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The Consent of the Oppressed: An Analysis of Internalized Racism and Islamophobia among Muslims in Spain
Abstract
Taking as our starting point the premise that all domination mechanisms are based partly on their naturalization and reproduction by the very persons that experience them, this study uses the notion of “internalized racism” to explore how Muslims living in Spain internalize some of the cultural and ideological myths that sustain the racism and Islamophobia they experience, especially in relation to institutional practices of control and discrimination. It contributes an innovative approach to the knowledge of racism in the Spanish context, showing how religious and racialized minorities in Spain understand, perceive, experience, and at times reproduce the discrimination they are subject to, and how Islamophobia is entwined with other forms of racism and exclusion as well as with Spain’s specific historical relationship with Islam. The research is based on qualitative data obtained from eight discussion groups that met between 2019 and 2021 and comprised a total of 61 Muslims resident in various parts of Spain.
... Other studies have shown the problems caused by voluntary conversions to Islam, such as social rejection or difficulties in finding a job (Ainz-Galende and Rodríguez-Puertas 2021; Ainz-Galende et al. 2021). However, it is important to acknowledge that Islamophobia in Spain is influenced by institutionalised practices that may not always be overtly expressed in public discourse (Gil-Benumeya 2023). Additionally, it is connected to political actors (Corral et al. 2023;Gil-Benumeya 2021). ...
... Nevertheless, it seems unquestionable that Islamophobia is a form of racism as suggested by several authors (Gil-Benumeya 2023;Hernández Aguilar 2023;Ejiofor 2023;Brun and Cosquer 2022;Cheng 2022;Meer and Modood 2019;Massoumi et al. 2017;Hajjat and Mohammed 2023;Sayyid 2014) or proposed in the review published by the Runnymede Trust on the twentieth anniversary of the first report (Elahi and Khan 2017). In this document, the following definition, which, in our opinion, captures all the nuances of this complex term, can be found: "Islamophobia is any distinction, exclusion, or restriction towards, or preference against, Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslims) that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life" (p. 1). ...
This article analyses the media discourse about Islamophobia in Spain. Specifically, an overview of all the appearances of the term in four Spanish newspapers (ABC, El Mundo, El País, and La Vanguardia) is provided with the aim of finding out when the term was first used and became standard language. The study also demonstrates the links with the public interest and identifies the ideological and terminological attitudes in the discourse of each newspaper. The corpus includes 1475 news articles since the first reference (in 1987) to the term Islamophobia and May 2022, which were quantitatively examined in two steps. While the first was manual and served to document the historical background, the second allowed us to monitor the media content by means of Sketch Engine. Furthermore, the searches for the term “islamofobia” in Google Trends from Spain were also reviewed. The main findings show that both terrorist attacks in Western countries and the controversies surrounding freedom of speech are key to the emergence and normalisation of the concept, particularly since 2015. However, the interest of each newspaper differs, with El País covering the topic most frequently. This left-wing newspaper offers some notable variations in terminology as well. While the three right-wing newspapers consistently relate Islamophobia to threat, the vocabulary used in El País underpins the victimisation of the Arab-Islamic population. According to the Sketch Engine analysis, the usual terms that occur in combination with Islamophobia are racism, terrorism, violence, hate, anti-semitism, and xenophobia. Finally, Google Trends data confirmed the peak in public interest in the Barcelona and Cambrils attacks (17A).
El racismo es un fenómeno que nos involucra a todos y a todas en primera persona: todos somos al mismo tiempo potenciales verdugos y posibles víctimas. Somos potenciales verdugos porque los prejuicios y las conductas racistas no son exclusivos ni propios solamente de individuos ignorantes o declaradamente racistas, sino que son elementos latentes en nuestro horizonte cultural y pueden resurgir fácilmente en momentos de crisis, miedo o incertidumbre. Somos posibles víctimas puesto que el racismo es un fenómeno que ha sabido adaptarse a las contingencias históricas y sociales: hoy los discriminados pueden ser los “otros”, pero mañana podríamos ser nosotras las personas cuyos derechos fueran sistemáticamente violados por pertenecer o ser asignadas a un determinado grupo.
Si el racismo nos involucra en primera persona, las ciencias sociales y la acción social no pueden mantener una postura neutral: no es suficiente denunciar los actos racistas más explícitos o lamentar la indiferencia generalizada frente a la violación de los derechos de las personas migrantes o racializadas. Es necesario renovar las herramientas conceptuales para identificar las nuevas formas de racismo y plantear metodologías y estrategias de acción capaces de combatirlo eficazmente.
La elaboración de este libro se enmarca, precisamente, en esa necesidad urgente de renovación (conceptual, analítica, estratégica, metodológica y práctica) de la reflexión sobre el racismo, para construir un antirracismo realmente eficaz, crítico y transformador.
I nternalized racial oppression is a controversial and largely ignored topic in race scholarship, yet it is vital to informing critical race theory. In sociology, a discipline committed to cataloging the social mechanisms and consequences of racism, internalized racial oppression has received only scattered, often cursory, attention (Anzaldua 1993; Collins 1990; Osajima 1993). More recently, attention to the problem of colorism among African Americans includes reference to internalized racism as a largely peripheral concern (Hunter 2005; Thompson and Keith 2001; for an exception, see Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992). Yet internalized racial oppression has been repeatedly acknowledged as a problem in the writings, films, and speeches of antiracist activists, public intellectuals, and artists, most prominently among African Americans (e.g., filmmaker Spike Lee; novelist Toni Morrison; Malcolm X; and see hooks 1995; Lipsky 1987; Sandler 1993; Woodson 1933/ 1990). Those who study the effects of colonialism on the oppressed have also engaged the topic, sometimes referring to internalized oppression as “mental colonization” (see Freire 1968; Fanon 1963; Memmi 1965). Psychologists have long studied internalized racism’s deleterious effects on a variety of outcomes, including health, self-esteem, and marital satisfaction (see Butler, Tull, Chambers, and Taylor 2002; Taylor 1990; Taylor and Jackson 1991), while clinical psychologists have developed therapeutic responses to the psychological harm of internalized racial oppression (see Fortes De Leff 2002; Semmier and Williams 2000; Watts-Jones 2002).
Despite sociology's longstanding interest in inequality, the internalization of racial oppression among the racially subordinated and its contribution to the reproduction of racial inequality has been largely ignored, reflecting a taboo on the subject. Consequently, internalized racism remains one of the most neglected and misunderstood components of racism. In this article, the author argues that only by defying the taboo can sociology expose the hidden injuries of racism and the subtle mechanisms that sustain White privilege. After reviewing the concept and providing examples of the phenomenon, the author draws on critical social theory to examine reasons for the taboo, such as a theoretical fixation on resistance, a penchant for racial essentialism, and the limitations of an identity politics. The author concludes by offering a method for studying internalized racism and resistance concurrently within the matrix of intersecting forms of oppression.
This author introduces a framework to guide researchers into a process of racial and cultural awareness, consciousness, and positionality as they conduct education research. The premise of the argument is that dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen can emerge for researchers when they do not pay careful attention to their own and others’ racialized and cultural systems of coming to know, knowing, and experiencing the world. Education research is used as an analytic site for discussion throughout this article, but the framework may be transferable to other academic disciplines. After a review of literature on race and culture in education and an outline of central tenets of critical race theory, a nonlinear framework is introduced that focuses on several interrelated qualities: researching the self, researching the self in relation to others, engaged reflection and representation, and shifting from the self to system.
Respectability politics—that is, the process by which privileged members of marginalized groups comply with dominant social norms to advance their group's condition—is the object of a growing body of literature in the fields of race and ethnic studies, social movements, and critical theory. Yet this body of literature remains theoretically unintegrated. This article offers a clarification of the concept by specifying who can resort to this type of politics and by characterizing respectability politics as an inherently ambivalent political strategy, one that stands at the crossroads of forms of resistance and accommodation of oppressive structures. The article also demonstrates the concept's potential to move beyond its current application in African American studies, as respectability politics holds promise in providing insights on the oppositional politics of other marginalized groups' members (such as Muslims in Europe or Latino/as in the United States). Lastly, the article sketches four research directions in the study of respectability politics, with important implications for understanding the workings of social conformance under domination.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0037768615601966
This article uses conversion to Islam as a lens through which to explore the intricacies
of race and religion in France and the United States. Using in-depth interviewing and
ethnography, the author explores how white converts relate to their allegedly dissonant
racial and religious identities in national contexts where Islam has been racialized
as ‘Brown’ and foreign. Focusing on two countries that have historically had highly
contrasted understandings of race and religion, she offers a comparative analysis of
how race operates in the lives of Muslim converts on both sides of the Atlantic. The
article shows that, even though processes of racial assignation work in a similar manner
in both cases, French and American converts report different experiences with race,
thereby suggesting that the racialization of Islam is endowed with different textures and
meanings across national contexts.
This article contributes towards understanding how Islamophobia manifests in the lives of Muslim converts in Britain. The significant relationship between Islamophobia and racialization is highlighted by arguing that before experiencing Islamophobia, 'white' converts to Islam are re-racialized as 'not-quite-white', or even 'non-white', because of a persistent conflation of Islam as a 'non-white' religion. The article also seeks to comprehend why Muslims may be so anxious about Islamophobia when they may rarely have experienced Islamophobia themselves. Rather than suggest this is because Muslims are paranoid and because Islamophobia is just a myth, as some have suggested, this article suggests that Islamophobia can be difficult to detect because it often manifests in a discreet manner. It is shown that converts are well placed to expose this 'subtle Islamophobia' because their intimate and regular contact with non-Muslims makes them particularly susceptible to frank remarks about their Muslim identity.
The contemporary relevance of the concept of “race” has been increasingly questioned around the world. In Europe, researchers
often look with skepticism at the US emphasis on race, instead highlighting the capacity of culture, especially religion,
to explain native opposition to immigrants. Using two distinct data sets, I examine self-reports of discrimination among immigrants
in Spain, where elites have long denied racial differences, to understand how the reported salience of boundaries based on
race, nationality, and religion change with acculturation. I find that reports of both nationality- and race-based discrimination
are relatively common for newcomers, while reports of religion-based discrimination are quite rare. Yet, unlike reports of
racial discrimination, reports of nationality discrimination decrease over time as immigrants' cultural differences decline
due to their cultural assimilation. For second-generation immigrants, especially non-Europeans, race replaces nationality
as the primary explanation for discrimination experiences and reports of religious discrimination grow even more infrequent.
I conclude that, from the perspective of immigrants, the recent transformation of Spain into a new immigrant destination has
gone hand in hand with the emergence of race as the main symbolic boundary marginalizing non-European immigrants in Spain.
This article is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon’s writing. In their latest book, Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take Fanon’s attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a ‘new universality’ as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity. In the article, I show that the affective dimension of Fanon’s search for a new universality is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way. I analyse how this difference between an affective ‘anti’ and an intellectual ‘alter’ arises in Fanon’s analysis and experience of racism. I refer to this particular experience as mis-interpellation and analyse the equally particular affect it generates. More generally, I show that if one is to make use of Fanon’s work today one cannot separate the intellectual and the affective that are so intertwined in his analytical work as Hardt and Negri do. To do so is to abstract from the serious political ramifications that the presence of this affective dimension entails.
The study of race and ethnic conflict historically has been hampered by in- adequate and simplistic theories. I contend that the central problem of the various approaches to the study of racial phenomena is their lack of a struc- tural theory of racism. I review traditional approaches and alternative ap- proaches to the study of racism, and discuss their limitations. Following the leads suggested by some of the alternative frameworks, I advance a struc- tural theory of racism based on the notion of racialized social systems. "The habit of considering racism as a men- tal quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned." -Frantz Fanon (1967:77) he area of race and ethnic studies lacks a _ sound theoretical apparatus. To compli- cate matters, many analysts of racial matters have abandoned the serious theorization and reconceptualization of their central topic: rac- ism. Too many social analysts researching racism assume that the phenomenon is self- evident, and therefore either do not provide a definition or provide an elementary definition (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Sniderman and Piazza 1993). Nevertheless, whether im- plicitly or explicitly, most analysts regard rac- ism as a purely ideological phenomenon.
In this article I argue that despite the claims of some, all whites in racialized societies “have race.” But because of the current context of race in our society, I argue that scholars of “whiteness” face several difficult theoretical and methodological challenges. First is the problem of how to avoid essentializing race when talking about whites as a social collective. That is, scholars must contend with the challenge of how to write about what is shared by those racialized as white without implying that their experiences of racialization all will be the same. Second, within the current context of color-blind racial discourse, researchers must confront the reality that some whites claim not to experience their whiteness at all. Third, studies of whiteness must not be conducted in a vacuum: racial discourse or “culture” cannot be separated from material realities. Only by attending to and by recognizing these challenges will empirical research on whiteness be able to push the boundaries of our understandings about the role of whites as racial actors and thereby also contribute to our understanding of how race works more generally.
Colonial Continuities. A Study of Anti-Racism in Aotearoa New Zealand and Spain.” PhD dissertation, National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies
- Azarmandi Mahdis
“Islamofobia, racismo e izquierda: discursos y prácticas del activismo en España.” [“Islamophobia, Racism and the Left. Activist Discourses and Practices in Spain”] PhD dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Oriental Studies
- Gil Daniel
The Involuntary Racist. A Study on White Racism Evasiveness amongst Social Movements Activists in Madrid, Spain.” Master’s dissertation
- Johansson Sandra
Exploración estadística del censo de ciudadanos musulmanes en España referido a fecha 31/12/2021. [Demographic Study of the Muslim Population. Statistical Exploration of the Census of Muslim Citizens in Spain as of 12/31/2021
- Observatorio Andalusí