"Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!"
Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11
This article is adapted from "The Rules of Forced Engagement:
Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San
Francisco Post-9/11," which originally appeared in Cultural
Dynamics, Volume 18, No. 3, November 2006. It is reprinted with
permission from Sage Publications.
In an October 2005 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy,
George W. Bush used the phrase "Islamo-fascism" in defining the "enemy
of the nation" in the "war on terror." He argued that, "These extremists
distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against
Christians and Jews and Hindus and also against Muslims from other
traditions, who they regard as heretics. The murderous ideology of the
Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. These
militants are not just the enemies of America, or the enemies of Iraq,
they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity."[1] Bush's
spokesman, Tony Snow, explained that Bush uses the term
"Islamo-fascists" in order to clarify that the war on terror does not
apply to all or most Muslims, but to tiny factions.[2] Since the attacks
of September 11, 2001, Bush has repeatedly claimed that "this is not a
war against Islam" and that the "war on terror" is a confrontation with
a particularly militant Islamic ideology. Yet federal government
discourses coupled with the local and global implementation of the "war
on terror" tell a different story—a story of an open-ended, arbitrary
war against a wide range of individuals and communities.
This essay provides a historically situated, ethnographic account of
the ways in which "the war on terror" took on local form within the
particular "anthropological location" of Arab immigrant communities in
the San Francisco Bay Area of California within the first two years
following September 11, 2001. I argue that the post-9/11 backlash has
been constituted by an interplay between two racial logics: cultural
racism and nation-based racism. Borrowing from Minoo Moallem and
Étienne Balibar, I refer to "cultural racism" as a process of Othering
that constructs perceived cultural (e.g., Arab), religious (e.g.,
Muslim), or civilizational (e.g., Arab and/or Muslim) differences as
natural and insurmountable.[3]
In the context of my field research, the
term "cultural racism" helps to explain cases in which violence or
harassment has been justified on the basis that persons who were
perceived to be "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" were rendered as inherently
connected to a backward, inferior, and potentially threatening Arab
culture, Muslim religion, or Arab Muslim civilization. I use the term
"nation-based racism" to refer to the construction of particular
immigrants as different than—and inferior to—whites based on the
conception that "they" are foreign and therefore embody a "potentiality
for criminality and/or immorality" and must be "evicted, eliminated, or
controlled."[4] In the context of the "war on terror," the interplay
between culture-based racism and nation-based racism has articulated
subjects perceived to be "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" not only as a
moral, cultural, and civilizational threat to the "American" nation, but
also as a security threat. The mapping of cultural racism onto
nation-based racism has been critical in generating support for the idea
that going to war "over there" and enacting racism and immigrant
exclusion "over here" are essential to the project of protecting
national security. Under the guise of a "war on terror," cultural and
nation-based racism have operated transnationally to justify U.S.
imperialist ambitions and practices in Muslim majority countries as well
as the targeting and profiling of persons perceived to be "Arab/Middle
Eastern/Muslim" in the diaspora.
Central to my analysis are the ways that cultural and nation-based
racism have intersected with multiple axes of oppression, such as class,
gender, and sexuality. According to Linda Burnham, the idea of a
simultaneity of oppressions "emerged among women of color feminists in
fierce contention with the notion that racial identity trumps all other
identities and that the struggle against racism should take precedence
over all other forms of resistance to inequity."[5]
My research illustrates that intersections between race, class, gender, and
sexuality produced a range of engagements with the "war on terror" among
my interlocutors, depending on their social positioning. For example,
the reproduction of government policies and media discourses in
day-to-day interactions at work, on the bus, or on the streets were more
violent and life threatening in working class urban locations than in
upper-middle-class locations.[6] Because of their class privilege and
the longer duration in which they had been in the United States, middle
to upper-class interlocutors had access to social, cultural, and
economic privileges that allowed them to distance themselves from
proximity to the "potential terrorists" compared to their working-class
counterparts. Alternately, working-class immigrants were often
perceived to be in closer proximity to "geographies of terror" (i.e.,
Muslim-majority nations) and were therefore perceived to be in closer
proximity to the "potential terrorists" than their middle-class
counterparts. Throughout my field sites, socioeconomic class
intersected with race and gender, in that dominant discourses tended to
construct working-class masculinities as agents of terrorism and
working-class femininities as passive victims of "the terrorists."
This essay is based on ethnographic research among Arab immigrants
and Arab Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area between September 2002
and September 2003. Most of the research took place among two Arab/Arab
American community networks: one that includes recent Arab Muslim
immigrants and refugees from Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and North Africa
living in poverty, and the other, middle and upper-class professionals
who are predominantly first and second generation and include Muslims
and Christians from the Levant. The research entailed intensive
interviews and participant observation with thirty board members
representing eight religious, civil rights, and community-based
organizations that serve Arabs/Arab Americans among their
constituencies. I conducted intensive interviews with six lawyers whose
work was vital to community-based efforts in response to the
anti-Arab/South Asian/Muslim backlash in the San Francisco Bay Area in
the aftermath of September 11. I also conducted intensive interviews
and participant observation among fifty community members from various
class, generational, and religious backgrounds and various countries of
origin in the Arab world.
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