“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.

1. “President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy,” October 6, 2005[↑]
2. Nir, Ori. “Bush Riles Muslims With ‘Islamic Fascist’ Remark.” The Jewish Daily Forward, August 18, 2006.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
6. Naber, Nadine. 2006. “The Rules of Forced Engagement.” Cultural Dynamics (18)3: 235-267.[↑]