Communication and race: the paucity of research on anti-Muslim racism

ABSTRACT

The field of Communication has been critiqued for its failure to take race seriously. This article contributes to this ongoing discussion through a focus on anti-Muslim racism scholarship. Six NCA and ICA journals with a track record of publishing articles on race have so far published only seven articles on Muslim racialization; the new journal Communication and Race does not include Arabs or Muslims in its purview. This essay points to the paucity of research on anti-Muslim racism and offers an overview of the work of key scholars that should be engaged as we expand Communication scholarship on race.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• race
• anti-Muslim racism
• orientalism
• racism

Acknowledgements

I thank Kate Gressitt-Diaz, Patrick Barrett, Robert Ivie and Robin Boylorn for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Paula Chakravartty et al., “CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2020): 254–66.

2 Eve Ng, Khadijah Costley White, Anamik Saha, “CommunicationSoWhite: Race and Power in the Academy and Beyond,” Communication, Culture and Critique 13, no. 2 (2020): 143–51; Paula Chakravartty, “CommunicationSoWhite in the Age of Ultra-Nationalisms,” Communication, Culture, and Critique, 13, no. 2 (2020): 270–74; Faiza Hirji, Yasmin Jiwani, Kirsten Emiko McAllister, “On the Margins of the Margins: #CommunicationSoWhite – Canadian Style,” Communication, Culture and Critique 13, no. 2 (2020): 168–84. For an overview of how the ICA and NCA have handled race, see Anna Valiavska, Angela M. Gist-Mackey, and Madison Holloway, “Decade of Race Publications: Meta Content Analysis of Race in Communication Scholarship from 2010–2020,” Howard Journal of Communications 34, no. 4 (2023): 337–52.

3 For an earlier intervention on this topic see Shereen Yousufa and Bernadette Calafel, “The Imperative for Examining Anti-Muslim Racism in Rhetorical Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no.4 (2018): 312–18.

4 Deepa Kumar, “Framing Islam: The resurgence of Orientalism during the Bush II era,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 254–77; Carol Stabile and Deepa Kumar, “Unveiling imperialism: Media, gender, and the war on Afghanistan,” Media, Culture and Society 27, no. 5(2005): 765–82.

5 Both before and after 9/11, the work of Jack Shaheen on anti-Arab stereotypes has been significant. His signature contribution, the book Reel Bad Arabs was first published in 2001 and several new editions were since published. Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, (Ithaca, NY: Olive Branch Press, 2001). The work of Gholam Khiabany, Milly Williamson, Elizabeth Poole, and Gavan Titley, among others, are also worthy of mention. See Williamson, Milly, and Gholam Khiabany, “State, Culture and Anti-Muslim Racism,” Global Media & Communication 7, no. 3 (2011): 175–79.

6 See details here: https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/communication-mass-media-complete#:~:text=Communication%20%26%20Mass%20Media%20Complete%20includes%20966%20active%20indexed%20and%20abstracted,of%20them%20are%20peer%2Dreviewed.

7 Anna Valiavska, Angela M. Gist-Mackey, and Madison Holloway, “Decade of Race Publications: Meta Content Analysis of Race in Communication Scholarship from 2010–2020,” Howard Journal of Communications 34, no. 4 (2023): 337–52.

8 Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Random House, 1979).

9 See critiques of Orientalism in Alexander Lyon Macfie, ed., Orientalism: A Reader, (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Visalia, CA: Vintage, 1994).

10 Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

11 Said, Covering Islam, xi.

12 Ibid., xvii.

13 Mahmood Mamdani identifies the “good” and “bad” Muslim dichotomy in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Harmony, 2005). I have also argued against Said’s focus on “Islam” as only a negative signifier in Deepa Kumar, “The right kind of “Islam”: News media representations of US-Saudi relations during the Cold War,” Journalism Studies 19, no. 8 (2018): 1079–97.

14 See for instance Lisa Lowe, “Critical Terrains French and British Orientalisms,” (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991) and John McKinzie, “Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts,” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

15 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1

16 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3.

17 Steve Garner and Saher Selod, “The Racialization of Muslims: Empirical Studies of Islamophobia,” Critical Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 9–19.

18 Nadine Naber, “Look, Muhammed the Terrorist is Coming!” in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 276–303, 278–79.

19 Moustafa Baymoumi, “Racing Religion,” The New Centennial Review 6, no. 2 (2006): 267–93, 287. I argue in my Terrorcraft piece that terrorist racial formation goes back to the 1970s, see the article cited above.

20 See the Islamophobia is Racism syllabus here for more resources: https://islamophobiaisracism.wordpress.com/.

21 Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: Twenty Years After 9/11 (New York: Verso, 2021).

22 Evelyn AlSultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York: NYU Press, 2012)

23 Evelyn Alsultany, Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (New York: NYU Press, 2022).

24 See website: https://www.natcom.org/spectra/new-nca-journal-communication-and-race.

25 Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim racism are distinct, but they also overlap. In the context of the racialized terrorist threat, what began as the Arab terrorist was expanded to include other racialized groups such as Iranians and South Asians. See Deepa Kumar, “Terrorcraft: The Making of the Racialized terrorist threat,” Race and Class 62, no. 4 (2020): 34–60.

26 Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (New York: Verso, 2021).

27 See, for instance, Tanner Mirrlees and Taha Ibaid, “The Virtual Killing of Muslims: Digital War Games, Islamophobia, and the Global War on Terror,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2021), 33–51.

28 Amado Padilla coined the term “Cultural taxation” in 1994 to shed light on the disproportionate service burden carried by faculty of color. Amado M. Padilla, “Ethnic Minority Scholars, Research, and Mentoring: Current and Future Issues,” Educational Researcher 23, no. 4(1994), 24–7.