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Chapter 3 The Social Construction of the Arab (and Muslim) American T HE NEGATIVE post-9/11 experiences described by Arab Muslims in the research interviews as chilling, destabilizing, and even frightening were set in motion by social constructions of their relationship to the attacks, not by the attacks alone. When allegations (examples of which are provided in this book) were made inferring that Arabs and Muslims living in the United States were a potentially collaborative fifth-column population, many in the United States accepted such claims as credible because they were built on social constructions that were in place well before the events of 9/11 appeared to lend credence to them. Those who posited Arab/Muslim collective culpability for the attacks did not necessarily charge that all Arabs and Muslims in the United States could have or would have committed such a deadly attack on Americans, but they did assert that Arab/Muslim communities silently supported the attacks and willingly hid terrorist sleeper cells. Pre-9/11 social constructions that had proffered the existence of a collective value-set and orientation shared by Arabs and Muslims, including a propensity to violence , a disposition to terrorism, and an entrenched hatred of America, had set the stage for these propositions to gain wide public support. (Gendered aspects of this value-set are elaborated in chapter 7.) Arabs and Muslims in the United States thus had experiences that were similar in sequencing to those of Japanese Americans before and during World War II. In the Japanese American case, widely held negative social constructions of their treacherous “character” existed long before the 1941 Japanese government attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor and had led to restrictions on their immigration (1908) and their state-based rights to own land and work freely, as well as to discrimination based on a range of symbolic cues (Takaki 1989; Parrillo 1997).1 It was these preexisting negative stereotypes of Japanese Americans that empowered 64 assertions of their group danger and collective complicity after the attacks occurred, resulting in broad American governmental and popular support for their incarceration in internment camps during the war. The crisis of 9/11 crystallized preexisting sentiments such that the host of negative traits imputed to Arabs and Muslims in the United States assumed master status (Hughes 1945), forming the main architecture of their ascribed social status for a significant segment of the American population , just as the status of blackness is assumed primary for black men walking through white neighborhoods (Anderson 1990). This master status was associated with a set of symbols that included a phenotype (the dark-skinned, dark-haired Arab/Muslim/Middle Easterner), mode of dress, written script, and type of name. These symbols provided the visual cues for assaults, verbal insults, property damage, and reports of suspicious activities, as well as random arrests. (Under the assumption that a turban symbolizes the Arab/Muslim/Middle Easterner, Sikhs were attacked and also murdered after 9/11.) One could argue that prior to the 9/11 attacks Arabs and Muslims had been racialized in American society: they were socially constructed as groups of people who were different from others in American society, and those differences were attached to culture and place of origin and understood by many as “racially” identifiable . Racialization is a concept used in the sociological and anthropological literature to describe the social processes by which groups of people are racially formed, that is, how they are constructed and understood collectively and positionally by the pairing of a set of imputed shared characteristics and associated phenotypic (or biological) traits (Omi and Winant 1994). Racialization processes have defined the contours of American social life since the country’s founding, and they were the basis for social practices and legislation that accorded differential sets of rights to whites, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos, which in turn reified notions about “race” and produced racialized outcomes. I draw on the racialization paradigm because it allows us to capture social practices and processes that occur over a period of time and thus gives us a perspective on how Arab Americans and Muslim Americans came to be seen by a large sector of the American public as people who were different, with a unique set of characteristically negative attributes. The processual aspect is particularly important in the case of Arab Americans because they have experienced a collective shift in their social status in American society that is only captured...

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