Racialization of Religion and Global Migration

In the global migration story, the arrival of a diverse group of migrants can trigger intense debates about how and where people are accommodated into the host society. South Asian migrants have been moving across borders to nations where they are often both racial and religious minorities who experience the racialization of religion. The racialization of religion is a process that begins where certain phenotypical features associated with a group and attached to race in popular discourse become associated with a particular religion or religions and also are imbued meaning based on ideologies of inferiority and superiority. Through an examination of the experiences of South Asians in the USA—a group comprised primarily of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—I delineate and examine the racialization process and show how the racialization of religion exacerbates the “othering” of non-Christian religious groups in Western contexts. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.