Intended Audience
2018 WGSX Colloquium: “Dismantling Borders: Immigration, Gender and Sexuality, and Islamophobia”
Lecture by Dr. Nazia Kazi (Department of Anthropology, Stockton University)
Title: Islamophobia, White Supremacy, and Systemic Ignorance
In this talk, Kazi explores how anti-Muslim sentiment has become an undeniable feature of the U.S. racial landscape. While the threat of the “Muslim terrorist” looms large in the imagination of many Americans, many in the U.S. have scant knowledge about the historical relationships between the U.S. and many Muslim-majority countries. How are global politics (specifically, what the U.S. does outside of its borders) related to racism within the U.S.? How might we understand the current policy debates about immigration as connected to Islamophobia and the “new security state” that has intensified since 9/11/2001? Kazi argues that we must understand how white supremacy, U.S. foreign policy, xenophobia, and the decades-long intensification of Islamophobia are intimately connected.