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Rana in Terrifying Muslims describes the process of reframing Islam into a racial category as speaking "to a wider historical discourse that emanates not only from racism [...], but also from the historical pre-eminence of imperialism and the maintenance of empire" (27). He explains how this is exemplified through the connection between Muslims, Native Americans, and Christians. Spanish colonisers applied their stereotypes of Muslims onto the Natives of the 'New World' as a way of successfully Othering them; both Muslims and Native Americans were treated as barbaric and depraved while the Christian Spaniards framed their own national identity around being different from them. This idea of the Other as interchangeable with each other blurred the lines between race and religion, since the colonisers simply rejected anyone who deviated from their idea of the norm. Such European conceptions of Islam migrated with them to the Americas, where African Muslim slaves were identified using racial terms like "Moor," despite not being Arab (Rana 40). What started as hatred and prejudice towards a Muslim Other soon became a way for colonisers to frame all Othered people, which is why Islamophobia today functions as a form of racism even for non-Muslims.

Arora and Husain refer to these blurred racial/religious lines in their respective articles, situating the effects of historical Islamophobia in the present day. Arora writes about how the 9/11-induced Islamophobia manifested itself as racism against turbaned Sikh men as well, just on account of the fact that their markers of racial difference are visibly evident through the turban. Husain similarly recounts how a white supremacist shot three South Asian immigrants, all from different countries and religions, but referred to himself as the "Arab Slayer." These incidents highlight how impossible it has become to distinguish Islamophobia from racism.

Said first defines the Orient as one of the West's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other," making it clear that much of what is generally understood as the Orient is simply the West's perception of it (1). Despite being an imaginative concept borne from Western ideas of otherness, these conceptions of the Orient have material implications since they are embedded within Western colonial systems and are used by these institutions to exert power over the Orient (Said 2-3).

These material implications can be felt through the examples discussed in Bald's book, of various African-Americans performing a "Hindoo" or Indian identity as means of escaping the anti-black segregation during the Jim Crow laws. He notes that whites during the time would treat men from India (or men assumed to be from India) differently, since they were interested in their "wisdom" and "magic" (Bald 50). He uses the term "well-calculated Indianness" to highlight the way in which Bengali peddlers would exaggerate their speech or manner in order to perform an image of the "imagined colonial subject" that attracted white people (Bald 50-51). There were no distinctions made between the vast cultures; everything considered part of the "Orient" from South Asia to the Middle East was simply part of the "store of exotic nations" that peddlers could draw upon to sell their goods (Bald 55). In this way, both black and brown folks were able to use Orientalist stereotypes to their advantage: by catering themselves to what the whites wanted to see from them, they were able to ensure their safety at the cost of demeaning their own culture and identity.