Islamophobia and/as racism
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In "Benny Lava," Heems takes ownership of some South Asian stereotypes, rapping "I'm a big belly rude boy / I'm a fat sweaty Hindoo". This is not unlike what Kendrick Lamar does in "The Blacker the Berry," in order to lay bare the racist assumptions that often go unspoken but nonetheless structure moments of everyday life. Heems even connects Black and South Asian struggles in one of the first lines, setting side by side the racism faced by the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II and that faced by a (stereotypically brown) "squeegee man" in New York City. "Soup Boys" is a sharp contrast in tone, as we see Heems rapping leisurely about drones and escapism (weed + alcohol) over footage of drones and religious gatherings. He gives the mere concept of unmanned drones being used on human life the absurdity it deserves by repeating the word "drone" over and over in various benign contexts. He also uses this song to point out the disparity between perceptions of South Asians (those racialized as Muslims much of the time) as being violent, juxtaposed with the reality of American violence (drones) and cultural fanaticism (sports jerseys, cars, etc.).
Rana gives us some history and theory behind the Islamophobia and/as racism which Heems and Riz Ahmed point out in their raps. If we take Rana's historical line of argument, then racism began in modern form with the Spanish Inquisition. First it discriminated based on religion and thus mandated conversions, but over time Jews and Muslims began being associated both with immutable evil and with darkness/blackness. These perceptions were transmuted onto indigenous Americans encountered by Spanish colonizers, and in turn back onto Muslims by English colonizers based on their perceptions of indigenous people. Throughout history we see Muslims discriminated against on the basis of religious difference, membership in "Semitic" descent groups (Semitic-Hamitic hypothesis), darkness of skin, proximity to existing ideas about indigenous or Black people (some of which came from ideas about Muslims in the first place), American anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the figure of the terrorist. Thus it is not so simple as to say that Islamophobia is religious discrimination, certainly not in the way we think of the word today. It is a gloss for a great number of historically connected fears which sprung out of religion, dogma, and white supremacy. It is racism born of religious discrimination born of racism born of religious discrimination. Thus a term such as anti-Muslim racism might be more accurate, as it locates this discrimination within the figure of the Muslim, rather than in the religion itself (as much as ideas about religion inform these racist fears).