Muslim youth experiences in a visceral islamophobia and anti-muslim racism context

Abstract

This qualitative study critically examines Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism through lens of Muslim youth. Utilizing a critical ethnographic methodology, 23 Muslim youth between the ages of 18 and 25 years of Black, South Asian and Arab heritage were interviewed. The study foregrounds Critical Race and Anticolonial theories to make sense of the stories by foregrounding racism, white supremacy, and coloniality in their everyday encounters in Canada. Muslim youth understand and experience ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Muslim racism’, and live through in their daily social relations and interactions. These have governed and shaped Muslim youth to understand themselves and their place in relations to the national building project of white Canadianness. Although the Canadian landscape (justice system, education, employment, housing, immigration and settlements, health, and media) is ‘a fugitive space’ for any life that is not white, there is however a performative danger for bodies who carry race, ethnicity, gender and religion intersectionally. This leaves individual Muslims with daily choices on how much of themselves they may want to reveal in public. For Muslim youth, the cost of showing up Black or Brown while carrying one’s Muslimness is heavier, and it leaves undue burden on their lives as Muslims. The findings reveal that anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia cannot be buried theoretically under the settler-colonial paradigm in Canada. The study calls for the politics of refusal and resistance at the intersections of race (Black and Brown) and religion (Muslimness) to forge new imaginaries for educational futurities without giving up on the present.