"The Social Production of our Moral Indifference: Muslims, Whiteness and the Wreckage of Racialization"

  • Date: Dec 9, 2020
  • Time: 04:15 PM - 05:45 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Nasar Meer (University of Edinburgh)
  • NASAR MEER is Professor of Race, Identity and Citizenship at the University of Edinburgh, and is the Principle Investigator of the JPI ERA Net / Horizon 2020 GLIMER project, examining the governance and local integration of migrants and Europe’s refugees.
  • Location: Zoom Meeting
"The Social Production of our Moral Indifference: Muslims, Whiteness and the Wreckage of Racialization"
Public Lecture at the Online Workshop “Intersections of Religion and Race: Law, Politics, and Everyday Life”, organized by the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics


For more details please contact riedel(at)mmg.mpg.de.

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Despite several decades of compelling scholarship, semantic disputes continue to dominate accounts of the racialization of Muslims, or Islamophobia. This talk will refuse the invitation to continue in the vein, and argue instead that European centred but global white supremacy cannot but be understood other than through an account of the racialization of Muslims, past and present. Beginning with terrorism undertaken on Utøya Island and the wider Norway attacks in 2011, it will argue that not only did this violence have a particular relationship to the racialization of Muslims, but also to a broader reticence to recognise Whiteness as a social, political and historical project against which non-white groups are racialized. Whiteness here is a ‘project’ from which some people who may define themselves as white today would have been excluded in the near past. Recognising this, it will be argued, is no less important to sifting through the wreckage of white supremacy, and a key challenge for grasping the ways in which the racialization of Muslims is uncoupled from other groups.


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