Nadine Naber,
"'Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!' Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11"
(page 6 of 6)
Conclusion
In response to the post-September 11th backlash, the category "Arab,
Muslim, South Asian" has been incorporated into liberal U.S.
multicultural discourses. Consider, for example, diversity initiatives
that have operated to single out Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians as the
only "targeted communities" in the post-9/11 moment.[21]
In such instances, terms such as "targeted communities" have reinforced a
multicultural rainbow where specific marginalized groups are associated
with specific historical moments while occluding the historical
circumstances that produce oppression, marginality, and
institutionalized racism, and overshadowing links between groups that
have shared similar histories of immigrant exclusion and racism. That
many liberal immigrant-rights organizations referred to anti-immigrant
policies underlying the PATRIOT Act of 2001 as an "Arab, Muslim, and
South Asian" issue and "Border Protection" Bill HR4437 of 2006 as a
Latino/a issue—even though both pieces of legislation affected Arabs,
Muslims, South Asians, Latinos/as (and other immigrants as well as
citizens), and even though the intensified anti-immigrant sentiment
sparked by the aftermath of September 11 facilitated support for the
HR4437—exemplifies this pattern.
Transgressing liberal multicultural approaches, many racial justice
activists and scholars have agreed that survivors of 9/11-related
federal government policies and incidents of harassment in the public
sphere tended to be Arab, Muslim, and South Asian, but that this is not
an isolated case of group marginalization. A new racial justice
discourse thus emerged that called attention to anti-Arab/Muslim/South
Asian racism, insisted that racial justice movements take the link
between U.S.-led war in Muslim majority countries and the
marginalization of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the United States
seriously, and linked the targeting of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians
to experiences of other communities with shared histories of oppression,
including, but not limited to, Japanese Americans, Filipinos,
Latinos/as, and African Americans. Yet prevailing articulations of
"race" within U.S. racial and ethnic studies tend to preclude
comparative research and teaching on the links between the racialization
of Arabs, Muslims, Middle Easterners, and South Asians and other
communities that have been historically targeted by racism,
colonization, and state violence.
In the late 1960s, San Francisco State University was the site of the
longest campus strike in the nation's history, spearheaded by the Black
Students Union and the Third World Liberation Front (a coalition of the
Black Students Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the
Filipino-American Students Organization, and El Renacimiento, a
Mexican-American student organization). This movement demanded the
expansion of the college's new Black Studies Department (the nation's
first), the creation of a School of Ethnic Studies, and increased
recruiting and admissions of minority students. On March 21, 1969, this
strike officially came to an end with the establishment of the School of
Ethnic Studies, which included a focus on Asian Americans, Latinos/as
and Native Americans, and an expanded Black Studies Department. This
movement, based on the strategic deployment of the terms "Third World
people" and "people of color," legitimized the establishment and
expansion of ethnic studies programs that place communities with shared
histories of oppression by the United States government at the center of
study, analysis, activism, and empowerment. Yet this paradigm, which
operates according to a 1960s understanding of what constitutes racism
has the potential to limit our categories of analysis to those
established during the height of student movements for ethnic studies in
the 1960s. U.S. women of color feminisms have tended to reify these
categories. Contemporary articulations of this paradigm foreclose
discussions on how the meaning of "race" has continued to shift and
preclude analyses of how "racism" is constantly being remade depending
on the historical context. At the same time, many recent conversations
within U.S. racial and ethnic studies have explored how research on
emergent forms of racialization in relationship to both previous as well
as new and current historical processes might contribute to historically
situated conceptualizations of race and racism in a post-9/11
environment.
In this essay, I have attempted to bring new questions to bear on the
study of race, particularly in terms of analyses of the intersections of
race and gender: What are the implications of continually re-evaluating
our understanding of racialized-gendered identities in light of new and
changing historical moments? What are the possibilities for envisioning
U.S. racial and ethnic studies and U.S. women of color feminisms in ways
that remain connected to the 1960s student and civil rights struggles
through which they were produced, while becoming more attentive to
current gendered-racialization processes? How might becoming attentive
to the gendered-racialization of Arabs, South Asians, and/or Muslims
contribute to explorations of the relationship between race, gender,
colonization, and empire or the relationship between histories of
"internal" U.S. colonialisms and the structures of imperialism, race,
gender, and sexuality that operate against immigrants with whose
homelands the United States is at war?
My research reinforces existing theoretical approaches that tend to
define U.S. race and ethnic studies, ascontending that "race" is
malleable and shifting, racial categories are socially and historically
constructed, and the construction of racial categories is a continuous
process that takes on new and different forms within different
historical moments. It also affirms U.S. women of color feminisms that
call attention to differences within racialized communities (such as
those of class, gender, sexuality, and religion) and contend that
experiences of oppression shaped by both racism and sexism
simultaneously cannot be subsumed within either a feminist framework
that critiques sexism or an antiracist framework that is only critical
of racism.[22] It has also illustrated that research on the gendered
racialization of the "Middle Eastern/Muslim" or the "Arab/Muslim/South
Asian" "enemy within" can generate important new questions, such as: To
what extent does the rhetoric of an endless, fluid "war on terror" that
"knows no boundaries" produce new forms of gendered racialization that
are similarly arbitrary, open-ended, and transgress borders and
particular geographic places?
Endnotes
1. "President
Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for
Democracy," October 6, 2005. [Return to text]
2. Nir, Ori. "Bush Riles Muslims With 'Islamic
Fascist' Remark." The Jewish Daily Forward, August 18, 2006.
[Return to text]
3. See Moallem, Minoo. 2005. Between Warrior
Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of
Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press. Also
see Balibar, Etienne. 1991. "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" In Race,
Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso.
[Return to text]
4. Here, I build upon Kent Ono's concept:
"potential terrorists." Ono, Kent. 2005. "Asian American Studies after
9/11." In Race, Identity and Representation in Education, 2nd ed.,
edited by Cameron McCarthy, Warren C. Richlow, Greg Dimitriadis, and
Nadine Dolby, 443. New York: Routledge. [Return to text]
5. Burnham, Linda. 2001. "Introduction." In Time
to Rise, edited by Linda Burnham, Maylei Blackwell, and Jung Hee Choi.
Berkeley: Women of Color Resource Center, 9.
[Return to text]
6. Naber, Nadine. 2006. "The Rules of Forced
Engagement." Cultural Dynamics (18)3: 235-267. [Return to text]
7. Ashcroft, John. 6 June 2002.
Attorney General Prepared Remarks
on the National Security Entry-Exit System. Washington, D.C. (February 8, 2007). [Return to text]
8. Cainkar, Louise. 2003. "The Impact of the
September 11 Attacks and their Aftermath on Arab and Muslim Communities
in the United States." GSC Quarterly 13 (Summer/Fall): 1.
[Return to text]
9. Amitava Kumar. 2000. Passport Photos.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 74. [Return to text]
10. Ono, Kent A. and John M. Sloop. 2002.
Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition
187. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 33.
[Return to text]
11. Naber, Nadine. 2006. "The Rules of Forced Engagement."
Cultural Dynamics (18)3: 235-267. [Return to text]
12. Ibid. [Return to text]
13. Moallem, Minoo. 2005. Between Warrior Brother
and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy
in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[Return to text]
14. Balibar, Etienne. 1991. "Is There a
'Neo-Racism'?" In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso.
[Return to text]
15. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994.
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York:
Routledge.
[Return to text]
16. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Return to text]
17. Desouky, Eman. 2000. Re-que(e)rying the
Queer: Imagining Queer Arab Women Through the Politics of Marginality
and the Nation.
[Return to text]
18. Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit Rai. 2002. "Monster,
Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile
Patriots." Social Text 20 (3): 126.
[Return to text]
19. Deb and Mustis, 2004, 7. Deb, Trishala and
Rafael Mutis. 2004. "Smoke and Mirrors: Abu Ghraib and the Myth of
Liberation." Colorlife! Magazine, Summer 2004. (February 6, 2006)
[Return to text]
20. Deb and Mustis, Ibid, 6. [Return to text]
21. Lee, Kien S. 2002. "Building Intergroup
Relations after September 11." Analyses of Social Issues and Public
Policy 2 (1): 131Ð141. [Return to text]
22. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43: 1241-1299. [Return to text]
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