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.

On a global scale, the repeated framing of the aftermath of September 11 as an endless, fluid war has facilitated the Bush administration's conflation of diverse individuals, movements, and historical contexts such as bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, any and all forms of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, Hizballah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda under the rubric "Islamic fundamentalists/Muslim terrorists." It has also justified war on Afghanistan and Iraq, support for Israeli occupation, Israel's war on Lebanon, and the transfer to the Philippines of U.S. troops who have enacted human rights violations against local people under the guise of "saving innocent people from terrorism." Within the geographic borders of the United States, the "war on terror" took on local form in the expansion of anti-immigrant discourses and practices beyond the axes of "illegal criminal" to "evil terrorist enemy within." On April 6, 2002, former attorney general John Ashcroft succinctly captured the federal government's framing of the aftermath of September 11 as a war against terrorists who are everywhere and anywhere with the following statement: "In this new war our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods and public spaces.... Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States."[7]

September 11-related immigration policies have targeted immigrants who fit amorphous characterizations of a "terrorist profile" through FBI investigations and spying, INS police raids, detentions, deportations, and interrogations of community organizations and activists. The INS targeted non-citizens from Muslim-majority countries as well as some individuals from Muslim-majority countries who were naturalized. These tactics were part of the federal government's implementation of a "wide range of domestic, legislative, administrative, and judicial measures in the name of national security and the war on terrorism"[8]. The "war on terror" also justified an intensification of anti-immigrant policies that affected a range of immigrant communities, particularly those historically racialized as nonwhite. For example, in the months following September 11, in San Francisco, the INS passed as local police in an effort to uphold Ashcroft's message that undocumented immigrants are the enemy, and members of local law enforcement are part of the solution. Reflecting on this period, Rosa Hernandez, a Latina community activist, reported in an interview that, "The INS was engaging in random raids at supermarkets, bus stops, and among unlicensed flower vendors." In February 2002, the federal government officially took over airport security. In the San Francisco Bay Area, this meant marking Filipino/a airport screeners as scapegoats in the attacks and laying them off en masse. Improving security meant replacing non-citizen workers with citizens who tended to be retired white military and police who received better pay, more benefits, and more respect. Several scholars and activists have added that the "war on terror" has legitimized an intensification of police brutality within working-class communities of color, exposed low-income students of color to unprecedented levels of military recruitment, and forced massive budget cuts that have disproportionately diminished social services and funding for schools in low-income communities of color.

Among Arab diasporas in the San Francisco Bay Area, September 11-related hate crimes and other forms of harassment in the public sphere disproportionately targeted persons who displayed what dominant government and corporate media discourses often represented as emblems of a constructed "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" identity, including particular kinds of names, appearances, or nations of origin that signified an association with the enemy of the nation. Such identity markers hailed multiple subject positions into the "war on terror" through hate crimes and various forms of violence, harassment, and intimidation in the public sphere—at school, on the bus, at work, at home, and on the streets.

Names and Naming: "Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!"

Repeatedly throughout my research, interlocutors' narratives on harassment in the public sphere included stories in which particular names operated as signifiers of an "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" identity. Teachers and youth group leaders agreed that boys with names such as Mohammed or Osama were disproportionately harassed at school. Consider the following stories: Nayla, a Muslim American youth group leader, recalled an incident where school kids would frequently shout, "Look, Mohammed the terrorist is coming!" when a young boy named Mohammed would enter the playground. Amira, a college student, recalled reading the words, "I hate Mohammed. All Mohammeds should die," on a wall outside the Recreation and Sports Facilities Building at the University of California, Berkeley. Reflecting on difficulties that he and his wife faced in deciding whether or not to name their son Mohammed, Saleh, a small business owner, explained: "After September 11 no one would have thought about naming their son Mohammed in this country if they wanted him to be treated like a normal person. We thought about what would happen to our son in school, and how he would be discriminated against growing up. But we felt that this is our religion and our culture, and long before September 11 we decided that if we had a second son, we would name him Mohammed. We decided not to change what we stood for, but imagine what happens when your neighbor says, 'what is that cute little boy's name?' You say 'Mohammed' and they say, 'Oh...' This is how September 11 impacted even the relationship between you and your neighbor."

Several Christian Arabs with whom I interacted were similarly targeted based on associations between their name and the notion of a "potential enemy of the nation." In such cases, Christians were perceived to be Muslim because they had Arabic names, illustrating the ways that federal government and corporate media discourses' conflation of the categories "Arab" and "Muslim" took on local form in the public sphere. A youth group leader at a Roman Catholic Arab American church reported that after their son Osama was repeatedly called "Muslim terrorist," his parents changed his name to "Sam." Recurring throughout the period of my research were similar stories of individuals who changed their Arabic names to anglicized names, including an Arab American Christian who changed his name from Fouad to Freddy after facing 9/11-related harassment. Misidentifications of Arab Christians as Muslims reify the absurd generalizations and misconceptions underlying hegemonic constructions of the category "Arab" or "Muslim." They also reify that encounters with racism are informed by fiction and comprise a wide variety of complexities and contradictions. As Amitava Kumar put it, "In those dark chambers, what is revealed always hides something else"[9]. In the cases of misidentified Arab Christians, the simple reality that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arabs was hidden and erased from history.

Like federal government legislation, harassment against "potential terrorist men" in the public sphere operated within the logic of nation-based racism that considers discipline and punishment the "proper mechanism to set the tide of criminality intrinsic to them"[10]. Names signifying an "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" identity rendered particular men and boys at once foreign, or alien, to the nation, but at the same time connected, in the most familial and instinctive terms, to "the terrorists." In this sense, nation-based racism conflates "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" masculinities with an inherent potential for violence and terrorism and legitimizes the discipline and punishment of "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" masculinities "over there" (in the countries the United States is invading) and "over here" (within the geographic borders of the U.S.). Moreover, that Saleh, in the narrative above, reconsidered whether to name his son Mohammed indicates that he came to understand that he was required to engage with the hegemonic conflation of names such as Mohammed with Muslim masculinity and terrorism. In this sense, the interpellation of subjects through hegemonic discourses produced disciplinary effects in them. While the conflation of the "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" and "terrorism" brought into play dualistic mechanisms of exclusion (patriot vs. enemy/with us or against us), it simultaneously induced within individuals a state of consciousness that I refer to as an "internment of the psyche".[11] I coined the term "internment of the psyche" to refer to the ways in which engagements with gendered-racialization produced a sense of internal incarceration among my interlocutors that was emotive and manifested in the fear that at any moment, one could be harassed, beaten up, picked up, locked up, or disappeared.[12]

Although gender permeated nation-based racism through the conflation of particular names with Muslim masculinity and terrorism, a mapping of nation-based racism onto cultural racism also operated to articulate "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim" masculinity as inherently violent toward women. One cab driver told a story of his passengers' reaction to him after they read that his name was Mohammed: "Once, a woman got in my car. She looked at me, then read my name, then asked me if I was Muslim. When I said 'yes' she replied, 'how many girls have you killed today?'" In this case, a form of cultural racism that essentializes Muslimness as if the association between violence against women and Muslim masculinity is natural and insurmountable constitutes the articulation of Muslim masculinity as intrinsically connected to misogynist savagery. The woman's reaction to the cab driver reifies what Moallem refers to as "representations of Islamic fundamentalism in the West" that are "deeply influenced by the general racialization of Muslims in a neo-racist idiom which has its roots in cultural essentialism and a conventional Eurocentric notion of people without history."[13]

Here, "religion" functions "essentially," as "Mohammed," like the Osama and Fouad references above, becomes monstrously subversive, a metonymic source of sedition and danger within the nation, as well as to U.S. "interests" and to "American" bodies, white and nonwhite.[14]

Appearances: Unveiling the Terrorist's Daughter

The intersection of race and gender was also apparent in the harassment of women who wore a headscarf. A general consensus among community leaders was that federal government policies disproportionately targeted men while hate crimes and incidents of harassment in the public sphere disproportionately targeted women. As Farah, a Muslim American woman community activist put it, "Women who wear hijab were more of a target because they're more visible than Muslim men in public. The awareness that they were in more danger and were more impacted than men could be seen by all of the events that were organized in solidarity with veiled women in response to the backlash. There were days of solidarity organized across the nation." Several cases in which employers fired women from their jobs for wearing headscarves instilled a sense of apprehension about the acceptability of discrimination against Muslim women in the public sphere among several of my interlocutors. As Manal, a university student explained, "We felt supported, but at the same time, there was a concern for our safety. I had never carried pepper spray. I started carrying pepper spray after 9/11 and was really being mindful of my surroundings. I remember the Muslim Student Association meetings—afterwards everyone would make sure that no one was walking alone to their cars." Several Muslim American community leaders recalled cases in which women debated whether they should remove their scarves. As Amal, another university student put it, "I knew I had to prepare for at least some kind of backlash because I was visually identifiable. My mother, who doesn't cover, specifically told me, 'Don't go outside for a month or two. Wait till things die down.' I was like, 'I shouldn't hide. I shouldn't be scared or restrain my lifestyle because of ignorance.'" In this sense, considerations of whether and to what extent one should wear or remove a headscarf or go out in public generated an "internment of the psyche" or the awareness that one must become habitually concerned about hegemonic misinterpretations and mistranslations.

While "Arab Muslim" masculinities were produced as the subjects of discourses that construct their primary and stable identity as violent agents of terrorism and/or misogyny, or the "true" enemy of the nation, "Arab Muslim" femininities, signified by the headscarf, were articulated as extensions of those practices. In several cases, that headscarves signified an identification that transformed particular women into daughters or sisters of terrorists in general, or Osama or Saddam in particular, exemplifies one of the ways in which gender permeated nation-based racism in the context of the "war on terror." Lamia, a community activist summarized what she witnessed through her work among Arab Muslim youth in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco: "After September 11, girls who wear hijab received lots of harassment on the bus, at school and on the street. People would try and pull their hijab off." The following excerpt from a group interview with Iraqi youth elucidates Lamia's point:

Maha: "My sister was coming home from school one day and people were calling her, 'Osama's daughter.'"

Salma: "At school, kids take off their shirts and put them on their heads and say, 'We look like Osama's daughter now. We look like you now.' Some kids would come up to us and say, 'Why don't you take it off? Are you still representing Osama?'"

In this narrative, young Arab Muslim girls are constructed as though patriarchal kinship ties are the sole determinants of their identities. Reduced to "daughters of Osama," they are transformed into the "property," "the harmonious extension" of the enemy of the nation within, or symbols that connect others to the "real actors" or "terrorists" but who do not stand on their own (and lack agency).[15] The "daughter of a terrorist" metaphor also articulates a condemnation of Muslim women for veiling. Reifying the gendered logic of nation-based racism that constructs a binary between us versus them and good, or moral Americans versus bad immoral potential criminal terrorists, Salma's peer not only asks her to "unveil" but also reduces her realm of possibilities to either "taking off her veil" or "representing Osama." For Salma's peer, either she is unveiled/with us, or she is with terrorism. In this sense, the "veil" serves as a boundary marker between "us" and "them," and as long as women remain "veiled" they remain intrinsically connected to "potential terrorists."

Dark-Skinned, Bearded Terrorists, and the "Queery-ing" of "Muslim Masculinities"

Several interlocutors reported incidents in which beards, coupled with dark skin and in some cases a particular form of religious dress, emerged as signifiers of "Islamic fundamentalism" or "terrorism." Salah Masri, director of one of the largest mosques in San Francisco, explained:

I know this man who is a peaceful Tunisian Muslim that dresses in white robe with a long beard. He is extremely quiet and polite. He is a good engineer. He is an Internet web designer. After September 11, we didn't see him at the masjid for a long time. When we asked about him, it turned out he didn't feel comfortable changing his clothes or shaving his beard so he decided to stay home. Some people didn't want to look Muslim. I know people who dyed their hair blond. One of them was a Turkish guy who dyed his hair blond because he thought he looked Arab or Middle Eastern. We had many cases of people shaving their beards or people who stopped attending the mosque. But why dye your hair?! He still looked Middle Eastern with it!

That Salah conflates "looking Muslim" with "looking Arab or Middle Eastern" epitomizes a consensus among many of my interlocutors that dominant U.S. discourses do not distinguish between "Arabs," "Middle Easterners," or "Muslims" and construct an image of an "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look." Persons who closely resembled the corporate media's "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look" were particularly vulnerable to federal government policies and harassment on the streets. One immigrant-rights lawyer explained that the federal government went after "the CNN version of what a terrorist looks like. He was dark, Middle Eastern, and had a full beard. He was the typical terrorist looking guy—or at least the guy who CNN portrays as the terrorist. Timothy McVeigh is a terrorist, but he is not associated with terrorism because he does not look like the typical terrorist-looking guy." My research indicated that men who had beards, coupled with dark skin, were among those most severely concerned for their safety—particularly if they wore religious forms of dress perceived to be associated with Islam. That non-Muslim South Asian men such as Sikhs who wear turbans were repeatedly misidentified as Muslims (and in some cases killed) points to the ways in which a range of signifiers can stand in as symbols of an "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look." Cases such as these reify dominant U.S. distinctions between those who are with us and those who are with the terrorists by rendering particular kinds of bodies not only as unassimilable or "fundamentally foreign and antipathetic to modern American society and cultures," but also as threatening to national security and therefore legitimate targets of violence and harassment.[16] Moreover, cases in which men considered shaving their beards or avoiding attendance at their mosque illustrate that while dominant discourses on "potential terrorists" often pulled particular bodies into association with a violent "crazy" Muslim masculinity, they simultaneously produced an internment of the psyche that they themselves come to resist, transform, or reproduce.

On the streets, perpetrators of incidents of harassment often deployed sexualized tropes in targeting men whose appearances "fit" the "terrorist profile," reifying what Eman Desouky refers to as the "queery-ing" of Arab-Muslim subjectivities.[17] Dominant U.S. discourses have often depicted the United States as feminist and gay-safe through comparisons between U.S. and Afghan views on gender and sexuality. Yet, as Puar and Rai explain, "the U.S. state, having experienced a castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity, offers up narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden, brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans." In other words, a highly patriarchal and homophobic discourse has been central to the racialization of persons associated with "Islamic fundamentalism" and justifications for violence against them. Throughout San Francisco, hegemonic conflations between queerness, sexual deviancy, and the monstrous figure of "the terrorist" underpinned the subjection of particular masculinities to physical or epistemic violence because they "appeared" to be Muslim.[18] Consider the following community activist's narrative:

A guy from Afghanistan called into the hate-crime hotline. He had gone to help his friend whose car had broken down when he was doing some off-roading a couple of miles away from his house—which is also near a military base in Dublin. By the time his friend got out there to help him, there were two tow trucks out there. The tow truck drivers called the police because the men had beards so the drivers thought they were terrorists. They were near a reservoir and the tow truck drivers were saying things like, "Oh, okay ... they're tapping the water." So they took them to the military base to interrogate them. Fifteen to twenty cops came. They all thought they were trying to contaminate the water. One of the guys had prayer beads with him and officers said quotes like, "your faggot beads. We're going to f— you up; we're going to [give you oral sex]." The officers were intimidating them.

In this narrative, the tow-truck drivers transform the Afghan men into terrorists vis-à-vis assumptions that conflate "the beard" with "Muslim masculinity" and "terrorism." Inscribing hegemonic discourses that "they" are trying to kill/penetrate "us" on the Afghan men's bodies, the tow-truck drivers transform them into terrorist threats/enemies within. Here, patriarchal, homophobic discourses of emasculation mark Islam—represented by the prayer beads—as "faggot," or not quite the right/straight kind of masculinity. The police officers' speech implicitly positions heterosexuality on the side of good and queerness on the side of evil. Moreover, as the police punish Muslim masculinities (read terrorists) with the threat of sodomy, a logic of militarized patriotism intensifies the normativity of heterosexuality. In this incident, as in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, homophobia and racism intersect in the conceptualization that sexual degradation and the transformation of Muslim masculinities into "faggots" is an appropriate form of punishment.

Underlying this conceptualization is the heteronormative conflation of shame, humiliation, and homosexuality. Trishala Deb's response to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal offers an important critique of this conflation. She argues that we need to ask ourselves what this latest chapter (Abu Ghraib) teaches us about the inevitable homophobia and racism in military culture as well as cultures of militarization.[19] She adds "that there are more than two genders and the subjugation of people who are any of those genders is not closer to femininity [or emasculization] but to dehumanization."[20]

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]