Asian Buddhists and Hindus, African Muslims and animists, and others has resulted in an entwinement of religious and racial meanings. Those meanings position a variety of faiths together in the colonialist mind as an undifferentiated, racially and religiously inferior group of “heathens.” Racialization thereby leads to essentialism—it reduces individuals to one aspect of their identity and presents a homogeneous, undifferentiated, and static view of migrant religious communities. It can result in religions being conflated with one another, or treated as similar, because of shared racial associations; it can also produce situations of “mistaken identity,” in which the perception that they are members of a given racial group leads to the assumption that they are members of a given religion when they are not.
The most conspicuous example of the racialization of religion today is the association of brown skin with Islam. From the oil shock of 1973 and the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 through the Gulf Wars and the post-9/11 “Global War on Terror,” the West has been confronting “enemies” whose ideology is expressed and explained by reference to their interpretations of Islam. This ideology is racialized via its association with Islam: “Arab” and “Muslim” are used interchangeably and the politics and tactics of terrorist movements are described as “Islamic” by the popular media.43 Edward Said argued that Islam had been turned into the West’s “post-Soviet devil,” replacing “godless Communism” as its sinister global enemy.44 Note that both of these perceived enemies, Communism and Islam, are positioned as the opposite of Christian. More recently, legal scholar Neil Gotanda has argued for making “Muslim” a racial category when examining the law because “[e]qual protection categories in constitutional law are inadequate to describe the racial nature of the Muslim terrorist.”45 In addition to endangering brown Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the racialization of Islam also diminishes it as a global religion, ignoring Muslims who are African American, East and Southeast Asian, and White.
Racialization can create false assumptions about theological similarity among faiths because they are associated with a particular racial group, such as the association of Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Sikhism with South Asian Americans. Aggravated by most Americans’ lack of knowledge about these faiths, this conflation of geographic identity and religious theology generates assumptions that religions with divergent practices, beliefs, and scriptures, are theologically similar due to the racial commonality of their adherents. Sikhism, for example, has been treated as theologically similar to Islam or Hinduism—words such as “offshoot” and “sect” are often used—when it is in fact a revealed religion with its own scripture and historic line of gurus (religious authorities).
The racialization of religion can also produce situations of “mistaken identity,” in which membership in a racial group causes members of one religion to be assumed to be members of another. When this occurs, social trends like Islamophobia can have effects not just on Muslim Americans but also on those mistaken for them because of race. South Asians and others, regardless of their actual religious affiliation, have faced attacks because their race connotes a religious identity that the American public imagines to be disloyal and unpatriotic.46 Sometimes even a “foreign” name is enough to create a target. In the 1970s and 1980s, some Indian Americans with the last name Shah faced harassment as a result of the Iran Hostage Crisis. Shah is a common family name in parts of India. Daily news reporting had made the phase “the Shah of Iran” ubiquitous in US culture; even though the Shah was a US ally, and “Shah” was a title and not a name, the phrase and the name became associated with Iran as a foreign enemy of the US. I have a friend whose family—the Shahs of Shaker Heights, Ohio—received so many telephone calls with death threats that they decided to change and delist their telephone number.
In the months after 9/11, media images of Osama Bin Laden and Afghan Taliban leaders, Muslims who wear a type of turban, customary in parts of Afghan culture, produced the belief that Sikh men were followers of an Islamic sect. Balbar Singh Sodhi, a gas station attendant killed in a “9/11 backlash” attack in Arizona, was a victim of “mistaken identity”—murdered not for being Sikh, but for being mistaken as Muslim.47 In the years since 9/11, Sikh Americans continue to be profiled and targeted for violence as a result of the erroneous association of turbans with Islam. Sikh American scholar Jaideep Singh has identified a new American racial classification, “Apparently Muslim,”48 which involves state action like humiliating searches of turbans performed by airport security and private discrimination in restaurants and other accommodations.49 Whether we diagnose these incidents as symptoms of a lack of information or a disregard for accuracy, the experiences that Sikhs and others, including myself, have had during police stops and airport searches arise from a theological misunderstanding of our brown skin.
The racialization of religion reinforces and exacerbates the marginalization and devaluation of minority religious groups.50 When a belief system is rendered illegitimate, the ideas, images, and items associated with that religion may no longer appear to hold religious value in the eyes of those in power and can be appropriated for a variety of uses. Western appropriation of Hindu terms such as karma and guru can reflect distortions and decontextualizations of the theological meaning of those terms.51 The commodification of religious images and ideas allows the sale of Native American “dream catchers,” statues of the Buddha as home decor, and the replication of religious imagery for secular use—such as placing Hindu god and goddess images on candles, perfume, and clothing. Reducing Hinduism’s vibrant anthropomorphic representation of gods and goddesses to a consumer product permits them to be seen as cartoonish and theologically invalid—“false gods,” in the words of some government officials.52 Scholar Jane Naomi Iwamura reminds us that the “the change in Americans’ perceptions of Asian religions from ‘heathen’ cultures to romanticized traditions should not necessarily be taken as a sign of social progress.… These viewpoints are also shaped by how we have come to know the spiritual East—namely, through mass media representations and channels of consumption. There is much at work in our pursuit of Asian religions, far beyond the noble desire for universal understanding and world peace.”53
One irony in the treatment of these faiths as new and foreign is that some, such as Asian American faith traditions, are of more ancient origin than Christianity. Yet they are perceived as new—even grouped with “new age” beliefs—in mainstream American society. This perception exists precisely because for centuries federal law excluded Asians by favoring Protestant Christianity and Whiteness (and thus immigrants of northern European origins) and by expressly barring Asians from immigration and citizenship.54
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 gave renewed sanction to the White Christian supremacist movement. Even before then, but more so since, virtually every national discussion involving Islam has been framed around questions of national security. Faced with a particular set of political movements around the world, which invoke Islam to rally support for or opposition to various regimes and ideas, the US response has been to reimagine the entire religion as a foreign enemy. The Global War on Terror
