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Article

Critical Sociology

The-Truth-About-Islam.Com:
2015, Vol. 41(1) 57–75
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DOI: 10.1177/0896920513508662
Cyber Islamophobia crs.sagepub.com

En-Chieh Chao
National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Abstract
This essay contends that the digital debates over Islamophobia show a curious resemblance to pre-
existing American folk theories of racism. The outcry surrounding the reality show All-American
Muslim is the case study, but the argument applies to a broader development of cultural racism
and Islamophobia in American society. Starting from a discussion of the politics of racialization and
‘post-civil rights’ racism in the USA, the article outlines the mediation of racial politics through
reality television and online commenting in relation to Islamophobia. Finally, appropriating the
work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Jane Hill on the underlying theories of American racism, I
examine two seemingly opposing discourses entailed in the AAM controversy, and demonstrate
that the entire online outcry has closely followed the old paradigms through which Americans
talk about racism.

Keywords
Muslims, racialization, Islamophobia, reality television, online commenting, cyberspace, USA

Introduction
Ordinary people have never been more desired by, or more visible within, the media (Turner, 2006).

The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers
whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of
Americans cherish (The Florida Family Association, 2011).

A dark side effect of the internet is the rapid reproduction and quick legitimization of discrimina-
tion. This is particularly evident in the case of cyber Islamophobia and the endless online contesta-
tion over ‘the truth about Islam’. This article explores the ways new user-based media serve to

Corresponding author:
En-Chieh Chao, Department of Sociology, National Sun Yat-sen University, 70 Lienhai Rd., Kaohsiung 80424, Taiwan.
Email: zolachao@nsysu.edu.tw

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58 Critical Sociology 41(1)

legitimize or destabilize Islamophobia. By examining the underpinnings of the online outcry sur-
rounding the reality show All-American Muslim (AAM), this essay contends that the digital debates
over Islamophobia, while fought in an unprecedentedly populist and electronically ‘knowledgea-
ble’ fashion, show a curious resemblance with pre-existing American folk theories of racism
(Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Hill, 2009).
While Islamophobia1 refers to a range of notions and behaviors (Runnymede Trust, 1997),
this essay proposes that we not treat Islamophobia as an ‘irrational dislike of individuals or
communities based on their religious origin’ (Salaita, 2006: 248). My concern is tied to the
rationalist assumption about human behaviors contained in this definition. Being rational or not
is hardly an adequate criterion to understand how a discourse is justified and embraced (a tax
increase is disliked even if it is ‘rational’ from the perspective of national revenue; a lavish
carnival can be celebrated even if it is quite ‘irrational’), and it is debatable whether all desir-
able things (such as family values, zen meditation, or cinematic aesthetics) should always be
rational. To discredit Islamophobia due to its ‘unreason’ is to assume there is a single body of
‘rational’ knowledge about Islam that overrides other ‘irrational’ feelings about Islam. Such a
stance makes it difficult to understand phenomena such as Muslims’ affective relationships
with the Prophet Muhammad, or the increased observance of fasting during Ramadan in tropi-
cal areas where the day is long and the weather is dehydrating. The situation is further compli-
cated when we claim that Islamophobia is based on religious difference, whereas it is probably
more plausible to portray it as based on perceived difference. Non-Muslims can be mistaken for
Muslims and disadvantaged due to the racialization of Muslims, which has less to do with the
victims’ actual ‘religious origin’ than the perpetrators’ projection of ‘Muslim-ness’ onto the
victims.2 It is hence not Islam, the ‘religious origin’, but the perpetrators’ projections about
what Islam is, that constitutes the discrimination. To say that the victim is harmed because of
Islam is to risk acquiescing to the discriminator’s worldview. Finally, as will be demonstrated
in this article, Islamophobes can demonize Islam ‘hyper-rationally’ with ‘evidence’, including
statistics, lists and interpretations of Quranic verses, things they now can easily obtain and
distribute via the internet.3
Islamophobia is, of course, not new. Modern media representations of Muslims in the United
States such as Hollywood movies (Gottschalk and Greenberg, 2008: 118–125; McAlister, 2005:
82–83; Shaheen, 2003) have consistently adhered to a colonial discourse of a righteous, heroic and
civilized West bravely confronting an evil, licentious, and barbaric Islamic world (Miles, 1989:
34–35; Said, 1979: 48). Thanks to decades of mass media’s orientalist tastes and the ‘cultural turn’
in the understanding of global geopolitics (e.g. ‘clash of civilizations’), the tragedy of 9/11 appeared
to many Americans not only to validate the entrenched idea that Muslims are fanatical and devious,
but also to legitimize the militarization of the pre-existing discourse of Muslim-Arab barbarity into
the ‘war on terror’. A small cadre of anti-Islamic celebrities like hard-liners Robert Spencer,
Brigitte Gabriel, Frank Gaffney, David Horowitz and David Yerushalmi (Steinback, 2011), not to
mention the No.1 conservative political commentator, Bill O’Reilly, find a large and eager audi-
ence for their explanations of the imminent threat posed by Islam. They have received a steady
stream of invitations to TV shows and public rallies warning about the Islamic takeover of the USA
and spreading anti-Sharia panic online.
Popular anti-Islamic websites such as thereligionofpeace.com and JihadWatch.org marked a
new era of the industry of Islamophobia that entertains a positivist collection and populist exhibi-
tion of the criminality of Islam. Terrorist attacks and suicide bombers are counted, stonings and
honor killings pictured, images of oppressed Muslim women pitied, and other stories of Muslim
backwardness digitalized, all rosters of ‘Muslim’ inferiority. They are then viewed, copied, emailed
and forwarded. They ‘vindicate’ the heavily biased worldview already common in the influential

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Chao 59

US media and reinforce such a worldview. They would never portray Hamas as the democratically
elected ruling party of a nation (as they won the 2006 Palestinian election), but simply treat it as a
‘terrorist’ organization (after the US-led intervention that denied the results of the election and
further weakened Palestinian solidarity by splitting the ruling). Anyone sympathetic with Hamas is
also a ‘terrorist’, indirectly naturalizing the discourse about Hamas’s ‘terrorist nature’ as a truism.
Through digitalized representations of ‘Muslim atrocities’, the fictional imageries about Muslim
dictators and suicide bombers are no longer merely a cinematic mantra for movies like True Lies
(1994) and The Siege (1998), but realities that are wisely prefigured and later vindicated.4 Hence
the question: how were Americans to ‘learn’ about Islam, a religion that most have assumed they
already knew?
Against the backdrop of the proliferation of these dark representations of Muslims, the Learning
Channel’s All-American Muslim (AAM) was born. AAM is a reality show that follows five Shia
Muslim Lebanese American families living in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the highest concentra-
tion of Arabs in the USA. As one of the co-producers of AAM Mike Mosallam says, the show’s
central aim is ‘to humanize the Muslim-American experience’ (personal communication, 5
November 2012). Given that most Americans have never befriended a Muslim, the show was
intended to present what ‘real’ Muslim Americans do and say about being Muslim and American
in the aftermath of 9/11. Like nothing ever before, the show features a clerk in the district court, a
cop, a football coach, a party organizer, as well as married couples in affectionate equitable
relationships—all Muslim and all American.
Months before the premiere of AAM, liberal cultural critics in the USA hailed it as a break-
through. After all, as the UK-based Runnymede Trust long ago advocated in its classic report about
Islamophobia, one of the priorities for media coverage should be to include ‘a greater range of
positive images of Islam in the media, to offset the negative images’ (Runnymede Trust, 1997: 20).
A reality show that explores the daily lives of ordinary Muslims living in the USA seemed like a
promising counter-balance to the insatiable impulse to demonize Muslims. Why would it not?
Disillusion came fast and hit hard. On the day of AAM’s premiere on 13 November 2011, a
group called the Florida Family Association asked its supporters to contact advertisers to boycott
the show and denounced the show on its website as:

propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are
advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law. The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be
ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to
liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish (the FFA website, 13 December
2011).

The tiny Florida Family Association (FFA) did not enter its crusade against AAM unprepared.
The much bigger Christian conservative groups such as the American Family Association and
CLearR-TV have created a workable manual for conservative activists since the 1980s. To get
expressions of sexuality, violence and homosexuality off the screen, one mobilizes boycotts.
Among other examples with varying degrees of success, the American Family Association pre-
vented Pepsi from using Madonna’s ‘sacrilegious’ song Like a Prayer in the soundtrack of a com-
mercial in 1989, and in 1990, CLearR-TV boycotted Burger King until the company ran half-page
advertisements in 554 daily newspapers across the country stressing that Burger King would keep
‘supporting traditional American values on television, especially the importance of the family’
(Fahey, 1991: 662). The direct impact on sales was never necessarily the most important factor in
leading the boycotted corporations to change their mind. Rather, the fear of bad publicity is often
enough to prompt a corporate response.

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60 Critical Sociology 41(1)

The controversy continued to flare up until the next month, when the home improvement giant
Lowe’s decision to pull ads from AAM drew much attention. On Saturday 9 December 2011,
Lowe’s posted a statement on its Facebook fan page that said they cared about ‘the community at
large,’ and apologized if they ‘made anyone question that commitment’ (Lowe’s Facebook fan
page, 9 December 2011). Following the statement, Lowe’s came under relentless fire from critics
but was also enthusiastically defended by supporters. The dispute prompted an outpouring of com-
ments on Lowe’s fan page on Facebook. On 12 December 2011, less than three days after Lowe’s
made its announcement, more than 24,000 comments had flooded the fan page. The online com-
ments continued to increase in the following days, and spread on other news websites’ commenting
systems. After seven episodes, the show was canceled, with the television network TLC citing ‘low
ratings’, despite the average of one million viewers per episode.
The AAM controversy reveals that, even when the media tries to present Muslims in a non-
stereotypical light with first-hand sources, the potential audience can still reject it. More impor-
tantly, hundreds of online comments beneath the news stories about AAM include not only some
unprepared and emotional comments, but provocative assertions that are assisted with citations of
Quranic verses, interpretations of news events or a link to thereligionofpeace.com that are framed
in a way clearly intended to enlighten others.
This article strives to examine the logic of Islamophobia embedded in the reactions posted
online regarding the AAM controversy. To do so, I first outline the politics of racialization and
‘post-civil rights’ racism in the USA. I then discuss the mediation of racial politics and hate speech
through reality television and online commenting. Finally, following the work of Bonilla-Silva
(2006) and Hill (2007) on American racism, I elaborate on two dominant discourses entailed in the
AAM controversy, in order to decode the popular essentialism of Islam in relation to racism.

Racialization, post-Civil Rights Racism and post-9/11 America

In American society, racialization has been an ongoing social process that integrates (or excludes)
immigrants into (or from) the dominant political economy. A standard example is the initial raciali-
zation of Irish immigrants as closer to African Americans due to their similar status as a ‘dependent
class’, only for them to be re-classified later as white in the wake of the redrawing of racial bounda-
ries through skin color (Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 1999). In this vein, the racializing process in the
USA is the chief mechanism of essentializing differences between marked others and unmarked
privileged groups. The histories of ‘racial formation’ (Omi and Winant, 1986: 55) are thereby a
product of processes of racialization, essentially a tool of othering. A physiognomic or embodied
feature is itself never self-evident; it needs a conceptual frame, and the frame changes.
The task of identifying racism in ‘post-civil rights’ America is particularly difficult. On one
hand, although much scholarship has demonstrated that race is a historically varying, contextually
constructed cultural categorization of social difference5 (Wodak and Reisigl, 1999), it never stops
race from being imagined as residing within the bodies and psyches of individuals (Harrison, 1995;
Silverstein, 2005). On the other hand, however, the persistence of racism and its invidious impact
have been significantly underestimated precisely due to the universal condemnation of conscious
racism. To many sociologists and anthropologists’ dismay, rather than recognizing structural con-
straints, American society increasingly understands racism as backward individual prejudices,
while attributing racial inequality to individual failure or group shortcomings (Bonilla-Silva, 2006;
Bourgois, 2002; Feagin, 2010; Hill, 2009). For Bonilla-Silva (2006), the current state of ‘racism
without racists’ in the USA is built upon a kind of ‘color-blind racism’ that misrepresents racial
inequality and marginalizes the relevance of racism in society. He identifies four commonly-held
notions that sustain and justify color-blind racism:

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Chao 61

(1) Market neutrality: the market is open to all and discrimination is not the norm.
(2) Natural exclusivity: people have a natural tendency to stay with their own kind.
(3) Cultural racism: minorities practice self-defeating behaviors, which account for their
failure.
(4) Minimization of racism: racism should no longer be relevant in society.

In a different but complementary vein, the linguistic anthropologist Hill (2009) identifies three
major components of an American ‘folk theory of racism’ that disguises racism as humor and
denies the magnitude of racism in contemporary American society:

(1) Biologism: race has some biological foundations and is thus inherent.
(2) Individualism: racism is bad and only bad people suffer from it, which is caused by indi-
vidual bigotry that can be corrected by education.
(3) Natural exclusivity: people have a natural tendency to stay with their own kind.

Both Bonilla-Silva’s ‘color-blind racism’ and Hill’s ‘folk theory of racism’ note the widespread
disclaimer of racism, in which the threshold of racism is so high that almost nobody but the most
murderous ‘racist’ would fit the criteria. (Or not even that. In the case of George Zimmerman, after
his killing of an innocent teenager, Trayvon Martin, he walks free). Self-proclaimed non-racists
could confidently claim support for an equal society, but often immediately shift the responsibility
for racial inequality to the practices of their victims.
One of the major ways that discrimination remains off the radars of racism is through the practices
of cultural racism (Myers, 2005) or what Balibar calls ‘racism without race’ (2007). The criteria gen-
erating cultural racism are more explicitly tied to presumed cultural traits as opposed to primarily
biological ones (Hall, 1992), hence replacing discrimination based on supposedly innate bodily char-
acteristics with that based on perceived cultural difference. Since cultural racism is based on articula-
tion and essentialization of supposed ‘cultures’, so far as racism continues to be understood as tied to
biological facts, it would be difficult to raise the awareness of the prevalence of cultural racism.
Despite great local variations, the phenomena of cultural racism against Muslims in Western
Europe, Northern Europe and Australia have all moved towards a condition of denied citizenship,
in which Muslim minorities are constructed as culturally incompatible with the mainstream society
and forced to openly defend their citizenship (Dunn et al., 2004; Modood and Werbner, 1997). The
racialization of Muslims refers to this particular process through which a wide array of collectivi-
ties and individuals are singled out based on their perceived ‘Muslim-ness’ and excluded from the
imagined body of ‘ordinary citizens’, to be judged as essentially different, as inferior, less human,
often dangerous, and hence ‘not us’.
The racialization of Muslims in the USA has been manifested in a series of obvious violations
of civil rights,6 everyday discrimination, and hate crimes,7 not only against Muslims, but also
against whoever ‘looks like’ a Muslim. The death of six Sikhs at a temple in Wisconsin on 7 August
2012 (Yaccino et al., 2012), testifies to the importance of perceived embodiment of difference over
any ‘actual identity’ in the structures of racism.
Conversely, the racialization of Muslims can also take place independently of skin color or
embodied trait, and solely based on speculations or knowledge about people. The most famous
example in the USA is arguably the die-hard rumor that Obama is actually a Muslim, which was
presented as a new, legitimate question in a time when open discrimination against people of color
is no longer an acceptable discourse. The ‘Muslim President of the United States’ accusation gen-
erated great panic in the nation, which then led to further elaborations of the presumed inferiority
of Muslimness and its inherent incompatibility with American-ness.

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62 Critical Sociology 41(1)

In a different vein but also based on knowledge about people, the racialization of a Muslim
could even happen overnight, as the American stand-up comedian Dean Obeidallah shared in his
live performance (11 May 2008):

Pre-9/11, honestly I was just a white guy, living a white guy’s life. All my friends’ names were Monica and
Chandler and Joe and Rose. Then 9/11 happened and for the first time in my life, I became an Arab man.
(Obeidallah, 2008)

In a way, Obeidallah was almost reborn as an ‘Arab’ out of the detritus of 9/11.

Reality Television and Racial Politics

Racial politics are embodied and performed differently in different kinds of media. For reality
television, we can roughly identify two genres in relation to the portrayal of race:

1) the shows that are explicitly about an ethnic/racial identity or subculture, which depend on
‘real people’ who seem to embody curiously exaggerated stereotypes, and
2) the contest-based programs that present a supposedly random set of ordinary people who
will then be sorted based on merit via competition.

In the second category, reality television transforms an unknown yet talented person into a celeb-
rity, through allowing ‘the best of herself or himself’ to shine in shows such as America’s Next Top
Model (UPN) or American Idol (Fox). In this manner, racial identity is not supposed to be the focus
of a contestant and reality television then becomes a vehicle for the reiteration of the supposedly
race-neutral American Dream.
In the first category, however, reality television promotes outrageous representations of stereo-
types: the loud, brash, self-confident, uneducated, tanned, and drinking ‘guidos’ in Jersey Shore
(MTV); successful Christian fundamentalists who love guns and hunting and whose family busi-
ness is selling duck calls used by hunters in Duck Dynasty (A&E); or the tacky, filthy, poor, rude
and loud ‘white trash’ (rather than simply ‘trash,’ since ‘trash’ is typically ‘un-white’)8 in Here
Comes Honey Booboo (TLC).
Under this media obsession with the brilliant performance of the ordinary talented and the fas-
cination with the stereotyped minority (McCarthy, 2007), AAM represents a misfit. The very idea
of presenting ‘ordinary Muslims’ is caught in a dilemma between boredom (not enough brilliant
performance) and hyper-racism (against the already stereotyped minority that the show wishes to
de-stereotype). Controversies were supposed to give it more publicity, but AAM never seemed
to take advantage of that by making inflammatory representations of Muslims. AAM chose instead
to continue to emphasize the normality of its characters. In fact, John Stewart, host of the popular
Comedy Central program the Daily Show, affirmed Muslims’ normality by showing a clip of a
couple in AAM talking about the wife’s pregnancy and quipped that the show is ‘the most boring
reality show imaginable’. From complaints about not having met Mr. Right, doubts about opening
a nightclub, to the struggle over coaching football during the fasting month, each of the show’s
potentially interesting stories were studiously not presented in the neurotic or obnoxious way they
would be in other reality shows.9 In other words, AAM is definitely no Shia version of Jersey
Shore, and its goal is mission impossible given the current tastes of the reality television world.
Yet boredom is one thing; the controversy quite another. As it turns out, the very normality of
AAM was taken as an affront by some segments of the nation. When the Florida Family Association
implies that AAM’s ‘ordinariness’ masks a larger threat looming behind, they are saying that either

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Chao 63

the Muslims in AAM are not ‘real’ Muslims, or that they are faking their ordinariness. The affront
caused by AMM, therefore, is not merely the frustration of a deeply-held stereotype. It is generated
by the fundamental denial of Muslims’ entitlement to ordinary American-ness.

Online Commenting and Hate Speech

Like reality television that exposes and profits from the performance of ordinary people, the rise of
Web 2.0 or user-generated websites represents another ‘ordinary’ turn for media cultures. As a sub-
category of Web 2.0, online commenting systems are now increasingly ubiquitous add-on sections
beneath news stories inviting readers to post comments. The presence of online commenting does
not simply digitize what people might say. Rather, it allures readers to articulate the opinions they
would not necessarily hold otherwise. Some commenting systems also give users a chance to attain
popularity by showing the numbers of hits a comment has gotten, encouraging the achievement of
‘most liked comment’ and transforming the once passive experience of consuming news into an
active contest.
Even before scientific research began demonstrating how online commenting beneath news
stories may skew the perceptions of news (Brossard and Scheufele, 2013), many professional
online news editors had expressed the concern that for every one or two interesting comments, one
had to wade through eight comments that were rude, patronizing, venomous, disrespectful, or
entirely uncivil (Shepard, 2011). Some journalists believe that placing a commenting box beneath
a news story violates the basic ethics of journalism, since if the same contents were submitted in
letters to the editor, they would never be accepted and published the way they are posted online
immediately.10
Cyber space has other built-in aspects that are suitable for hate speech. The absence of direct
consequences, even when anonymity is partially removed due to the rise of social media, has con-
tinued to encourage disrespectful comments without the risk of social opprobrium usually attached
to such behavior (Hlavach and Freivogel, 2011). Perhaps more importantly, the proliferation of
web content serving ideological niches increasingly allows users to close themselves off from the
opposing points of view in the public sphere by seeking only views that reinforce their beliefs and
biases.
In sum, the commenting box invites expressions that can be achieved and quantified with only
a few clicks. It has no spatial or temporal limits but is open to everyone who has access to the
website. The spirit of the ‘quick comment’ that is built into the box is the antithesis of rigorous
study and meaningful dialogue but a haven for diatribe. Award-winning journalists Hlavach and
Freivogel (2011) argue that often times online commenting can be synonymous with hate speech,
as shown by some cases of defamation that were brought to court. By promising a platform for
people to be heard, online commenting systems in theory allow anyone to claim the authority to
publish their opinion. The information orgy held on the internet would seem to add incentives and
argumentative tools for harsh and uncivil online comments to news stories.

Method and Data

To survey how Islamophobia is being constructed and contested via online commenting in news
stories about AAM, I collected online comments created between November 2011 and March 2012
on five influential news websites regarding stories about the airing of AAM; the advertisers’ with-
drawal; and the cancellation of the program. The five websites were selected from the top 10 most
widely read news websites (Pew Research Center, 2012): Wall Street Journal (187 comments),
USAToday (636 comments), New York Times (49 comments),11 the Los Angeles Times

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64 Critical Sociology 41(1)

(164 comments), and the Washington Post (103 comments). On the basis of a total of 1139 online
comments, I conducted a content analysis (Mayring, 2004) to map out the range of perspectives,
finally choosing a few of the most frequently voiced perspectives to represent a diverse array of
opinions.
To be clear, there must be a non-response bias to the results since many people who read the
news stories did not post their comments. Most readers would move on without leaving a com-
ment or even reading the comments. Without a frame from which to randomly select out of the
entire population that reads a particular website, the survey is inevitably non-representative. Yet,
by looking at over a thousand comments, along with multiple national surveys (Pew Research
Center, 2010), one can get an idea about what concerns are at stake and what conceptions are
circulated. In fact, since the most eloquent or argumentative commenters are most likely to
spread their messages online to influence others, it is worth exploring and deconstructing their
logic.
In the content analysis, I quantify content in a systematic and replicable manner. The combina-
tion of both word and theme is used as a content unit, although theme is usually the more useful
determining factor. Since many comments combine multiple items in the directions of strong
polarizing tendencies, I narrow them down to two prominent themes most relevant to Islamophobia,
a group of comments which constitutes 49 percent of the total sample. Due to the limits of the
article, there are several other common themes that I will not explore in depth, because they do not
directly address Islamophobia. These themes include discourses about the free market, the efficacy
of boycotts, and general comments about the reality TV genre. Some examples include: ‘Get a grip
folks. Lowes has a right to advertise or not, on any program of their choosing, for any reason.
That’s the way it is in a “free” country’, ‘boring horrible programming’, and so forth, a group
which constitutes another 37 percent of contents. The rest of the comments are ambiguous and dif-
ficult to categorize.
The two discourses and the sub-categories this article examines are described below.

The Anti-Bigotry Discourse

About half of the comments relating to Islamophobia (287 or 25% of the comments total) men-
tioned that the advertisers’ withdrawal from AAM represented an act of ‘bigotry’. These comments
(See Table 1) include the assertion that ‘one can’t make the acts of a few the fault of the entire
group’, and that ‘Muslims are good people’ based on their previous expat life experience in
Muslim-majority countries or based on their interactions with Muslims in the USA.

The Anti-Islam Discourse

A nearly equal number within the comments relating to Islamaphobia (273 or 24% of the total com-
ments) are anti-Islamic, with statements such as ‘Islam is an inferior religion’; Islam is ‘a religion
of hatred’; ‘a total system’ that surpasses everything else; it is ‘intolerant’; the Quran is evil;
Muslims are killing, amputating, stoning and forcing marriage; plenty of Muslim ‘imams glorify
jihad’; ‘the crusaders did not read the Bible, but today’s Muslims are all literate and decide to kill’
since it is the basic Quranic teaching; ‘modern Muslims have created a certain mystique about
themselves’; the Muslims in the AAM are ‘not real Muslims’; ‘non-Muslims are constantly perse-
cuted by Muslims’; there is a conspiracy to Islamicize the USA, and that AAM is part of that propa-
ganda, and so forth. Among them, many comments also include some statistics of ‘Muslims’
atrocities’ or provide anti-Islamic websites to urge readers to find out the ‘truth’ about Islam. For
example, one comment (USA Today, 16 December 2011) says,

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Chao 65

Table 1. Examples of anti-bigotry comments.

1. Yes thank you USA Today for actually having an opinion that doesn’t line up with the rhetoric or fear
mongering of FAUX news [sic].
2. If you live in the U.S. you don’t have any argument for being against religion, we were founded on
the premis [sic] of religious freedom, if you disagree well then leave, we dont [sic] need un-educated
bigots anyways.
3. Thank you for showing your ignorance Don! Classic irrational Islamophobe [responding to ‘USA
TODAY thank you so much for being foot soldiers in Islam’s Army of Dhimmitude. You’re
disgraceful’]
4. Like the Japanese got their education when we dropped the Hiroshima bomb? And before you
mention provocation, we’ve had our fingers in the Arab pie for decades.

Note: The examples are presented in their original forms.

Table 2. Examples of anti-Islam comments.

1. i am sorry but i do not believe this story … we get to see muslims [sic] beheading an American
journalist and their sharyia [sic] practice and forcing little girls into forced marriages! is this story
about fantasy island or Dorothy in Kansas city
2. I think many people today are unaware that in countries where Islam is dominating the church is
persecuted terribly. Their churches are burned their members are accused of crimes against Allah, the
Christian Bible is outlawed and that isn’t just Taliban. I am sure there are some good Muslims but as
their numbers grow in the US the church will find itself under the same persecution. Beware.
3. It’s a mistake to welcome Muslims into America unless they renounce the Quran, fully assimilate
themselves into American culture, quit going to the Mosque, etc.
4. The show is nothing but Jihadist propaganda! It astonishes me how liberals will support this hateful
‘religion.’

Note: The examples are presented in their original forms.

I got my education on 9/11 that is all I need to know. See www.thereligionofpeace.com

These anti-Islam comments (see Table 2) tend to have more ‘hits’ or ‘likes’ than the anti-bigotry
comments, sometimes with hit counts as high as 40, whereas anti-bigotry comments often only
have single digit hits.
To elaborate on these two discourses regarding Islamophobia in relation to American racism, I
appropriate Hill’s ‘folk theory of racism’ (2009) and Bonilla-Silva’s ‘color-blind racism’ (2006)
summarized earlier in this article with a twist that stresses the new racialization of Muslims. With
the specificity of the case study in mind, I deploy the following inter-related, sometimes internally
contradictory, assumptions that comprise what I will call the ‘ordinary theories about Islamophobia,’
particularly in the form of cyber Islamophobia.

The ordinary theories about Islamophobia

Individualism. Islamophobia or Islamophilia is caused by individual ignorance that can be cor-
rected by education. An anti-Islam or anti-bigotry attitude is caused by individual ignorance that
can be corrected by education.
Faith-ism. Religion is about private faith. Anti-bigotry commenters believe that discrimination based
on one’s faith is against individual rights. Anti-Islam commenters believe that people choose to be
Muslims since religion is a personal choice. Because Islam is evil, choosing to be evil is wrong.

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Biologized culturalism. Racism is discrimination against others based on their race. Anti-bigotry
commenters see religious identity as part of people’s ascribed identity, and therefore, like racial
identity, religious identity should not be discriminated against. For many anti-Islam commenters,
since Islam does not have a biological foundation, to hate Islam is not to be racist. Yet they also
hold that, once embracing Islam, Muslims are determined by the Islamic culture, both mentally and
bodily.
Positivism. Both sides believe that they have seen enough evidence from research, documentaries,
and reports to falsify the other side’s acts of Islamophobia or Islamophilia.

The Anti-Bigotry Discourse: An Analysis

The comments within the anti-bigotry discourse generally follow the four principles of ordinary
theories of Islamophobia, but here I focus on individualism in relation to education and prejudices,
as well as faith-ism. Let us examine the two samples below:

As boring as the show may seem, it [AAM] serves as basic education for all of those influenced by David
Caton’s hate and Lowe’s fear. (Wall Street Journal, 19 December 2011)

I still believe that [the] majority of Americans are not bigots; in fact, many of them have condemned [the]
recent wave of anti-Muslim bigotry. (New York Times, 16 December 2011)

The first commenter assumes that ‘education’ can overcome Islamophobia. Such a stance, how-
ever, cannot explain why, if education is the key, educated people (such as Bill Maher) could
become Islamophobic. Nor can it lead us to track precisely what kind of education Americans have
been receiving. In a different vein, the second commenter understands bigotry as a solely individu-
alized problem and a minor problem. It depicts an America that is mostly free of bigotry and con-
tinues to ignore the scale of prejudices and its implications beyond conscious racism.
The understanding of racism as individual prejudice reflects the common beliefs about racism
documented and analyzed by Hill and Bonilla-Silva. Such an understanding exposes a great mis-
match between individual responsibility and the continued institutionalized racism in the country.
US public discourse and the educational system that contributes to it stigmatizes overt racism but
replaces it with more covert kinds of racism. The age-old representations of Arab barbarity in
American textbooks, literature, film, and daily news reports are shared, accepted, or even rewarded
ways of portraying Muslims (such as in the Disney movie Aladdin). These are the ‘education’ many
Americans have received. By reducing racism to individual acts of bigotry, American racial dis-
course conceals the continued perpetuation of racism through social structures. It underestimates the
enormity of systematic distortions of the Other that cannot be taken lightly or fixed by individuals.
There are comments that recognize more systematic distortions in the kind of ‘education’ that
Americans are receiving. But often times, they quickly assume that the locus of responsibility is
again the individual who should know better, while neglecting the question of how individuals
could know better, when the inferiority of Islam is presented everywhere as common sense. For
example, an enthusiastic commenter on USAToday says:

As a person who has been to a predominately Muslim land, I find it refreshing that the stigma created by
Hollywood and Washington fear-mongers [is] being exposed as the lie it is. To demonize an entire religion
for the misguided and vile actions of a few whom [sic] call themselves Muslim is as stupid as demonizing
Christianity because of people like Tony Alamo and Jim Jones. Many Muslims are counted among my
friends and colleges [sic]. Many of the men and women whom I served with and trusted my life with were

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Chao 67

Muslims. Those who would debase them on account of their faith are ignorant and disgusting bigots,
whom [sic] project their own desires of dominance and tyranny onto others (USAToday, 19 December
2011).

The bright side of this comment is its acknowledgement of systematic distortions manifested in
‘Hollywood’ movies and ‘Washington’ politics, and much like ethnographic writing, it provides the
counter-images of ‘real’ Muslims as opposed to ‘imagined’ Muslims. However, this comment still
demonstrates an unintended shared assumption with the anti-Islam comments through its emphasis
on individual responsibility. It is individual bigots to blame, not the macro-level and long-term rep-
resentations of Muslims. Simultaneously, it is part of individual rights to have different faiths, and
one should not debase Muslims on account of their faith, which is protected by individual rights.
Such an anti-bigotry stance has many flaws. First, it overstates the individual access to knowl-
edge beyond one’s reference group and limited stocks of knowledge. Second, it reinforces the idea
that individuals are fundamentally independent of the political construction of commonsense
knowledge, which makes it difficult to see the political nature of commonsense knowledge that is
created for certain political purposes. Third, it ignores that for many Muslims, religion is also about
regulation of public behaviors and social relations in addition to interior psychological phenomena.
The post-Enlightenment notion of religion as private faith has its own secularist biases, which has
been a major source of discrimination against non-Christian religions that have been more than
individual beliefs.
Finally, the ‘individual responsibility’ argument privileges individual reasoning over the culti-
vation of cross-cultural empathy and collective responsibility for problems in the world that
American society has helped create. The focus on ‘who Muslims really are’ obscures the close
relations between representations of Muslims and the various responses of Muslims to the continu-
ing Western encroachment on Muslim peoples since the colonial period,12 which can never be
reduced to ‘the essence of Islam’ in a simple way. Western powers are often directly involved in the
militarization and mutations of Islam, and to explain who Muslims are (rather than who they have
become) while not explaining what Western powers have done (and who they have become) is to
unfairly exempt the West from responsibility and shift all of the blame for stereotypes of Muslims
onto the shoulders of Muslims and their sympathizers.

The Anti-Islam Discourse: An Analysis

The anti-Islam discourse closely follows the four principles. Here I specifically dwell on the role
of positivism and biologized culturalism. Note that the anti-Islam discourse often grants ‘us’ the
capability of exercising individualism while confining ‘them’ to the tyranny of biologized cultural-
ism. This gap is often reinforced by the research of deeply biased positivism. In the case of anti-
Islam activists, after studying and learning about Islam, they may be further convinced that any
‘good Muslims’ that commenters are acquainted with are simply individuals that deviate from the
‘real Islam,’ since ‘real Muslims’ must be determined by the Islamic culture, which is incompatible
with American values. AAM conflates ‘us’ and ‘them’ and grants the Other the status of ‘the ordi-
nary’, the most mundane guarantee for equal treatment. In this view, since the US identity is
incompatible with a Muslim identity, a reality show based on ‘American Muslims’ is simply
absurd. A commenter says,

‘All-American Muslim’- No such thing, people. Study your history. If they follow their religion they are
Muslim and have to keep to the teachings which are against everything America stands for. Wake up
people! (USAToday, 13 December 2011)

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68 Critical Sociology 41(1)

Note the pretense of the comment to raise the consciousness of people. Here, the implications of
‘the teachings’ were not further specified, assuming that readers already knew their contents. The
undertone of a ‘scientifically proven’ positivism looms large, as truth-claims lie at the core of the
following comments and their kinds that are commonplace in the hundreds of comments: ‘so much
information and knowledge of Islam available’, ‘the author comes across as a paid apologist’ and
‘There has to be something about Islam that makes people prone to terrorist and jihadist activities
and you just brush all the evidence aside?’ In other cases, a similar assertion is backed up by posi-
tivist ‘evidence’. News stories or Quranic verses are cited as the transparent evidence of the violent
and misogynistic nature of Muslims.
Similar logic of presumed knowledge about Muslim societies fuels a notion that one cannot be
fully Muslim and American at the same time, and further pushes positivism into biologized cultur-
alism. As a comment says,

Let’s see if an ‘All-Christian Saudi’ program would be allowed in Riyadh, or an all-Jewish Lebanese
program would be accepted in Beirut. For Muslims to portray themselves as regular folks while their
religion is based on intolerance of others’ beliefs is sheer hypocrisy. Unfortunately for those Muslims that
are ‘assimilated’ to our western values, the world of their own religion looks at them as heretics. (USAToday,
13 December 2011)

Here, it is ‘All-Christian Saudi’ (where the national descriptor is the primary subject), not the
more logically parallel phrase ‘All-Saudi Christians’, that is employed as a counterpart of ‘All-
American Muslim’ (where the religious descriptor is the primary subject). We can see the two stand-
ards of othering in play. The term AAM means that AAM are fundamentally ‘Muslims’ and only
secondarily ‘Americans’. In contrast, the term ACS means that ACS are fundamentally ‘saudis’ and
only secondarily ‘Christians’. ‘Christian’ is placed in the place where ‘American’ is, and ‘Lebanese’
is placed where ‘Muslim’ is. This kind of double standard is not just an accident. It implies that
‘saudis’ can be racialized to be a group of intolerant people in a way that ‘Americans’ cannot, and
‘Muslims’ is a racialized descriptor in a way that ‘Christians’ is not. It is no less than asserting that
Americans and Christians are diverse and benign, but Muslims must be all the same and intolerant.
In the last sentence of the same comment, the commenter questions the American-ness of
Muslim Americans by using the quotation marks around ‘assimilated’. This reveals a double denial
of belonging for American Muslims, who are seen as hypocritical and heretical. This logic denies
more complicated and mixed realities and mobilizes cultural racism to justify acts of exclusion.
Since it is pre-determined that there is no overlap between the two or any internal heterogeneity
with each entity, trying to straddle both sides and appear to be fine – ‘regular folks’ – must be a
result of ‘sheer hypocrisy’ (‘hypocrites’), or disqualified Otherness (‘heretics’).
The verdict that once the Other shares something with ‘us’, they must be hiding their true
essence or simply no longer truly Other, means that the discourse denies the Other the right to have
a multi-layered and complicated identity. A male commenter replied to a self-identified Arab and
Muslim female commenter who appreciated the efforts of AAM and whose profile photo is seem-
ingly her self-portrait in a tank top:

Sorry, but real Muslims don’t wear tank-tops. (USAToday, 13 December 2011)

And a commenter says,

The whole idea is to find people of the Muslim faith who are very moderate. That is, they do not support
terrorism, sharia law, etc. … Of course, many Muslims are like this in the USA. They too are considered

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infidels by the true Muslims who want to establish not a Muslim nation in America but subject every
nation and every person to Islam. This is basic Quranic teaching (USAToday, 19 December 2011).

Many comments under this category portray a high level of certainty in their knowledge of ‘real’
Islam. As one comment asserts,

Not that there aren’t Moslems who are good neighbors and solid citizens, there are. But to the degree they
accept the principles of equality of religions and gender, of democratic rule, of free speech including the
freedom to criticize any religion, they separate themselves from Islam. The all-American Moslem is not a
Moslem – they have become something else. For a Believer, NOTHING trumps Islam. (Wall Street
Journal, 23 March 2012)

Again, once ‘ordinary’ Muslims cross the line out of the zone of ‘Other’ targeted by cultural rac-
ism, they fail to correspond to the mainstream imaginations of the difference to which ‘Others’ are
assigned (Povinelli, 2002). Once they fail to correspond to this imaginary space, they are no longer
‘real’ Muslims and their existence has no bearing on our understanding of Islam.
The most disturbing notion that emerges from all the comments is arguably a medicalized ‘condi-
tion’ called ‘sudden Jihad Syndrome’ (SJS). This is an idea that all Muslims have some fixed pathol-
ogies inside their bodies, which can be activated; even the most ‘moderate’ Muslims may suddenly
turn into terrorists. The comments under this thread provide a long list of ‘moderate-Muslims-
turned-terrorists’ as evidence. Here we have encountered a new type of racialization of Muslims.
Although some comments clearly deny the validity of treating Islamophobia as racism and laugh at
the ‘racist’ accusation as ‘ignorance’ due to the fact that ‘Islam is not a race’, the emergence of SJS
seems to imply a hidden racializing force in play. The SJS discourse places the Muslim pathologies
inside the body and focuses on its alleged potentiality to precipitate a sudden ‘syndrome’, a jihadist
attack (which, even from a more conservative perspective of Islamic studies, abuses the multiple
definitions of ‘jihad’ and further naturalizes the validity of such a usage). Following a deeper logic
of embodiment, the SJS discourse appears to invoke a new kind of biologism.
Finally, a comment made on the Wall Street Journal website regarding the AAM controversy sum-
marizes the state of American racism by reasserting classical individualism and cultural racism,

Here’s my top-ten list of what we should expect from those who want to become Americans (and those
who are already Americans, for that matter). The list was first published in a National Review Online
column a decade ago [link] … ‘Respect women’ … ‘Don’t demand anything because of your race or
ethnicity’ … ‘Don’t view working and studying hard as acting white’ … ‘Don’t hold historical grudges.’
(Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2012)

The comment enshrines individualism to an extent that all the structural stratifications are erased,
and America is again a fair and free country for all. Whites work and study hard and respect
women, whereas minorities work and study less hard and disrespect women. The comment reas-
sures that individuals need not be afraid of discrimination, since discrimination is not the norm in
society. If there is any problem, it is mostly individuals’ fault. The statement, in a word, reinforces
the discrimination that it claims to be absent.

Conclusion: Cultural Racism as Truth.com

The obsession with the ‘real’ Muslims and the ‘truth’ about Islam in the AAM controversy is remi-
niscent of the debut of the show All-American Girl (ABC) in 1994, in which the actress Margaret
Cho played a ‘wild’ woman who had a contentious relationship with her traditional

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70 Critical Sociology 41(1)

Korean-American family. The show elicited a great outcry from the Korean-American community,
for Margaret Cho was criticized for not being ‘Asian’ enough. In fact, the show hired an ‘Asian
Coach’ to teach Cho how to ‘act more Asian,’ for she did not appear to know how (Tang, 2002).
Similarly, the biggest outcry against AAM, other than those from anti-Islamic groups, came from
the Muslim audience. Among the American Muslim audience, some were eager to ‘correct’ the
‘wrong images’ of Islam that these Muslims represent on the show, and defiantly contest the rarely
portrayed ordinariness that is assigned to them. Representing a stigmatized minority group again
proves controversial, and in this case the result is again ironic. Some self-identified ‘real’ Muslim
Americans – who are the most ritually observant according to their own versions of Islam – are
those who are mostly excluded by those anti-Islamic American citizens, yet they share the same
point of view: the Muslims in AAM are not ‘real Muslims’.
The burden of explanation is almost always exclusively loaded onto the shoulders of Muslims.
It is rarely contested that what ‘Islamic values’ and ‘Western values’ mean is always selectively
manifested at each historical moment, and contingent upon geopolitical realignment and cultural
encounter. Likewise, both internal pluralism and debatable interpretations inherent to Islam as well
as the abundance of mutual influences between the ‘Islamic’ world and the ‘Western’ world remain
deeply alien to the American public. Throughout thousands of online comments about AAM, no
one ever mentions that the versions of Islam that American Muslims are practicing are both ‘mod-
ern’ and ‘traditional,’ and that the so-called ‘Western’ values are often the very ingredients and
interlocutors of modern Islamic thoughts (Hefner, 2005; Zaman, 2002; Zubaida, 2005). All the
important questions about historical specificity are erased under a flat list of ‘evidence’ that reveals
the ‘truth’ about Islam.
Let us take wearing the hijab as an example. The practice is often unanimously assumed to be a
mandate, and those who do not follow this supposed mandate simply deviate from the ‘real’ Islam.
Such an assumption ignores the important fact that before the 1980s, few American Muslims would
see wearing hijab as a necessary part of a pious Muslim woman’s daily life (Ahmed, 2011). This
new phenomenon grew among Muslims in the USA and other parts of the world after the Iranian
Revolution (Bowen, 2007; Byng, 2010; Göle, 1996; Macleod, 1991; Mahmood, 2005; Smith-
Hefner, 2007; White, 2002; Williams and Vashi, 2007), which shows a complex development of
Muslim identities among educated women and their various responses to the perceived secular
hegemony that constructed Western women as sexy objects while victimizing the image of Muslim
women without their permission. Not only is mass veiling a relatively new phenomenon in many
places, it continues to be debated within Muslim communities. With little historical contextualiza-
tion of everyday Muslim politics, Islam is again fossilized and singularized. Whenever it is singu-
larized, there is always a greater risk that the singular entity will be mislabeled, massively attacked
and distrusted. As a result, any representation, including an impressive attempt to introduce the
‘reality’ of ordinary Muslims to the American audience, should be cautious about the risk of por-
traying Islam as either highly canonic or deeply privatized (that is, still retaining the two incompat-
ible categories of being ‘Muslim’ and ‘American’). The highly canonic ‘real’ Islam is a recent
historical product as modern as its critiques.
The obsession with the single truth about the Other in the USA has repeated itself. From the
‘savage Black’, the ‘inverted Jew’, the ‘Monkey Men’ Japanese (Stockton, 1994), the ‘devious
Communists’ to ‘Barbarian Muslims’, it is always ‘them’ that should be blamed for social prob-
lems, not ‘us’ who created unjust conditions domestically or abroad, and forced representations of
others to our benefit. If anything is new, it is the scale of self-proclaimed authorities in cyberspace
on the problem of Islamophobia, with their computer-mediated quantitative vigor and positivist
taste. Otherwise, Islamophobic comments have continued a pattern that highly resembles the
American ‘folk theory of racism’:13

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I am a good and normal mainstream sort of American. I am not an irrational ‘Islamophobe’, because I am
very well informed and I know enough about Islam. Haven’t you heard about the Sudden Jihad Syndrome?
I did my research. I may have used language that would be obnoxious in the mouth of an irrational
uneducated person, but if I did so, I was reasoning with the matter of life and death, the homeland security
of our nation. If you understood my meaning to be irrational or racist, not only do you insult me, but you
lack a sense of patriotism and pragmatism, and you are not well informed about the Muslim atrocity in
Muslim countries. Plus, this is not racism because Islam is not a race. Educate yourself.

Together with the idea that ‘Islamophobia is bad and only bad people suffer from it,’ the two
seemingly opposing opinions regarding the AAM controversy in fact share something important in
common, something quite American. They continue to support the mainstream American ideas
about what racism and religion are and should be, leaving little room for a fruitful reflection on the
role of ‘institutionalized racism’, ‘cultural racism’ and ‘public religion’ in American society.
To date, there has been an unprecedented ‘fervor’ for studying Islam in the aftermath of the
9/11 attack (Howell and Shryock, 2003: 448). The boom in studying Islam following 9/11 con-
tributes to some de-stigmatization of Islam, as is also reflected in the diverse perspectives in the
comments. Nevertheless, the academic trend that aims to enrich our understanding of Islam is
accompanied by a whole alternative universe of anti-Islamic ‘scholarship’, popular books, and
‘fast-food’ knowledge consumption online, where truth is assumed to be 30 seconds and a few
clicks away. Thanks to the internet, there have never been more Islam-demonizing references
readily available, ready for online commenting systems to display the discoveries of ‘truth-
finding’ soldiers.
The deep geopolitical mire and the mutated cultural war in post-9/11 US society have prompted
more comments on Islam than on the various ethnic, sectarian, or non-primordial, modern, subal-
tern cultures to which diverse Muslims belong. Hundreds of online comments regarding AAM
unconditionally treat ‘Islamic’ teaching and ‘Western’ values as two utterly unrelated entities.
These comments are moving towards what Fanon calls ‘a blind alley’ (Fanon, 1968: 214), where
‘Africa’ is essentialized under the gaze of the West. The blind alley here, by contrast, is when com-
mentaries assume that there is only one ‘real’ knowable Islam out there; that one can reduce the
complicated religio-political dynamic into over-generalized understandings of cultural traditions
within Islam and ‘essential values’ of the ‘West’.
As my analysis has shown, the entire online outcry regarding the AAM controversy has closely
followed the old paradigms through which Americans talk about racism. Public imaginations of
Islam have shifted from a relatively tacit commonsense understanding of Islam as vaguely danger-
ous and exotic (part terrorist and part Aladdin’s genie) to a polarized culture war that serves as a
battleground over American identities. If the old ways of thinking and talking about racism did not
adequately tackle the difficult problem of racial inequality, but simply transformed it from overt
racism into more nuanced forms of cultural racism, should we expect any better in the case of
Islamophobia? More diverse perspectives beyond treating racism (including cultural racism) as
‘individual prejudices’ must be heard in public more effectively, and collective actions in the realm
of media representation, education, economy, legislation and jurisprudence must be taken
accordingly.

Acknowledgements
I thank Andrew Shryock, Sally Howell, and Mike Mosallam for sharing their insights with me during the
course of this research, and I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier
version of the manuscript. Finally, many thanks go to Nat Tuohy for his useful comments about the frame-
work of this work.

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72 Critical Sociology 41(1)

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. Islamophobia’ often refers to ideas and practice that discriminate against Muslims and Islam. It can
include individual prejudices that assume Muslims are lesser humans or institutions that systematically
exclude Muslims from economic, social, or public life. Some common Islamophobia notions include the
belief that Islam enslaves women, that Islam is a violent political ideology, and that Islam has no values
in common with ‘Western’, ‘modern’ and ‘democratic’ traditions.
2. For example, two elderly, turban-wearing Sikh men were shot to death on the street in California, on 4
March 2011. Police suspected it was a hate crime committed by assailants who mistook their victims for
Muslims.
3. As a recent Pew Foundation survey (2010) reveals, more than 81 percent of those who have ‘a great deal
of prejudice’ towards Muslims claim that they have from ‘a little,’ ‘some’ to ‘a great deal’ of knowledge
about Islam. Although it is very difficult to quantify to what degree people rely on their perceptions from
the internet, the role of the internet should not be underestimated.
4. The discourse not only conveniently ignores a European history teeming with religious wars, World
Wars, totalitarianism and fascism (Bauman, 1989; Pieterse, 1991: 8–9), but also justifies colonial and
postcolonial domination and economic interests in the Middle East.
5. Racial boundaries never follow the same criteria, not even in the same time frame, as in the current
American categories of black, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islanders.
6. For example, two Tennessee legislators in February 2011 introduced a bill that would establish certain
Sharia practices as prima facie evidence of intent to overthrow the Constitution. It would virtually crimi-
nalize Islam, theoretically subjecting Muslims who were not careful in their prayer practices to prison
terms of up to 15 years.
7. For example, in May 2010 a bomb exploded at an Islamic center in Jacksonville, Florida. In August, a
man slashed the neck and face of a New York taxi driver after finding out he was a Muslim.
8. The categorical logic is that the term needs to describe specifically the trash as white. If the term nig-
ger fuses race, class and morality in one, white trash functions in a similar way, except that it reaffirms
the nature of trash as non-white, hence needing the white as the specific modifier. These white trash are
presented as vulnerable, stealing, engaging in bestiality, enjoying tacky clothes or furniture, having no
taste, and so forth (Newitz and Wray, 1996: 60). They are, in a word, working-class participants who
need moral and emotional transformation (Skeggs, 2009: 626).
9. In this article I will only provide a few contents of the show, since most of the online comments that this
research examines did not come from those who actually watched the show. What was really inside the
show was rarely discussed.
10. Yet advertisers today demand to know more about online users. Staying longer on the same page means
higher rates of successful advertisement for some advertisers, and placing a commenting box there seems
a feasible device. OCS providers have emerged as a new lucrative market. Companies such as Disqus
and Livefyre have helped all major news websites incorporate social media accounts (e.g. Facebook and
Twitter) which would include supposedly ‘real’ information of potential online consumers that are valu-
able to advertisers. Posting online in multiple sites with one single account automatically set has never
been more convenient.
11. I collected the comments between March and September, 2012. Many old comments seem to be deleted
from the New York Times site. They were present prior to the research, but when the research started they
became unavailable.
12. The US media once described Afghan soldiers as ‘freedom fighters’ during the Cold War against the
Soviet Union that preceded the subsequent militarization of the region. In an older past, the codification
of sharia law as many know it today was born in the 19th century following the Ottoman Empire’s strug-
gle against Western military encroachment.

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13. I have created this paragraph modeled on Hill’s summary of Americans’ practice of mocking Spanish
(2009: 180).

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