Unruly Women (Philosophy of Race)

Falguni A. Sheth
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Unruly Women
 PHILOSOPHY OF RACE

Series Editors
Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College and the Graduate Center CUNY
Chike Jeffers, Dalhousie University

Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice

Amy Reed-Sandoval

Reconsidering Reparations
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab

Falguni A. Sheth
 Unruly Women
Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab
FALGUNI A. SHETH
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sheth, Falguni A., 1968–author.
Title: Unruly women : race, neocolonialism, and the hijab / Falguni A. Sheth.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2022. | Series:
Philosophy of race series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021038634 (print) | LCCN 2021038635 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197547144 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197547137 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780197547168 (epub) | ISBN 9780197547151 | ISBN 9780197547175
Subjects: LCSH: Muslim women—United States—Ethnic identity. |
Neoliberalism—United States. | Marginality, Social—United States.
Classification: LCC HQ1170 .S466 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1170 (ebook) |
DDC 305.48/697073—dc23/eng/20211013
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038634
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038635
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197547137.001.0001
For my mother and again, for Bubba
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Ontopolitics: Unruliness, Excruciation, and Dismissal
2. Anxieties of Liberalism: Secularism, Feminism, and Suitable
Muslim Women
3. A Genealogy of Neocolonial Social Comportment
4. The Hijab and the Sari: The Strange and the Sexy Between
Colonialism and Global Capitalism
5. Reversing the Gaze: The Racial-Cultural Aesthetics of Power
6. Transparency and the Deceptive Conceit of Liberalism
7. Discrimination, Neoliberalism, and Suitable Women
8. Dismissal: Neocolonialism, Race, and Anti-Blackness
Conclusion: Listening to the Silences

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

The world, and especially my version of it, has changed enormously

since I began this project. Thanks to Inez Valdez, who issued the
invitation to participate on the American Political Science Association
panel that led to this book. I thank Linda Martín Alcoff for soliciting
this project well before there was any reason to believe in it, and for
her remarkable warmth and generosity and friendship. Thanks also
to generous and critical anonymous referees for their helpful
insights, and Peter Ohlin, editor at Oxford, for his efficient and
supportive approach. I am grateful to audiences at Emory
University’s WGSS Research Seminars, SPEP, APA, FEAST, and SAAP
meetings, and the Race-Religion-Secularism conference in
Amsterdam, where parts of this work were presented. I thank my
colleagues in WGSS for their support as I made my way South,
especially Lynne Huffer and Elizabeth Wilson. Thanks to my former
chair, Deboleena Roy, and Deans Michael Elliott and Carla Freeman
for supporting a year’s leave to finish this book. Thanks also to Beth
Reingold, Kadji Amin, Stu Marvel, Pamela Scully, Michael Moon,
Sameena Mulla, Aisha Finch, John Lysaker, and other colleagues at
Emory for their generosity, collegiality, and support. Deep gratitude
to the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry for a year to think and
write, and to Walter Melion, Keith Anthony, Colette Barlow, and Amy
Erbil for making the Fox Center such a hospitable intellectual and
social space. I am grateful to my colleagues during the 2018–19 Fox
Fellowship year for their collegial interlocution and enthusiastic
mischief. I thank Deborah Dinner, John Harfouch, Janine Jones,
Daniel LaChance, Joan Cocks, Schirin Amir-Moazami, Mickaella
Perina, Katie Terezakis, Allison Adams, and Samia Vasa for reading
various versions of this manuscript. In particular, I am grateful to
Mickaella, Katie, Debbie, Danny, and John for reading multiple drafts
of the same chapters without complaint.
This book has been subject to many stops and starts. Many
friends came together as my world changed over the last six years.
Because of their support, I was able to move forward—and,
ultimately, to write this book. Sincere thanks to friends from
Middlebury College for their warmth and support: Amy Holbrook,
Peter Matthews, Timmy Mayer, Caitlin Meyers, Ani Mitra, Marcos
Lopez, Sujata Moorti, Phani Wunnava, and Susan Burch. Special
thanks to former Middlebury President Ron Liebowitz and Dean
Andrea Lloyd for their caring responses. To my people at Hampshire
College, a wonderful and supremely undervalued place for
intellectual courage and camaraderie, a simple thanks cannot begin
to describe your critical importance. I am especially grateful to
Wilson Valentín-Escobar, Yaniris Fernandez, Diana Sutton-Fernandez,
Sue Darlington, Rachel Engmann, Jennifer Hamilton, Monique
Roelofs, Uditi Sen, Onni Gust, and the rest of my warm and
supportive former colleagues and students—especially Seth Wessler,
Yasmine Farhang, Rage Kidvai, and Tripp Johnson.
I continue to realize how rare good friendships are in the
academy, and specifically in philosophy: I want to acknowledge the
loyal and deeply brilliant friends who keep me sane in this field and
support my intellectual endeavors: Alia Al-Saji, Amy Allen, Sybol
Anderson, Linda Martín Alcoff, Namita Goswami, Mickaella Perina,
Katie Terezakis, John Harfouch, Devonya Havis, Janine Jones, Eddy
Souffrant, Paul C. Taylor, and Lisa McLeod. Special thanks to Alia Al-
Saji and Amy Allen, for quietly taking up my SPEP EC responsibilities
without fuss, and for supporting my career through a marked
transition.
In Georgia, I found a set of colleagues and friends whose
generosity and care is superlative and rare: Diana and Robyn Sutton-
Fernandez, Yanna Yannakakis, Aiden Downey, Allison Adams, Debbie
Dinner, Derrick Gervin, Michelle Gordon, Michelle Wright, Carol
Anderson, Daniel LaChance, Karen Stolley, Calvin Warren, Jenny
Wang Medina, Mel and Wes Green, and Malinda and Lydia Lowery.
Love and appreciation to Tex, who has entered and anchored my life
at exactly the right moment, neither too early or late, and fills it with
laughter, serenity, baseball, and perspective.
And then there are the friendships and connections that are
unconstrained by geography, moods, or emotions. For cradling me
through the dark years: Anita Balachandra, Asim Ali, Marcellus
Andrews, Linda Martin Alcoff, Bob Emmons, John Harfouch,
Mickaella Perina, Kristen Luschen, Uma Narayan, Tanda Neundorf,
Rekha Patel, Flavio Risech, Pierre and Arlene Rouzier, Ragesh and
Yaminee Sheth (and my nephew Ajay “Rohan” Babycakes
Spiderman, who always lifts my spirits), the Garbers, Sudha Setty,
Sangeeta Kamat, Marcos Lopez, Kevin McCarron, Michael McDonald,
Laurie Stenberg, Bess Purcell, Katie Terezakis, Janine Jones, Paul
Taylor, and Lucious Outlaw. Charles Mills made my research and
presence as a philosopher not only possible but joyous. Charles,
without your work and insistence upon the significance of my work, I
would not have been able to continue in this field. I am, as always,
supremely grateful for your friendship and mentorship, from the
beginning and through the dark years, and I will miss you so much.
I promise to carry on your work. Mickaella, Kristen, Katie, and Tanda
—I won’t corrupt the perfection of your presence in my life by trying
to describe it. Special thanks to John Garber for being my fellow
outlaw, to the Anitas, and to Asim and Laurie for their decades of
care and love, including chauffeuring me around Maryland.
Always, still, forever, thanks to my beloved Bob. Even though he
is no longer in this world, he was there at this book’s inception, and
my daily interlocutor in its completion, and beyond.
Unruly Women
 Introduction

A casual perusal of the news over the nearly two decades since the
events of September 11 shows the range of hostility directed toward
Muslim women and girls who wear the hijab or variants of the
“veil.”1 We read reports of attempts to pull off the hijab or niqab
from young girls or Muslim women walking down the street or
working as food delivery drivers. These are the public, visible,
verifiable events—translated as assaults, and in some cases treated
as such.2 These events are instances of religious or racial
discrimination—of violating women’s right to exist without injury in
society because they are Muslim.
North America has become increasingly dominated by the (global
and domestic) politics of national security as a defense against
“Islamic terrorism,” and even more so as the years have passed. Yet,
despite the visible presence of Muslim women who wear the hijab in
the United States, there have been few legal or state-led attempts to
regulate the hijab in the French (or Quebecois) sense of outlawing
conspicuous religious symbols. This is not to say that the hijab or
niqab are not considered threatening, subversive, and somehow
violating the principles of (a seemingly secular) liberalism. U.S.-
based Muslim women are still regulated and disciplined within the
social context in which they find themselves, as well as by the state,
but in less explicit ways than their European counterparts who find
the veil disturbing if not altogether offensive or transgressive of their
dominant, “secular” liberal culture.
In the United States, Muslim women who wear the hijab are
disciplined and regulated through a range of legal, economic, or
juridical approaches with reference to the liberal tenet that is being
contested or re-inscribed at various moments. Consider the following
catalogue: In 2003, a Muslim female police officer was fired for
wearing the hijab on the ground that she violated the Philadelphia
Police Department’s uniform policy.3 In 2005, two young Muslim
teens who were arrested, strip-searched, detained, and interrogated
for eight weeks on the suspicion of being potential suicide bombers
or terrorists (Bernstein 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006; Sheth 2006). In
2007, the Transportation Security Association announced its intent to
screen and examine anyone who wore “headgear,” including men
who wear baseball caps, cowboy hats, and turbans.4
Muslim women who wear the hijab have been routinely employed
at companies that require some social visibility, whether in clothing
stores or nonprofit organizations. There have been multiple
occasions (and a few legal cases) involving Muslim women or teens
who wore the hijab who were either not hired, or fired, from clothing
stores because they did not conform to in-house dress policies (Aziz
2012). Muslim women are also employed by government
institutions: in one instance, the US Department of Justice filed and
settled a civil discrimination suit on behalf of a New Jersey
corrections officer who was fired for wearing the hijab.5 In other
instances, imprisoned Muslim women have been required to remove
their hijabs on the grounds that they could injure someone else6 or
themselves.7 Women have been pressured to remove their hijabs on
threat of being barred from the courtroom where they were
conducting unrelated business. One order came from the governing
judge on the grounds that the woman violated the courts’ need for
transparency, identity, public-ness8 (ACLU of Michigan 2009). As
mentioned previously, other women, and Muslim teens who wear
hijab, niqab, or burqas report having to deal with daily harassments
or fear of physical violence. In many cases, women were not able to
obtain redress for these injustices or other forms of harassment or
violence, even when they were the aggrieved parties.
The disruption of the hegemonic aesthetic norm through their
public presentation or comportment—especially by an already vilified
minority population—is encountered as an “unruly” threat to be
addressed and contained9 (Sheth 2009, chap. 1). On a global level,
this is how much of North America, Europe, and Australia have
responded to Muslims after the events of September 11, 2001,
whether through a domestic and global discourse of national security
(Akbar 2015), or “laïcité” (Laborde 2005), or a defense of long-
standing (Judeo-Christian) cultural and national dominance. This
response is—quite simply—the rejection of Muslims unless they are
seen to integrate into that racially unmarked dominance.
In effect, this discourse, and the policies that follow from them,
are practices of legal, social, and cultural containment through which
the Western world has mounted an ever-increasing challenge to
Muslims’ moral, cultural, or religious commitments; but this
challenge is translated as a necessary political defense against
“political Islam” or “Islamic terrorism”10 (Ammann 2009; Akbar
2015; Beydoun 2017). As such, to subscribe visibly to Islam is to
always already be a problem. Yet, there is something else at stake
as well: the disruptions, while overtly received as threats to security,
secularism, or (liberal) democracy, are in fact threats to something
longer-standing and much more entrenched. These are challenges to
the long-standing received and unchallenged authority of American
imperialism and settler-colonialism. These projects go hand in hand
with a long-standing capitalist economy that is embedded in a
political and legal liberalism, which can thus demand obedience
through the machinations of legal procedures and neutrality.
At the beginning of his essay “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz Fanon
asserts that “[i]t is by their apparel that societies first become known
. . .” (Fanon 1965, 35). It is through women’s apparel that a society’s
“civility” or their “civilizability” is often evaluated. Such judgments
occur covertly, subconsciously, but ubiquitously. The bodies and
sartorial practices of women have always been strategically read and
judged,11 but in the case of dark, foreign, or marginalized women,
these readings are made in light of a prior history of colonialism and
imperial enterprises. On this understanding, the sartorial aesthetic
that reflects the cultural hegemony of Europe or the United States
demarcates and highlights the backwardness of the sartorial
aesthetic of “Other” cultures, in this case of Muslim women. As in
the case of the French and other European nations’ explicit
legislative stances against the veil, whether the hijab or niqab, often
by insisting that it is repressive or anti-secular, there is an invocation
of colonial power, used to correct, reform . . . or evacuate a culture
through Muslim women’s bodies/garments—in the name of
Western/liberal/civilizational moral superiority. Here, I draw on
Edward Said’s discussion of the Western gaze, or of Orientalism,
namely that “European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even
underground self” (Said 1978, 3). As Said insisted, “Orientalism is
more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over
the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient” (Said
1978, 6).
Yet, the “Muslim question,” as symbolized through the hijab, is
about something much deeper, more existential, . . . more corrosive.
The Muslim question is not merely about religion. Even as I have
written about the racialization of Muslims, I didn’t understand the
extent to which the Muslim question—as explored through the lens
of Muslim hijabis in the United States—is fundamentally about race,
immigration, diaspora, belonging. It is about the management of
women of color. It is about the unspoken juridical and existential
dismissal of Black Muslim women. It is about the sterilized
production and disciplining of Muslim women through juridical and
procedural regimes, articulated through culturally secular and neutral
norms.
In the United States, Muslim women are disciplined and regulated
through, among other ways, anti-discrimination laws. However, this
regulation is embedded in a longer, deeper history of
neocolonialism.12 I searched for a term that would illustrate the
hierarchical dynamics and comportments found in the relationships
between colonial administrators and a colonized people as these
continue transgenerationally and diasporically, that is, well after
colonialism has “ended” and far beyond the society in question. By
neocolonialism, I mean not only a repetition of colonialism, but a
repetition that embodies the seemingly neutral and objective
articulation of the rule of law and procedure. In so doing, this
repetition conveniently rests on a stylized history specific to the
United States, going so far as to distance itself entirely from
colonialism on the grounds that it was not involved in colonizing the
current descendants of other (French, Spanish, British, Portuguese,
Dutch) societies. By disavowing colonialism, U.S. narratives of
liberalism re-anchored the objectivity of liberal juridical and cultural
regimes in that distanced space through a focused amnesia. This
amnesia frames and eclipses relevant events that connect
colonialism and conquest elsewhere to the stories of how Black and
brown subjects find themselves in another space and time—still
haunted by geopolitical, intergenerational histories that are the
legacies of colonialism. These legacies carry on intergenerationally,
bringing forth and retaining a range of cultural and political dynamics
of condescension and degradation, even in the absence of explicit
registers of colonialism. Barnor Hesse identifies this tension between
the planes of racism and colonialism when he says,

Our understanding of race and its institutionalization as policing needs to

resist the violence of interpretations that mystify its colonial assembling as
segregated demarcations of Europeanness over non-Europeanness. On the
basis of these colonial demarcations, race was assembled and tabulated
through practices of making and marking white and nonwhite chains of
association between corporealities, territories, ecologies, cultures, religions,
and histories (Hesse 2017, 586–87).

He refers to this as part of the logics of “white sovereignty.” Race

becomes part of a vocabulary that is invoked in distinction from the
territorial legacies of colonialism, even as race emerges through the
logic of colonialism (Stoler 2010; Lowe 2015). In a society such as
the United States, for example, these dynamics are certainly seen
but are most often framed through a narrow grammar of racism. I
want to enrich that grammar by exploring a discourse that engages
only explicit encounters with racism, while simultaneously and
deceptively invoking other norms that are also racial but remain
camouflaged through the fabric of neutral liberalism. Such norms are
more difficult to extricate through racial grammar—in large part
because that grammar is not used. It is avoided by smart and
sophisticated scholars, judges, political officials, and others—in favor
of references to the naturalized vocabulary of freedom, choices,
professionalism, culture, secularism, security, uniformity, belonging,
impartiality, and so on. Racial discourse is also expressed through
technicalized juridical references: standards of proof, strict scrutiny,
statutes of limitations, irrelevant claims. This grammar, along with its
colonial palimpsest, yields a seemingly antiseptic architecture—
institutional, cultural, political—that undergirds “modern” society. It
is expressed through a sanitized discourse that professes to embrace
procedure and process as leading to the best possible outcome for
those who register complaints of discrimination, namely, as leading
to justice. It is a discourse—in all of its Foucauldian hues, but also in
terms of legal vocabulary, governmental strategies, avowed
commitments to liberalism and secularism. Hence, neocolonialism is
my denotation of this complex architecture of liberal discourse, racial
logics of policing, all of it intersecting with an amnesiatic history of
progress.13
This is why, even though the subject of this book is ostensibly
about the hijab and other variants of the veil, that lens enables a
larger exploration of the dynamics of the garb that women wear in
relation to larger questions of civility and civilizability; in other
words, it is about the neocolonial and racial-cultural aesthetics of
power. These aesthetics are not only about sartorial practices that
signify a religious commitment, but also about generic or “secular”
clothing, or clothing that is marked as culturally/racially specific.
Even as neocolonialism incorporates the anti-blackness and settler-
colonial roots of its past, along with an anti-immigrationist
sentiment, it does not do so overtly. Rather it does so mercurially,
through a range of biopolitical, ontopolitical, and globalizing
neoliberal economic norms.
Here, let me briefly describe neoliberalism: I refer to a political-
economic framework that champions free markets and promotes
individual negotiation to solve economic, political, and social
problems (Brown 2015; Freeman 2014; Cooper 2017; Giroux 2014;
Chomsky 1999; Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism has become an ordinary
catchphrase in the last few decades. It is laden with multiple
meanings, and often used as a pejorative to indicate an inferior way
of dealing with the market, the economy, and the state. David
Harvey, perhaps the most popular interlocutor of neoliberalism in the
twenty-first century, describes it as follows:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices

that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and
free trade (Harvey 2005, 2).

This description seems innocuous enough, and close enough to free

market economics to warrant more detail. Harvey provides it when
he states that:

[i]n so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself,

capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all
previously held ethical beliefs’, it emphasizes the significance of contractual
relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximized
by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to
bring all human action into the domain of the market. (Harvey 2005, 3)

Harvey’s analysis hearkens back to Michel Foucault’s painstaking and

lengthy rumination on neoliberalism in the twentieth century. As
Foucault explores in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures, “the problem of
neo-liberalism is rather how the overall exercise of political power
can be modeled on the principles of a market economy” (Foucault
2008, 131). Foucault takes pains to point out that the early
neoliberals took pains to disarticulate the principle of laissez-faire
from a market economy, that is to say that market economies are
hardly left to their own devices, but rather instrumentalized to
achieve certain outcomes (Ibid.). This is, in effect, the way that
private employers’ interests and anti-discrimination law work through
the U.S. courts—to achieve certain outcomes concerning Muslim
hijabis. As Wendy Brown translates neoliberalism, it “activates the
state on behalf of the economy” (Brown 2015, 62).
Yet, the liberal state is discursively important to the classical (and
neoclassical) economists’ insistence that the market is the site of
voluntary exchanges outside of the state’s interference. Thus, the
liberal picture of the active individual as free, autonomous, not
hindered by state regulations, induces a visage of markets as a
government-free, independent site. In turn, markets point to images
of individuals as being autonomous agents, entering and leaving the
market at will, expressing independence and autonomy. Such a
picture of the market conceals the relationship to government, which
is to order, direct, and govern the economy on behalf of certain
interests.
This framework does not begin to extricate the stark implications
of this kind of market-based ethic. The implications of this erudite,
neutral, non-racial discourse are tortuous: excruciating. When I
began to research the details of one case, I discovered a news
article that hailed a state trooper for having saved Christmas for a
stranded motorist and her family. She was on her way to a soup
kitchen to obtain supplies for her family, but the kitchen was over 30
miles away, and she had run out of gas. The trooper later went to
her house and brought her children Christmas presents after
learning that there would be no holiday celebration for them.14 That
motorist was one of the hijabis whose lawsuits I discuss later in this
book. As I calculated the timing, I realized that her trip to the
kitchen was soon after her dismissal from her place of work. Her
treatment in the courts was no better, but it was rationalized through
a plethora of attention to juridical procedure.15 And as this woman
was fired for her commitment to her faith, she was thrust even
further into precarity.
This is the implication of neoliberalism, wrapped up as it is with
neocolonialism. What I should have seen—much sooner than I did—
was that in this tightly woven fabric of neocolonialism and
neoliberalism, ontopolitics and technologies of race were at play. By
ontopolitics, I mean a moral/political apparatus that instantiates
distinctions between good and bad subjects/populations, doing so
through a range of subtle practices that claim adherence to race-
neutral procedures, while employing invidious strategies to produce
subjects in certain lights.16 This apparatus draws on presumptions
naturalized and made “obvious” and uncontroversial through
histories of colonialism, slavery, immigration, and, weaving into
those selective histories, pernicious structures that have been
legitimated through the facades of equality and universality
championed through the project of liberalism and equality. Muslim
women, with their range of backgrounds, races, range of places in
where they encounter hostility, are a microcosm of a larger
ontopolitics that is at play in the United States.
Part of these ontopolitics depend upon a certain aesthetics of
power that locate themselves in standards of professionalism,
secularism, and neutrality that are in fact racial and cultural, as I
explain in Chapter 5, and markedly gendered. They depend upon a
mode of racial address that is directed toward diasporic subjects—
Muslim, brown, Black—and often play out in distinct ways for
different (and intersecting) populations, as I explore in Chapters 7
and 817 (Roelofs 2020). They are, in fact, technologies of race.
Technologies of race are a crucial part of this neocolonial structure:
the perceived unruliness of Muslim women, women of color, African
American women, and immigrant women is consumed, processed,
and managed through the devices of race-neutral legal procedures
that adhere to abstract principles, timelines, statutes of limitations,
interrogations of choice, profit, religious accommodations, and so
forth. But what all of these procedures conceal is the excruciating
implications for these women: the unbearable, unlivable inability to
rise to the expectations of neocolonial authorities, and to the
impossibility of success even if they could approximate those
expectations.
Embedded in all of this are the pervasive and unabiding layers of
racialized receptions to women of color through administrative
procedures and judicial opinions. It is neither the hijab nor niqab
that is under contestation in the United States (nor, I would suggest,
in France). What is being contested are the gendered (and racial)
performative presentations and practices of women of color (Butler
1990). We see these contestations through the filter of Muslim
women—as a subset of Black women, other women of color,
immigrant women. The lens through which I write this book takes up
a cross-section of them through the vehicle of the hijab, and thus
may appear to be exclusively concerned with the management and
disciplining of Muslim women. To some degree, that is accurate. But
even more so, this filter allows us to see a cross-section of precarity,
unruliness, and the contestatory possibility and fluidity that might
accompany a gendered and racialized subject (object) of
management, regulation, and production.
Later, I initiate a vocabulary describing two kinds of racial address
that accompany the production and management of subjects of
color: Through the concepts of excruciation and dismissal, I begin to
excavate the dimensions of psychic violence and racialized
administration at play in regulating the performativity and practices
of subjects of color, but specifically in this case of Muslim women. By
excruciation I mean the impossible, unbearable, yet must-be-lived,
space between success and not-success. The demand to be
autonomous and independent and free in the ways that liberal
regimes “invite” is a demand to appear autonomous and
independent and free: to comport oneself as if . . . And yet the
secret, often well kept, is that under neocolonial/liberal regimes,
women of color, Black women, immigrant women, are prevented or
precluded from performing independence or autonomy or freedom
outside of certain narrow strictures, because that would be a threat
to the regime itself. They are demanded to comport themselves as if
. . . , but too much success (e.g., to perform autonomy so without
legal strictures, dress codes, or institutional harassment) would
mean that they might not be manageable under such a regime.
Freedom is not about being free, but about comporting oneself
properly to appear free in a way that is recognized by that regime.
And yet, women of color, Black women, many immigrant women,
marked as they are visually, cannot “perform” successfully. Still, that
does not prevent the coercive “invitation” that they must do so, nor
does it restrain the discipline applied to them because they cannot
do so successfully. That discipline can take the form of firing,
contempt of court, or racial dismissal: their complaints, leveled in the
name of “freedom” to challenge discrimination, the freedom to dress
as they find suitable in relation to their moral/social/religious
commitments, may be addressed as successful, but little will actually
change in the prevailing order.
Dismissal is both a judicial term, indicating that a complaint has
been dropped or a case has concluded, and a classic American18
racial comportment. In this book, I argue that it is used in lieu of (or
adjacent to) direct racial encounters in juridical spaces as a way of
“trumping,” to borrow a phrase from the card game of bridge, the
hand that people show. It is a racial comportment that produces
women of color as racialized subjects, whose complaints are
generally not recognized—for any variety of reasons—as valid or
legitimate. This comportment can be seen through a range of
expressions, through explicit legal dismissal of a case based on any
number of reasons. More compellingly, dismissal can be seen in the
ways that issues in discrimination cases are parsed out: thus, even
in the face of evidence of intense racial discrimination in a religious
discrimination case, it is bracketed as unrelated to the complaint, or
the statute of limitations has passed to pursue the complaint, or it is
dismissed as irrelevant on the grounds that the intense
discrimination was expressed by colleagues and not the supervisor
who ultimately “laid off” the complainant.
Legal scholars and lawyers may take issue with my interpretive
approach—with not analyzing or attending to judicial procedure
precisely when reading these cases. I am reading between the lines
for comportment, attitudes, norms, implicit values that are being
articulated and held up behind the face of explicit arguments about
legal and political principles. My approach to many of these cases is
to move past the typical bureaucratic details, which can be invoked
in order to neglect or shift direction on a complaint: that a complaint
was not filed in time; that certain principles apply (are being applied)
and others do (are) not; that a summary judgment is given in favor
of the plaintiff for one aspect of the case, and for the defendant in
another aspect of the case. These are all part of “proper” legal
procedure and critical legal judgment. These opinions represent how
lawyers and judges are “trained” to think. Legal training is part of a
larger consensus about how to uphold and sustain neutral
proceduralism in the interests of justice. And yet, we also well
understand that there are conservative judges and “liberal qua less
conservative” judges. Often the distinction between the two depends
on which principles, which cases, they believe will make the
strongest argument in their defense (or in defense of their legal
judgment).
I am interested in excavating a metaphysics of racial address that
exists beneath that judgment. That requires alternately perusing and
scrutinizing a range of materials: statutes, legal materials such as
opinions, transcripts, background context, history, and other factors,
in order to extract a political ontology—or an ontopolitical analysis of
race, as it were, which illuminates the quotidian attitudes toward
women of color in “everyday” legal, administrative, and workplace
contexts, and which helps locate racial dynamics against a largely
unspoken history that engenders and produces those racial
dynamics.
Part of the way that the ontopolitics of race plays out is through
the production of suitable Muslim women in contrast to Muslim
women who are illegible as rational, autonomous, and with
legitimate grievances. Rather, they are—through judicial opinions,
court officers and judges, news media, prison authorities, security
personnel—rendered as irrational, oppressed, coerced, defiant,
unruly, in any or some combination of these features. In short, they
are rendered unsuitable, unacceptable, and ultimately, unfree. But
these readings are, even if implicit or displaced through an
administrative or procedural discourse, racial productions that
become located in a larger, longer history of neocolonial
arrangements. Muslim women, as American racialized subjects or
immigrant racialized subjects, play a part in a neocolonial, neoliberal
script.
 1
Ontopolitics
Unruliness, Excruciation, and Dismissal

I. Non-conformity or Unruliness?
In any number of examples in the ensuing pages, hijabis and
niqabis1 will be addressed in the courts, on the streets, in their
workplaces, as women who have made a “choice” in the classical
liberal sense of freedom. Any abstract liberal subject can choose to
be free or “unfree.” But these sorts of choices are read differently for
dominant elites than they are for women of color. While there are
studies that suggest that intentional non-conformity may engender
respect from the surrounding work culture, this respect is accorded
to those who have more social capital—or what we might call, in
critical race studies, race or class privilege (C. Harris 1995; Hunter
2002). Thus, while Western corporate culture might celebrate
“renegades” such as Mark Zuckerberg, who popularized casual
“hoodie and jeans” office wear, or Steve Jobs’ black-on-black outfits,
it is important to note that these figures are most often elite men
qua corporate raiders, in charge of shaping and forming corporate
culture (Bellezza, Gino, and Keinan 2014; Murray 2019). By contrast,
much of American society vilifies darker women of color2 who—
whether through their modes of dress or public communications—
decline to conform to accepted neocolonial prescriptions to “behave
themselves.” Witness for example the reception of outspoken women
such as Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist and hijabi, or
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is a Black immigrant and hijabi, or
philosopher and activist Angela Davis’s infamous Afro, which she
wore during her earlier years as an activist and revolutionary. Davis’s
Afro entered into 1970s mainstream consciousness as a symbol of
defiance and radicalization (McDonald 2018).3 And yet, these
practices—whether hair or headscarf, cultural or religious—mark
darker women and men as departing from norms signaling
conformity. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, which, even if not
endearing does not signal him to be a threat, Trayvon Martin’s
hoodie was not encountered as innocuously. It was met with deadly
force (Jeffers 2013).
Even though at first glance, the public wearing of the veil might
appear to be compatible with certain U.S. Constitutional principles
such as the First Amendment (which ostensibly protects freedoms of
expression, association, and religion), this compatibility can be
modulated through what Michel Foucault calls governmentality,
depending upon how threatening or suitably “unruly” the Muslim
woman in question is perceived to be.4 The question of perception is
important here, since it is neither stable nor objective. Following
Foucault, the perception of good and bad subjects emerges from the
biopolitical management of society and the production of different
kinds of populations at the boundaries of American liberalism.
Biopolitical management is a form of regulatory power that facilitates
distinctions between populations through processes pertaining to life
and death. These are technologies of power—“mechanisms of
security”—that have the effect of achieving “overall states of
equilibration or regularity” among populations (Foucault 2003, 246–
47). Foucault’s framing of regulatory power is useful in that it points
to the phenomenon of legislation that can draw distinctions between
Americans and outsiders. These distinctions are embedded in the
history of immigration law, which is administered independently of
constitutional tenets5 and which establishes a “racial divide” between
those who belong to the state and those who constitute threats to
the polity.6
These distinctions play out inconspicuously, through a subtle
combination of biopolitics and ontopolitics. The biopolitical
management of “(good) Americans” versus “(bad) Americans”
establishes the foundation by which to distinguish between the
“good liberal subject” from the “terrorist”—or their “oppressed”
wives, daughters, and mothers who are in our midst.7 This
distinction can be seen, as Foucault suggests, through the inscription
of race and racism, although at the level of ontopolitics (Sheth
2011). In ontopolitics, sovereign power collaborates with regulatory
power to produce ontological divides and resorts to a moral plane to
legitimate those divides.8 Ontopolitics can consistently operate
alongside biopolitics; however, its scope of (political) management
distinguishes good subjects from bad subjects through non-
biological, indeed moral, cultural, social, ontological categories such
as terrorist, patriot, enemy, friend, moderate, extremist,
fundamentalists, radical, and so forth. Moreover, ontopower—as a
mode of inscribing racism—parallels a Foucauldian dialectic between
sovereignty, disciplinary/regulatory power, and population.9

II. Neoliberal Tactics: Governmentality and

Producing “Suitability”
As I will argue, we will see that dress is not merely about the
personal preference of the wearer. What someone wears, and how it
is broadly perceived, is influenced and shaped according the whims
and dictates of a dominant elite. This point—that the public
presentations of less powerful members of any society are subject to
the norms, expectations, and visions of “suitability”—contravenes the
explicit liberal ideology of individual autonomy and freedom. Michel
Foucault—while not explicitly concerned with fashion—insightfully
develops this point in relation to his notion of governmentality and
the production of suitable ends. A suitable end is distinct from the
objective of sovereignty, which is the making of decisions for “the
common good and salvation of all” (Foucault 2007, 98). Suitable
ends are those which are:
 internal to the things [government] directs (diriger). It is to be sought in the
perfection, maximization, or intensification of the processes it directs, and the
instruments of government will become diverse tactics rather than laws.
(Foucault 2007, 98)

Contrary to the mythos of classical political theory, governmentality

is not necessarily administration for the purposes of justice or the
common good; it doesn’t necessarily restrict its power to territory.
Rather, governing is a strategic art deployed toward certain
“suitable” ends, or as Foucault says, “the right disposition of things
arranged so as to lead to a suitable end.”10 The objective of suitable
ends is taken up through governmentality. Governing is the complex
administration of power. It includes “the ensemble formed by
institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and
tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very
complex, power that has the population as its target, political
economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of
security as its essential technical instrument” (Foucault 2007, 108).
In other words, the purpose of power is to shape or produce the
population through data gathered through the apparatus of political
economy, while using various security measures and policies as its
mode of production.
Governmentality also includes “the tendency, the line of force,
that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led
towards the pre-eminence over all other types of power—
sovereignty, discipline, and so on—of the type of power that we can
call ‘government’ and which has led to the development of a series
of specific governmental apparatuses appareils) on the one hand
[and, on the other] to the development of a series of knowledges
(savoirs)” The third element that Foucault includes are those
processes that are transformed from justice to administration
(Foucault 2007, 108–9; italics in original). This transformation is key
to understanding the argument in this book: it can only be seen if
one can acknowledge a distinction between rhetoric and ontology, or
appearance and essence. The language of liberalism—the framing
(and not framework) of justice—is a technique of power, as Foucault
himself argues.

The game of liberalism—not interfering, allowing free movement, letting

things follow their course; laisser-faire, passer et aller—basically and
fundamentally means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows
its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality
itself. (Foucault 2007, 48; italics in translation)

The secret of governmental power is that it draws on law and

discipline as vehicles of power—not to arbitrate justice, but to
complement reality—to work alongside reality in order to produce a
certain outcome—in the name of freedom, yes, but freedom as
“nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of the
apparatuses of security.” (Foucault 2007, 48)
This approach to managing subjects who appear insubordinate
(or unruly) raises the question of what a suitable end looks like. One
the one hand, a suitable end is that which the state deems useful to
its plans. On the other hand, suitable ends will often, if not always,
be couched in a cheerful rhetoric as being “good” for some
population, without much distinction regarding when a “suitable
end” reflects a seemingly appropriate outcome for a dominant
majority while simultaneously (re)producing a dynamic of
subordination or inequality for a vulnerable or minority population.
To be effectively enlisted for the purposes of managing a population,
a suitable end relies on a discursive consensus that a particular
outcome is “beneficial” for not only society, but for the population in
question—not because it actually is, but because cultural minorities
or marginalized groups are rarely acknowledged; in fact, they are
actively discouraged from having cultural, social, political interests
that are distinct from the larger “community,” since these are
believed to inhibit assimilation or societal harmony. This absence of
acknowledgment is ironic in view of liberalism’s emphasis on
“individualism” and “individual freedoms.”11 In other words, a
suitable end “emerges” as the truth of the dominating culture.
The approach of suitable ends may serve to explain, in part, why
the hijab hasn’t been overtly regulated in the United States, despite
its increasing visibility. There is little reason to engage in an overt
encounter when similar ends can be accomplished through less
confrontational legal/institutional/procedural means. This is one of
the most effective strategies of neoliberalism, understood as a
technique in which things are allowed to happen, to occur, in the
neoclassical sense of laisser-faire, laisser-passer political/juridical
structure. Besides legal power, the weight of cultural and colonial
power already lies in the hands of the state and judiciary. The legacy
of that power expresses a certain confidence in the ability to discern
the kinds of cultural practices that are acceptable, because it is able
to usurp the authoritative judgment about which kinds of practices,
or treatment, are acceptable for cultural minorities or other
marginalized groups.
Insofar as the hijab and Black women’s hair are seen as
aberrations of professional dress, they are received as cultural, that
is, “voluntary” practices that must either be corrected or
accommodated.12 Yet, while the practical expression of ontopolitics
may be oblique or obscure, its effects are felt viscerally. For Black
women and darker women of color, racial “non-conformity” or the
mark of difference, whether skin color or hair, is not a choice—it is
an ontological and political condition. That is to say, it is the world
through which their identities have been woven, stitched, and
constituted. As such a world, it is not an external institution to which
one decides to make a commitment or to detach oneself. Rather, it is
an environment in which their self-understandings are shaped
alongside their engagement in certain practices, not always
deliberately or consciously, but co-constitutively in concert with
others of similar backgrounds, class, cultures, or histories, similar to
Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, chap. 2).
Habitus, as Bourdieu envisions it,

could be considered as a subjective but not individual system of internalized

structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all
members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all
objectification and apperception: and the objective co-ordination of practices
and the sharing of a world-view could be founded on the perfect impersonality
and interchangeability of singular practices and views. (Bourdieu 1977, 86)
The world, as I am deploying it analytically, is similar to Bourdieu’s
notion; however, I want to ameliorate Bourdieu’s emphasis on what
seems to be the intentional dimension of the engagement of
practices—since it is the outside perception of intentional “refusal to
conform” that is flawed. Such a perception misconstrues that the
practices undertaken by those who share the same habitus are not
necessarily deliberately engaging in non-conformity, but rather
taking up practices that are shared by others in their world. Still,
Bourdieu’s notion is useful, because the historical dimension of
habitus is precisely that which is forgotten, internalized, and
absorbed through the set of practices that are perceived as non-
conformist or unruly. As he says,

[I]t is the habitus, history turned into nature, i.e. denied as such, which
accomplishes practically the relating of these two systems of relations,13 in
and through the production of practice. The “unconscious” is never anything
other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by
incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of
habitus. (Bourdieu 1977, 78–79)

Even though “non-conformity” is not necessarily an intentional,

resistive stance, it is read that way by those in dominant worlds as a
“choice” that can be undertaken or not. And since it is “undertaken,”
it must have been a “free choice” in the sense of flexible agency, but
“unfree” in that it does not comport with the standard of cultivated
or educated freedom, in the vein of John Locke or J. S. Mill. The
process of history turning into nature is forgotten. Against the
backdrop of a dominant society that has also forgotten, that
“natural” practice, whether of Black hair or the hijab, is also subject
not only to amnesia, but construed as a resistance that challenges
the practice—both because of the superordinate view of the larger,
neocolonial society, viewing the Muslim woman in question as
engaging in resistance, and because the history of her world, her
culture, her community has been “forgotten”—or does not register
as an ordinary expression of practices.
 III. Excruciation
Over the last three decades, a variety of decisions have come down
on multiple sides of the practice of veiling in public places and
workplaces. Such regulation could not be successful unless it was
also embedded in a phenomenon of excruciation. Excruciation is the
neocolonial phenomenon of forcing vulnerable14 or already
marginalized populations into two difficult—if not impossible—sets of
expectations, each of which is arduous and laborious, and requires
contortions in order to aspire to them. That is, neocolonial subjects
of color are positioned between two impossible positions. Moreover,
there is no winning position. Excruciation is crucial to the facilitation
of a neocolonial juridical order of priding itself on a liberal neutrality
that subsumes only legal historical precedent but not the imperial
history that foregrounds and undergirds that regime.
Ultimately, these positions are represented by the extremes of the
complete cultural assimilation or reproduction of the standards of
dominant or neocolonial population, or utter failure.15 Success is
nearly impossible, since success means looking like a member of the
dominant group: in behavior, practices, dress, habits, and
comportment. If success, as complete cultural assimilation, were in
fact attained, this would suggest that the vulnerable subjects or
groups in question have blended in completely. Such a goal is most
likely unattainable for darker subjects in the context of society with a
colonial, slave-owning, and imperial legacy. The other option/end of
the spectrum is not-success—that is, not quite “one of us.” That
conceptual space is very capacious and allows for many possible
points on the spectrum—from not good enough, to almost passable,
to utter failure. And yet, the power of excruciation lies in the implicit
yet ubiquitous challenge to rise to the level of the
dominant/neocolonial expectations, and yet the near constant
certainty of failure. It is a process that “subjects” of colonialism are
ceaselessly faced with. They are caught between two inevitable
ends: the mandate to be like their colonial taskmasters and yet,
disallowed or prevented from being successful. This is the
painfulness of excruciation: the expectations are nearly impossible,
ultimately unbearable, and yet inescapable. The adjectival form of
this term is familiar: excruciating. Synonyms for excruciating include
the following:

agonizing, extremely painful, severe, acute, intense, extreme, savage, violent,

racking, searing, piercing, stabbing, raging, harrowing, tormenting, grievous;
dreadful, awful, terrible, unbearable, unendurable, more than one can bear,
more than flesh and blood can bear.

Excruciation connotes a kind of tortuousness, if not actual torture—a

metaphor for the pain and contradiction induced by both the rack
and vice: the rack, a medieval torture device which consists of
anchoring a body’s four limbs to four corners and stretching them to
the point of breaking; the vice, a device designed to squeeze and
crush, to annihilate. Its root, which is likely obvious, connotes
crucification.
Excruciation, in a neocolonial context, is the spectral ground
against which all diasporic subjects must stand, inevitably, such that
the values of the neocolonial upper class are transmitted and
reproduced. Frantz Fanon describes a version of this when he refers
to the attempts to challenge the colonial world in Wretched of the
Earth:
The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the victorious
confrontation of these values with the lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is
so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized
rightly make a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned. In colonial
context the colonist only quits undermining the colonized once the latter have
proclaimed loud and clear that white values reign supreme. (Fanon 2004, 8)

They are imposed and taken up through the help of the colonized
intellectual along with the colonized bourgeoisie, the latter of whom
are desperate to ascend to the status of the colonized “elite” (sic).
Fanon articulates the compulsion with which the bourgeoisie want to
engage with the elite through the “famous dialogue on values,” in
which the “specificity and richness of Western values” is articulated.
But it is done subtly, in a way such that the colonized populations
are unaware of the “rearguard campaign in the fields of culture,
values, and technology, etc.” (Fanon 2004, 7–9).
But Fanon recognizes as important the role of the intellectual and
the bourgeoisie in imposing good cultural values upon the colonized
population at large, while the colonized population in turn sees only
the destruction of property, harassment, and persecution by the
colonists. Moreover, Fanon recognizes the impulse of colonized
subjects to accept the values of the colonists:

In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold,
the colonized subject has had to pawn some of his own intellectual
possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the
way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks . . . . (Fanon 2004, 13)

When we extend this analysis to the present-day inheritors of

colonialism, the neocolonialists, what we see is that one is pressured
to try to mimic the colonial authorities. Yet, even in the current
moment, the danger is that if one is too successful, then one is
impossible to distinguish from the real colonial authorities. We might
consider this to be a success—when the foreigner, the outsider, the
colonial subject emulates one’s masters, as ostensibly is the project
of the colonizing mission. Yet, it is an ill-fated if not an impossible
goal: If the colonial subjects were to be successful in emulating their
masters, then they would be impossible to distinguish from the real
colonial authorities. They would cease to be recognizable, but they
would still be understood as threats—so they are either preempted
or punished at some level, regardless of what they wear or how
much they assimilate. This is the other side of the phenomenon of
excruciation: the pressure to uphold colonial values, which can run
the spectrum of white supremacy to elite bourgeois values in the
workplace, or values of liberal feminism and democracy, while still
facing the constant threat of not being successful/being too
successful, and thus being disciplined, set back, punished.
Pierre Bourdieu, three decades later after Fanon, formulates an
analysis of the production of “taste” and distinction that is largely
established by a bourgeois class. Some of this emerges as an
expression of education or social origins (Bourdieu 2000, 12). Other
sources include “economic capital” (Bourdieu 2000, 39). And yet, it
is difficult to see the pressure to conform to bourgeois values as
traceable to a distinct source such as education or capital, especially
in light of the failure of “respectability politics” to be an effective
deterrent from harassment or persecution of colonized (or
neocolonial) subjects by bureaucratic, school, or police institutions
(F. C. Harris 2014). Rather, the pressure to conform to bourgeois
values appears to emerge from an essentially neocolonial impulse
that insists that subjects of color must present in ways that replicate
the liberal, post-imperial image of the free, autonomous individual.
This pressure induces a state of ambiguity, a state of suspension,
which in itself can lead to a state of excruciation.
The metaphor of crucifying functions especially well with regard
to vulnerable populations, those who have much to lose—because
they are disposable, and therefore can be easily toyed with by the
dominant population, much like a cat with a mouse. Excruciation
then, is a trial, a game, that the colonial subject can never win, even
though it is imposed continuously, revealing to us the disposability of
the diasporic subject and the slave alike. Again, Fanon’s prescience
on this front can be seen throughout his writings. Fanon points to
the idea that the “colonial subject is a man penned in; apartheid is
but one method of compartmentalizing the colonial world. The first
thing the colonial learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its
limits.” A few pages later, he identifies the “permanent state of
tension” that the colonial subject is in, given that he is never sure
“whether he is out of line,” while also fully aware that he faces the
world as “configured by the colonized,” and as such he “is always
presumed guilty” (Fanon 2004, 15–16). Fanon recognizes the same
for men in “Algeria Unveiled,” when he points to the double-bind
imposed upon Algerian men who work for the colonists: to show
their wives or to risk being considered primitive and patriarchal
(Fanon 1965, 37–44). But there is little discussion about the
excruciation in which women find themselves.
It is unclear that women, Algerian or contemporary women of
color in neocolonial contexts, are subjected to excruciation solely
through patriarchal values. As Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid
point out, attributing exploitation to patriarchy is not an adequate or
satisfactory response. As they say, while patriarchy is a known factor
within a range of cultures, it nevertheless produces all women as a
“class by themselves,” distracting us from the nuances and myriad
sources of the pressure to coerce women into excruciation positions
(Sangari and Vaid 1990, 24). Similarly, excruciation does not find all
neocolonial subjects in its midst in identical ways.

IV. (Ad)dressing Women Racially

In the ensuing chapters, I want to illuminate excruciation and
dismissal16 as a structure of racial address. Monique Roelofs
develops the concept of modes of address to explain how subjects
are taken up in a racial, or gendered, or cultural frame. Address, for
Roelofs, is the response or engagement of a certain object, or
relationship between persons or things, or some variant thereof, that
is hailed or responded through the lens of certain constellations. As
importantly, modes of address “sustain material relationships among
subjects, and among subjects and objects. More than that, they help
or orchestrate such relations” (Roelofs 2020, 41).
Drawing on Jamaica Kinkaid’s short story “Girl,” one particular
form of address that Roelofs extracts has to do with the hierarchy
between a young girl and her teacher, an authority figure. Roelofs
describes the possible phenomenon of insubordination that could
emerge in the face of a prescriptive command. As Roelofs suggests,
“Dictates, after all, are the kind of things one can flout. They
disclose a disciplinary agenda, which also uncovers the sway held by
exactly those contravening forces that appear to require
regimentation” (Roelofs 2020, 43). Part of the anxiety that emerges
in such hierarchies is the possibility of “eluding regulatory control,”
which implies that the subject in question is not strictly in conformity
with the rules (Roelofs 2020, 43). While the scene that Roelofs
describes is different from the phenomenon that I want to
illuminate, the question of insubordination, and anxiety that a
subject may be eluding regulatory control, is very much at play in
the relationships between Muslim women of color and the public
officials or employers whom they address through their
comportment or dress. In turn, those same officials and employers
express their concern at the “insubordination” on display by Muslim
women through their dismissal of their concerns and charges, and
refusal to see the excruciation—the impossibility of these women to
conform in ways that will erase their visage as insubordinate or “not-
quite-one-of-us.”
Dismissal illuminates the structure of racial address to which
Roelofs gestures. Dismissal refers not merely to the dismissal of
charges, but to the courts’ and employers’ comportment17 toward
the complainant: that of dismissing the possibility that there is any
validity to their concerns of being discriminated against. They are
disseminated through the court opinions, judge’s commentary, and
chronicling of events, among other sources. Moreover, the judges’ or
employers’ attitudes reflect a wariness, even an incredulousness that
something as “trivial” as a headcovering could cause the kind of
resoluteness that launches a battle in court. In that triangulation of
excruciation, dismissal, and anxieties over the eliding of regulatory
control, we see the structure of racial address emerge. This
comportment incorporates explicit expressions of dismissal, as well
as subcategories of dismissal: castigation, cavalier discipline, and
others.18
Even though these attitudes are directed to the plaintiffs, they
manifest themselves as expressions of unruliness on the part of the
plaintiffs because we take for granted the already existing hierarchy
between the judge and the plaintiffs. That hierarchy, mirroring the
neocolonial dynamics discussed above, displaces the subtext,
relocating it outside the frame. That subtext consists of the
assumptions of the subordination of the plaintiffs as articulated by
their unnamed racial and ethnic identities, and their insubordination
as manifested through the fact of the lawsuit.
Variations of racial address are illuminated through the ways that
African American Muslim women are addressed in relation to
immigrant (Black and non-Black) Muslim women. All of these
populations are addressed racially and/or culturally; all of them are
racialized subjects. The juridical responses to Muslim women
oscillate between more expansive and more restrictive treatments of
the racialized discrimination that they face in the workplace. At
various points, if a hijabi’s court case is successful in making it up
through the courts, and whether she will succeed in adjudicating her
claims, depends upon the vagaries and vicissitudes of the case, the
employer, and the bench. Those factors already fold in a certain
combination background details that affect her
juridical/cultural/social treatment as a racialized subject. In certain
cases of immigrant Muslim women of color (Black and non-Black),
they are addressed against the temperature of national security
politics in relation to a phenomenon understood as “Islamic
terrorism.” The anxiety gauge—namely, the national mindset—
regarding the perceived national safety of the dominant
racial/cultural population in relation to “Islamic terrorism”—will often
serve as the backdrop of a court’s expansiveness or restrictiveness.
At various moments in the last two decades, the intensification of
fear of terrorism qua “Islamic fundamentalism” has waxed and
waned, depending upon any number of factors: violence marked as
“terrorist” because of the ethnic/religious interpellation of the
suspect; the hawkish or warmongering tendencies of the
congressional or executive branch, such as the passage of the USA
PATRIOT Act several weeks after the events of September 11, 2001;
the decision to send U.S. troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban;
the expansion of the droning of suspected terrorist cells in Pakistan
during the 2000s; the expanded “Muslim ban” in 2016, which
attempted to prohibit the entry or re-entry of visitors or migrants
from predominantly Muslim countries. In the aftermath of such
moments, hijabis reported many more public—verbal or physical—
attacks on them.
In the case of Black Muslim women, specifically those who are
African American, those background conditions are augmented by a
different dimension of national security politics. That dimension
consists namely in the history of civil rights movements and
legislation to protect African Americans in the twentieth century.
Islam as a specific challenge to the violent racism of Christianity
began to be taken up at the same time: first through the Moorish
Science Temple movement, as an Islam-affiliated organization, and
then through the Nation of Islam.19 Finally, in the mid-twentieth
century, radical movements such as the Black Panthers, along with
Nation of Islam and other Black Islamic organizations, were
challenging and resisting threats to the safety of African Americans,
leading to investigations and attempts to discredit, suppress, or
destroy them altogether, by the FBI through their counterintelligence
program, COINTELPRO (O’Reilly 1991).
As such, the visages of Black Muslim women are associated with
radical Black movements organized to protect African Americans
from threats of the state, but which are connoted as being enemies
of the (liberal/white supremacist) state. This brief sketch might allow
us to understand the technology of race at work in the case of
African American Muslim hijabis as related but distinct from that in
the context of non–African American or non-Black Muslim women.
The former have two unruly histories to contend with in terms of the
way they are addressed racially—both in terms of general social
culture as well as by the state. In a different vein, as Su’ad Abdul
Khabeer argues, authentic Islam in the United States is coopted by
immigrants, leaving little legibility or legitimacy for “indigenous
Islam,” even though it has existed in the United States since the
beginning of the twentieth century and has been taken up by African
Americans. This phenomenon, creating antagonisms between
“indigenous” and immigrant Muslims, augments, perhaps even
intensifies, the skepticism and suspicion that has already trailed
Blacks and Black Muslims for much of the twentieth century
(Khabeer 2016).
Returning to the notion of excruciation as a form of racial
address, it is a continuation of a practice that was prevalent during
times of slavery. This was true in many arenas, even in the area of
clothing. For example, as legal scholar and historian Leon
Higginbotham illustrated, slaves couldn’t hold any form of property
without a master’s permission, including clothing, which was to be
regulated to distinguish the slave from their master:

When a slave managed to obtain clothing that might accord him some dignity
or prestige, the act declared that when such clothing was “above” that which
a slave should wear, it could be taken from the slave by “all and every
constable and other persons” to be used for his or their own benefit.
(Higginbotham 1980, 173)

After offering a description of the coarse fabrics and materials that

slaves would be allowed to wear, Higginbotham reminds us that:

The slave was forced to “know his place” and never to reflect or symbolize
any higher aspiration than that which the white society had irrevocably
imposed upon him. (Higginbotham 1980, 174)

Part of the regulation of clothing for “subordinate” populations was

not only to ensure that “they” should know their place, but that
society should be able to read those populations as having
conformed to the standards set up for them. Standing apart renders
those subjects to have willfully, by choice, refused to comport
themselves by the standards set up by the elite.
Thus, as we will see later, in the cases of Deandra Spears, or
Ginnah Muhammad, or Cynthia Rhouni, or Lisa Valentine, or
Ethiopian and Somali immigrant women who worked as cabin
cleaners for an airline, their attempts to commit to their faith in
public—whether in the workplace, through court opinions,
courtrooms, prisons, or county courthouses—are primarily legible
through the lens of unruliness, even as they are registered through
the grammar of procedure, neutrality, and color-blindness. They are
forced to “choose” between employment or faith (and poverty, in at
least one case), or seeking justice and faith, or visiting their
imprisoned partner and faith, or supporting family and faith.
Moreover, such choices are not merely forced upon them as women,
but as racialized subjects. In part this is difficult to prove, precisely
because there is nearly no reference to their race. However, rather
than the absence of proof, it seems to be precisely the existence of
proof that their treatment is intensified, that they are excruciated in
ways that are different from those of other Muslim women of color.
Non-conformity can be read as a brave, hip, choice—a kind of
leadership, according to studies by business professors of tech
industries. But only if it is intentional. For Black American women,
their perceived non-conformity may and also may not be intentional.
When Blackness presents as a physically immutable fact and an
ontological condition, then veiling or hair practices are read as
intentionally non-conforming—even when they wear the veil or
khimar while performing their daily lives in accord with the
expectations that neocolonial feminism induces them to take up in
order to be respectable: to be employed, to be a “responsible”
citizen, to be part of a community. And those two poles: the poles of
attempting to live up to the promise of the racially unmarked
neocolonial and yet racially dominant—neocolonial—world in which
they are forced to exist; and to attempt the pursuit of the promise of
American liberalism—while simultaneously being disciplined—this is
the process of racial excruciation or other technologies of race
designed to domesticate, manage, and be persecuted through the
tragic impossibility of the conditions in which they are caught. In this
way, the fates of Spears, Valentine, Muhammad, Tisby, and so many
others whose insistence on remaining true to their faith, taking up
one of the supposed promises of U.S. liberalism, are related perhaps
indirectly to the fate of Shukri Ali Said.
In April 2018, Shukri Ali Said, a young Somali-American Muslim
woman was shot dead by police officers in the early morning hours.
Shukri had come to the United States with her family over 25 years
before, when she was 11 years old. She and her family moved to
John’s Creek, Georgia, near Atlanta, in 2017. That morning, a
Saturday, Shukri had left her home with her passport and a knife,
repeating out loud that she had to go home. Her sister Aisha
Hussain, fearing for her sister’s well-being, called 911 in order to get
them to check on Shukri. Less than 10 minutes later, Shukri was
dead, shot by two of the four police officers, apparently for failing to
heed instructions to drop the knife.
 “She is clearly of African descent, she’s wearing Abayba (sic), Islamic attire,
she’s fully covered, and she is irrational, saying ‘I’ve got to go home. I’ve got
to go home’ ” . . . “I feel like . . . if her Islamic identity wasn’t so dominant, it
might have been handled differently. Race and religion clearly played a big
part in it.”—Aisha Hussain, sister of victim. (Boone 2019)

The director of Georgia Council of American-Islamic Relations

(CAIR), Edward Ahmed Mitchell, speculated that “law enforcement
failed to properly de-escalate conflict with a woman they knew to be
mentally ill . . . or that law enforcement reacted differently to Shukri,
a Somali-American woman who was reportedly wearing a hijab and
a dress at the time of the shooting, than they would have reacted to
another individual” (CAIR 2018). Shukri Ali Said joins the long and
often quiet list of Black women who have died at the hands of law
enforcement officials.
For example, Sandra Bland was stopped for a supposed traffic
violation and brutally arrested because she refused to put out her
cigarette in her car. Ultimately, Bland was found dead in her prison
cell, described as having committed suicide in her cell. In Florida,
Marissa Alexander was arrested and convicted of attempted
homicide for shooting a gun into the ceiling of her house in an
attempt to scare her physically abusive ex-partner into staying away
from her. Even though “Stand Your Ground” laws or Castle doctrine
is enforced in Florida,20 Alexander’s attorneys were unsuccessful in
demonstrating that Alexander was within her rights to defend herself
against an intruder in her house. Amy Hughes was shot in her own
yard by police officer Andrew Kisela because Hughes was holding a
knife while standing on the grounds of her own home (Kisela v.
Hughes 2018). The case was heard by the Supreme Court, who
ruled against Hughes on the grounds that Kisela was entitled to
qualified immunity in the event that there was any doubt that he
acted reasonably. Most recently, as I finish this book, there were
continual protests over the shooting of Breonna Taylor, an
emergency room technician in Louisville, Kentucky, who was shot
dead while sleeping in her apartment (Oppel Jr, Taylor, and Bogel-
Burroughs 2020). This short catalogue should convince us that Black
women are subject to state violence on a continual basis.21
But Shukri Ali Said’s death, as an immigrant Black hijabi, at the
hands of the U.S. state, remains illegible. It is illegible—it does not
register precisely because we are not accustomed to being able to
think Blackness and Muslimness and gender and even
“immigrantness” together—as an intersectional challenge to the
dominant narrative of ahistorical liberal secularism. Deandra Spears,
Lisa Valentine, and others have not died, but they have been subject
to excruciation and its flip side, dismissal. Dismissal consists in the
evacuation of the legitimacy of someone’s claims of injustice—
whether these claims involve physical harm, discrimination, or some
other form of diminution or belittling. The way I utilize it in the
framework of neocolonialism, dismissal is part of the symbiotic
tightrope that connects the two ends of excruciation: one’s claims
are deemed illegitimate in the face of expectations of how one can
comport oneself better; how one must work harder to realize their
liberal, authentic, free, ideal self. And these expectations exist to
point the blame back at the claimant: “It is your fault that you are
being discriminated against, or harmed, or not taken seriously. If you
could only . . .”
And in this triangulation, dismissal can take the form of any other
tones: contempt, castigation, cavalier discipline, among others.
These tones will reveal themselves in later chapters.
 2
Anxieties of Liberalism
Secularism, Feminism, and Suitable Muslim Women

It is by their apparel that types of society first become known . . . The fact
of belonging to a given cultural group is usually revealed by clothing
traditions. (Fanon 1965, 35)

I. Anxieties and Lightning Rods

Hostile receptions to “visibly” Muslim women1 are filtered through
the vocabulary of legal rights or discrimination. Such a vocabulary
may be relevant, but it is both pragmatic and partial. It is pragmatic
because it captures a certain legal status at a particular moment—
we could call it a legal screenshot. It is partial because couching
these dynamics in a framework of legal rights eclipses the colonial
history of liberalism in which United States politics and law are
embedded, and presents the issue merely in terms of what is “due”
to the aggrieved party, if in fact a legal institution concedes that the
plaintiff is aggrieved. Yet, such a question—essentially framed as a
question of liberal justice—is embedded in a cultural and political
narrative that submerges the history of imperial dominance under
the framework of rights and equality, through the institutional
vehicles of laws and markets—through racial capitalism—by which
already long-standing (naturalized) colonial and imperial worldviews
are sustained and reproduced.2
Liberalism, with its peculiar understanding of justice as involving a
set of rights against the state, reciprocal duties, and extension of
individual freedom to all of its legible members, is the history of
British subjects who colonized a land through the blinders of terra
nullius (Locke 1947; Mill 1862; Pateman 2007) and imposed a set of
religious and political beliefs that facilitated their own dominance
while remaining indifferent to the paradoxical co-existence of slavery
and liberalism, geopolitical conquest and liberalism, imperialism and
liberalism—essentially contradictory ideologies—for hundreds of
years (Mills 1997; Mehta 1999; Pitts 2006; Muthu 2012). Be that as
it may, the framework of liberalism is proudly asserted as the
constitutive mode by which to challenge breaches of religious and
political individualism in the United States—as if these breaches were
happenstance, momentary, individual, and without a cultural
background that is haunted by much deeper, longer-standing
struggles to monopolize power.
In the United States, several of the primary spaces where
religious discrimination is challenged are the workplace or in prisons,
such as when employers prohibit women from wearing the hijab at
work—either by threatening to fire them or not hire them at all, or
by refusing to accommodate their religious commitments in a
reasonable manner. And yet, for the myriad of religious
discrimination cases that have been brought to U.S. courts on behalf
of Muslim hijabis, very few of them have been successful. By my
admittedly unscientific count, there appeared to have been 155
federal cases that contested employers’ or prisons’ ban on the veil
for Muslim women between 1998 and 2019; 115 of these cases were
brought between 2008 and 2019. The ingenious—and often
disdainful—ways in which these challenges are rebuffed should
become the basis for rethinking the efficacy of liberal proceduralism
—and reconsidering its guise as an impartial recourse—for obtaining
justice for populations who are both vulnerable and perceived as
unruly or threatening to a racial, cultural, political elite.
For reasons explained in the introduction, much of the North
American and European controversy over the hijab and its various
counterparts centers on the proper norms governing the public in
distinction to the intimate/moral, the demarcation between the
neutral/secular and religious/cultural/moral, between public freedom
and individual choices. At one level, these distinctions appear to
emerge from a several centuries-old discourse about the contours of
political versus individual freedom: How much of one’s private
commitments can be exhibited in public without impinging on the
beliefs of others? How much of one’s personal preferences can be
expressed without risking strife among one’s neighbors? These
questions don’t make sense unless we accept the framework that
well-functioning polities constrain sources of friction so that people
may live peaceably together. This is, at some level, the revered
mythos of liberalism—in differing forms—for the United States as
well as for the French. Secularism is deployed as the powerful cloak
that would provide the support to buttress individual freedom,
autonomy, and conscience—all ligatures needed for a properly
functional liberal engine. As Joan Scott argues, the “story” of
secularism “provid[es] a unifying rationale for a series of economic,
social, and political developments” (Scott, 9). It is a discourse—an
apparatus of power—which holds secularism as an enlightened
norm, a mark of advancement over religion.3 Secularism becomes
the distraction by which the question of progress, enlightenment,
individual freedom, and autonomy are gauged. Yet, these questions
are more than about curiosity; they reflect the anxieties of
liberalism. That is, they reflect the anxieties of an ideological political
framework that claims to be about freedom, but reflexively
understands that political power cannot be successful by
accommodating an abstract—contentless—freedom. It can only
remain successful by grooming its subjects to live within its
boundaries. In this sense, again, Michel Foucault is correct: political
power cannot be adequately revealed by scrutinizing the figurehead
(Foucault 2003, 26, 59). A much more successful approach requires
understanding the anxieties behind the liberatory discourse, rather
than chasing the meaning of the veil. In what follows, I explore the
lightning rod symbolized by the “veil question” in the context of
liberal discourse of rights, freedoms, and secularism/religious
accommodations.
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