Atiya Husain

Atiya Hussain, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will deliver a lecture entitled, “How Muslims Disrupt the U.S. Racial Order,” as a part of the Islam in the Global Context Speaker Series.

In the post-civil rights movement era, racism is often covert and easily denied. It is in this broad context that Muslims in the U.S. are talked about as a racial group rather than the multiracial religious group they actually are, which makes for a complex discourse.

While 9/11 and consequent policies and government restructuring played a major role in perpetuating this  racial discourse, it predates 9/11 and has undergone many shifts. The absence of black and African American Muslims from dominant explanations for this discourse makes room for a closer look. This lecture will explore the racial element to mainstream media representations of Muslims before and after 9/11 and what this means in our supposed “post-racial” times.