Guess Who’s Coming to the Mosque? Religion and the Black-white Racial Order

• In Event: 341 - Section on Sociology of Religion Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Religion and Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

Race theorists tracing the history of the concept of “race” refer briefly to how religion was the primary way of conceiving of difference among peoples prior to race. They argue that basic binaries like Christian/heathen and civilized/savage later coalesced into the black-white binary racial order. Though religion informed the construction of the concept of race, scholarship on race today does not often examine religion. Moments like 9/11 and the consequent racialization of Muslims have brought this relationship between race and religion to the fore. This study illuminates and fills four gaps in the study of racialization and post-9/11 matters: a focus on cultural meanings, limited case studies, the call to move “beyond black and white,” and the absence of a theory of race that considers relationality. I draw on the findings of my ethnographic research on a Muslim community including 63 in-depth interviews and 12 months of participant observation to suggest we can learn more about the racial order as a whole after 9/11, including but not limited to Muslim racialization, using additional case studies with a theory of race that considers relationality.

Author

• Atiya Husain, Univ. North Carolina Chapel Hill