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“WE’RE JUST SEPARATE FROM EVERYBODY”

Culture, Class, and the Racialization of Muslim Newcomer Youth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2020

Aaron Leo
Aaron Leo*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University at Albany, SUNY
*
Corresponding author: Aaron Leo, Postdoctoral Associate, NYKids, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University at Albany (SUNY), 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222. E-mail: aleo@albany.edu.
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Abstract

Recent scholarly work has explored the experiences of racialization among Muslim immigrants in the United States. Such work has challenged a static view of race strictly tied to phenotype by highlighting the significance of culture and religion to racial ascription as well as the varied ways individuals respond to their own racialized position. While valuable, much of this scholarship has analyzed the racialization of Muslim immigrants as it relates to Whiteness thereby neglecting their relationship with other racialized minorities such as African Americans. Moreover, such work has focused on culture and religion without discussing the role that social class plays in the process of racialization. This article seeks to address these gaps by drawing on ethnographic data gathered among a group of Muslim newcomer youth in an urban, multiracial high school in upstate New York. The findings presented here show how these youth are racialized along cultural and religious lines yet actively respond to this process in various ways. In addition, participants articulated racializing comments towards African Americans with significant class connotations. Despite the tensions between Muslim newcomers and African Americans, moments of solidarity were evident and drew attention to the potential for establishing cross-racial alliances.

Keywords

MuslimsRacializationClassImmigrantsAfrican AmericansEthnography
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Fall 2020 , pp. 293 - 310
Copyright
© 2020 Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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