The Racialization of Muslims in the Post-9/11 United States

Muslims in the post-9/11 United States have become racialized through a series of laws and public policies ostensibly designed to protect the American public. These occurrences support a functional account of race: laws and public policies are used to render certain populations vulnerable, possibly criminalizing them, rendering them without the protection of legal or political protection, and creating a hostile environment in which those populations are susceptible to political, social, and cultural targeting by the larger society around them. The United States’s social and political approach to law and public policy to buttress national security has created a hostile context for Muslims, rendering them not just a religious group that has been discriminated against, but racializing them and vilifying and dehumanizing them as a racial group.