A particularly strong episode of Ramy, the Hulu television show created by comedian Ramy Youssef, a son of Egyptian immigrants who grew up in New Jersey, follows a young adolescent Ramy on the day of September 11, 2001. It poignantly demonstrates how Ramy and his family had to prove their “Americanness” to their friends, colleagues, and neighbors immediately following the attacks – such as his friends asking him if he's a terrorist because he's from the Middle East, his father erecting an American flag outside their house, or his classmates uninviting him to parties or checking to make sure he is actually saying the Pledge of Allegiance in class.
Experiences like this need to be shared, unpacked, and analyzed, and Selod's Forever Suspect provides the much-needed model for how to do such an analysis. This is one of those books that you read and wonder why it had never been written before. Based on interviews with Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth, Selod brilliantly examines how everyday Muslim Americans navigate being both Muslim and American in post 9/11 American society. Selod details how Muslim Americans similar to Ramy, and even her own father who started wearing an American flag lapel pin after 9/11, grapple with continued exclusion, racism, and religious discrimination. She builds upon and challenges Omi and Winant's (1994) theory of racial formation and their focus on the visual by aptly demonstrating how culture can racialize and race bodies.
Furthermore, Selod uses the framework of “racialized surveillance,” which she defines as “the monitoring of select bodies by relying on racial cues,” (24) to argue that our surveillance apparatus is inherently racialized. By doing so, she employs a Foucauldian analysis of what it is like to live in a surveillance society, and continually or forever be “suspect.” Her interviews reveal how Muslim Americans are surveilled at multiple levels of society, from having their ability to travel by plane severely restricted by such measures as TSA No-Fly lists to peer surveillance, or how Americans are encouraged to “see something, say something” and report to authorities any behavior they might see as strange or unusual. Selod also demonstrates that this surveillance is both gendered and racialized, for example in how the hijab is a “racializing agent.” Muslim women are framed as oppressed and Muslim men are framed as terrorists. Selod also demonstrates the connections between surveillance systems in the United States and Europe, as anti-terrorism measures in one context legitimate surveillance technologies in another. Her analysis demonstrates the need for sociologists to better interrogate our various surveillance systems, particularly as they disproportionately affect already marginalized populations.
One point I found particularly fascinating was the discussion of self-surveillance in Chapter 4, or how Muslim Americans are cognizant of how they are being read by others and adjust their appearance or behavior accordingly, e.g., not sounding too political in the workplace. This surveillance serves to reinforce a second-order citizenship or second-class status that continually reminds Muslim Americans of their “place.” Selod's respondents continually have to prove their belonging, their Americanness. But they are forever suspect, forever foreign.
The richness of this analysis raises a few points and questions. First is the relationship between racism and religious discrimination and the implications thereof. When Selod's respondents are told to “return to their country,” they are not told to return to a specific country. What's clear is that part of the racialization of Muslim Americans is conflating or confusing Syria with Egypt with Lebanon and so on. Therefore part of how they are racialized involves flattening the diversity of Muslim and Arab-American populations. This also points to the complications of lumping Arab and South Asian Muslims together in this analysis. Moreover, I wanted to hear more about the role of blackness as it relates to the position of Muslim Americans on the racial and ethnic hierarchy. One of her respondents mentions been called a “sand nigger,” which raises the question of how blackness – either abstractly or in reference to actual Black people – fits into how her respondents understand themselves as racialized subjects.
Forever Suspect also raises broader questions about citizenship and belonging. Is it possible to imagine an American society, or any society, without racialized citizenship? While reading I was struck by those respondents, mostly women, who expressed optimism and hope that through their own behavior they will shape others’ views of Muslims. They believe that positive change can still be effected amidst the heightened Islamophobia pervading the United States, buttressed by the words and actions of the U.S. president. One wonders how far our systems of racialized surveillance will go before we might all act in opposition.
That such questions arose while reading this book speaks to its richness. Forever Suspect will remain relevant for how it challenges us as social scientists and other scholars who research Muslim Americans in new ways. In addition to its scholarly depth, it is a beautifully written ethnography that will appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars in Sociology, Race and Ethnicity, and Islamophobia, among other disciplines.
