Racing Religion

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This paper investigates the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s program of “Special Registration” as an instrument of racial formation. As part of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” the Department of Homeland Security required men and boys over the age of 16 from a select group of mainly Muslim-majority nations to undergo “special registration,” an arduous interview process that resulted in almost 14,000 deportation proceedings.

By historicizing the special registration program to prior Asian exclusion laws and legal decisions, and by theorizing race as a concept and as a construct, this paper argues that the Special Registration program in effect creates a “race” out of a religion. The paper concludes by describing the political function of race in a time of war and by proposing that “whiteness” in the United States is premised by (among other things) a nationalist notion of Christianity.

Author Bio

Presented By:

Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland and raised in Kingston, Canada, he completed his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader and has published academic essays in Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Asian American Studies, and other places. His writings have also appeared in The Nation, The London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay “Disco Inferno,” originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection Best Music Writing 2006. From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. He lives in Brooklyn.