Colorblind Islam: The Racial Hinges of Immigrant Muslims in the United States

Islam is increasingly theorized as a “racialized” category in the United States, yet these accounts can too often emphasize a top-down approach of racial identification and obfuscate the importance of the African-American Muslim experience. Using Maghbouleh’s (2017) concept of “racial hinges”, the author synthesizes previous work and provides evidence from his own ethnographic research to describe how immigrant Muslims in the United States leverage different racial “strategies of action” (Swidler, 1986), including white acculturation and black appropriation. In the conclusion, the author suggests a third strategy: brown solidarity.