4. Whiteness, Hindutva, and Impurity

“It Is Unfair”

My focus group participants found Ahmed’s arrest absurd: “the school overreacted”; “the reaction to the whole thing was overboard.” One focus group laughed at the clear mismatch between action and reaction:

A participant in another focus group made a similar point: “That’s an example of overachieving gone wrong [laughter].” To which a fellow student added, in an exasperated tone, “So he got in trouble for doing his project?” Participants continued: “How do you mistake that for a bomb?” and “It is unfair that they took him away.”

Absurd and unfair though Ahmed’s treatment may have been, my participants did not view his experience as an aberration. Some thought a similar incident would be unlikely at their own predominantly-Brown schools, but in a white school setting, they could easily imagine being arrested just as Ahmed was. There is good reason for this. Juvenile court systems have long targeted Black and Latinx boys; although many of my interlocutors were of South Asian descent, they now face a carceral system that uses on them techniques honed through decades of policing Black life. Writing in 2002, Gary Smith observed a distinct shift in the juvenile system away from the courts’ original project of rehabilitation and toward punishment.5 Many states made it easier for minors to be prosecuted as adults, relaxed confidentiality policies, increased penalties, and in some cases, lowered the minimum age for execution. California Proposition 21, the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act, which passed in 2000, allowed a youth as young as fourteen years old to be tried as an adult. When that proposition was being discussed, proponents represented youth of color, and Black youth specifically, as “super-predators.” Some of those trends, such as the age when minors can be executed, have reversed in more recent years. The Supreme Court banned execution of those under age eighteen in 2005 and there is ongoing effort to raise that age to include young adults. While the country has pulled back from some extremes, it has still not necessarily moved toward rehabilitation. Debates around how much penalty is appropriate abound and many of the harsh punishments enacted twenty years ago are still on the books.

Furthermore, the twenty-first century has seen a significant increase in surveillance—the use of security cameras, presence of police in schools, and Stop-and-Frisk program6—which means a higher likelihood that Black and Brown boys face arrest. The plea-bargain system is another factor in the ongoing over-punishment of Black and Brown youth: because many of the harsh sentencing guidelines of the late twentieth century are still applicable, the accused who cannot afford a private attorney are likely to be guided by their pro bono attorney to take a plea rather than risk the harsh sentencing that could result from a jury trial. Black and Brown boys thus continue to be disproportionately affected by the carceral state. Against this background, my focus group participants explained the practices and maneuvers they had developed, both in and out of school, to avoid experiences like Ahmed’s.

Self-Surveillance

Several participants emphasized visible changes of clothing style or behavior: “Whenever I am getting on a bus, and of course I have my hoodie on, I always make sure to take my hoodie off right in front of everyone in the bus so like no one has any ideas or anything.” Another added: “I have changed my style. I don’t wear hoodies anymore.” When they walk at night and a white girl is ahead of them, they “slow down,” “take a different route,” and “have my hands exposed” because they know of occasions when girls have felt uncomfortable and called the police. These teenage boys have noticed people “move their bags when they see me pass by.”

At other times, rather than consciously performing harmlessness, they try to make themselves invisible: “I don’t stand out. I try to be mellow. I don’t do things extra,” and “I just mind my business, don’t do anything suspicious. Don’t look at anybody.” While my participants strive to avoid police officers and security personnel and “don’t talk back to cops,” they may still find themselves in difficult situations with them. One participant, Rahim, explained encounters with police in his neighborhood:

Whenever I am walking on the Ave and have my headphones in, they stare me down. So it’s like I always make sure I have to take off my headphones and make sure I am not doing anything. And it gets annoying from time to time because they do random searches but they only do it to people who aren’t white, which I tend to see a lot. Like one time the police officer was so rude, he took all my stuff and he threw it on the floor. He was looking through my bag and like okay so I am gonna have to put all this back in, for nothing, cuz you aren’t gonna find anything.

Frantz Fanon said, “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema,” for that development is structured by “the ‘historic-racial’ schema.”7 The gaze of the police officer, his careless handling of Rahim’s bag and its contents, belong to that “historic-racial” schema, which ultimately racializes Rahim—and here I am alluding to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of race as a practice of domination.

While Rahim’s experience is one that he shares with other nonwhite boys—being stopped by police and having belongings dumped out on the street is not exclusively experienced by those who are Muslim—a Muslim boy may live that reality differently because it is layered with experiences that are specific to his religion. Said differently, he may experience these events and related feelings as part of a Muslim commons, a shared Muslim minoritarian sense. Thus my participants also talked of encounters where they felt that it was their (or their relatives’) religious identity that stood out to the agents or police. One participant from Bangladesh recounted his father’s harassment at the airport: “When you are at the airport, you want to be especially cautious . . . if you have a beard, you better cut it. . . . Oh my . . . My dad had a long beard, he cut it and they were like ‘yo, you have to come over here’ and we spent like two hours in that thing.” Some Muslims wear a beard to emulate Prophet Muhammad. In popular culture it is associated with religious conservatism and prejudicially linked with extremism. Isolating religion from race, as I noted in chapter 1, is not a priority in my work. Following Mawani and Patel, I see Islam as being thoroughly integrated into assumptions about racial alterity in North America. It is less important for me to identify whether Rahim is mistreated because he is a Muslim or because he is an immigrant or coded as Brown. Muslimness, migrant status, and phenotype all work together as a connective regime in the eyes of the police officer who emptied Rahim’s bag onto the sidewalk. In such circumstances the body reacts by making itself small, by eradicating its uniqueness: “Do what everybody else is doing”; “wear the same clothes”; “act the same way”; “select hamburger over chicken karahi” and “work on English language accents.”

Managing Affect

Affect is central in the practices of self-surveillance described above. My participants managed their affect by trying to be “friendly” to everyone: “I try to be very friendly to people so they don’t start getting nasty ideas” and “I smile a lot and offer to pick up bags for old white women at baggage claim.” They described how they intentionally spoke softly and worked to appear “mellow” in white-dominated public settings, taking personal responsibility for calming the nerves of those around them—people who have been educated to read them in terms of threat.8 They tried to “smile more” and appear “jolly.” That my participants managed their affect in public is not surprising. They are deeply aware that they are being watched, not only by security officials but also by fellow passengers in an airport, travelers on a bus, or riders on a subway. Their fears are not unwarranted: the Transportation Security Administration’s Behavior Detection and Analysis Program (previously called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) trains officers dressed in casual clothes to identify passengers exhibiting signs of suspicious behaviors (stress, fear, deception). TSA’s own employees from Boston have criticized this program as specifically targeting people from racially marginalized groups.9

My participants’ practices of intentional softening and calming are also informed by a long history in which Muslim men have been associated with an excess of emotion, particularly rage. We see that association on Newsweek magazine’s cover page from September 28, 2012. Under the title “Muslim Rage,” a group of Brown men, mouths wide open, protest—presumably angrily, presumably at an anti-U.S. rally, and presumably in some part of the Muslim world. That is a long list of presumptions, but Newsweek seems to have realized that most readers would make them. A decade earlier, on September 28, 2001, Newsweek had featured a similar cover image where a young Muslim boy held a gun, under the header “Why do they hate us? The roots of Islamic rage—and what we can do about it.” In this construction, “they” are taken to task for unfairly directing rage at a majoritarian “us.” Again, the expectation of excess affect is not exclusively reserved for Muslim men. In “Feeling Brown,” José Muñoz argues that “standard models of United States citizenship are based on a national affect . . . This ‘official’ national affect, a mode of being in the world primarily associated with white middle-class subjectivity, reads most ethnic affect as inappropriate.”10 But affect may be projected differently onto different ethnic groups. Whereas in the case of Latinx people, it is the loud expression of joy that is viewed as unbecoming, in the case of Brown Muslim men, it is the public expression of discontent (or rage) that is the inappropriate affect. Rage is opposite to the emotional restraint demanded of middle-class subjects and assumed to characterize “us,” the citizen-readers. When the magazines invoke rage, they are mobilizing a long history of characterizations of Arab men and Muslim men in colonizing discourses.11 Muslims, young and old, perceive that they must modulate their reactions to fit the emotional space afforded by prescribed national affect (and we could extend this to national sartorial boundaries that exclude hoodies, beards, and hijab) or risk being marked as noncitizens.

Muslim boys are thus hypervigilant in spaces defined by whiteness or demarcated as white: “If you know where you are, you know what could happen. If you do certain things, you should alarm people of what you are doing. [Speaking of Ahmed] I would have went [sic] to my principal or even my science teacher and say that I am working on a project, an alarm clock, could you at least let the people in my area know.” Commenting specifically on Ahmed’s clock design, one participant said he would have thought more about the clock’s appearance, would “not make it look like science-looking” and would have avoided “wires poking out.”

But my participants also experience these acts of self-vigilance as burdensome. Bilal objected to the expectation that he should have to adapt his life and tastes:

We shouldn’t have to adapt but it’s what we have to do now. In my neighborhood, there are four people taken by immigrant police, ICE. I think I heard that they were just knocking on doors and that’s how they found people . . . We shouldn’t have to adapt . . . We have people like Trump, basically higher ups in our system that set up standards and rules, how we should act, what we should say.

Faisal added:

In African American households, when you get to a certain age, your parents, well, at least in my experience in [a] Muslim [household], you always get ‘the talk’ about how if you are ever suspected by any type of cop or any type of law enforcement you should like comply no matter what. Agree, no matter what. Don’t talk out of line cuz they are afraid what can happen to . . . cuz you’ve seen videos of people like, police brutality everywhere. And it’s like, like, I got this same talk at age six and that’s a pretty young age to be worrying about that kind of thing.

Some of my other interlocutors spoke of nervousness, fatigue, and nightmares. Sara Ahmed suggests that race structures the body’s mode of operation, and in these examples, we catch bodies in the act of racialization—when a boy avoids eye contact or takes off his hoodie as he boards the bus or when a young man shaves his beard before traveling or avoids having heritage food in public. Race structures those actions not prior to or after the hostile white gaze but during the exchange.12 It is in these moments that whiteness becomes manifest as a modality of power and control. Racialization thus weighs down boys like Bilal and Faisal—a burden that they are forced to carry from a very young age. Black Muslim boys, as Faisal’s comment suggests, may be aware of this burden through both distinct and overlapping routes and structures of feeling.

This weighed-down, racialized body—the postures it assumes, the clothes it puts on or takes off when entering public spaces, the accent it speaks in, the emotions it hides—thus becomes the matter through which the effect of whiteness appears in the world. But we also see how Black and Brown Muslims relate to whiteness in modes that are both like and unlike those of other boys of color. When Faisal (a Brown Muslim) suggests there is a “Muslim version” of the talk about police brutality, he illustrates how his experience overlaps with that of Black boys. But Bilal’s comments about ICE raids—or when other Brown Muslim boys describe being labeled “terrorists” or being mocked for their accents, their food, or their parents’ clothes—show that they also experience whiteness differently than their Black coreligionists. We are thus reminded of Deleuze and Guattari (from chapter 1) who point to variation within experiences of racialization. None of what I have written here is to argue against the reality that the American carceral logics are constructed to contain Black life—that is, in fact, its originary purpose, as Simone Browne shows in Dark Matters.13 Instead, what I hope to have demonstrated is how that regime encloses numerous others constituted as nonwhite, even as it continues to be most heavily restrictive toward those coded as Black. Ultimately these surveillance practices leave an indelible mark on the surveilled.

Ironically, the afterschool program where I met these Muslim boys aims to enable them to integrate better into the society that encloses them. The program advertises that it will guide participants on “valuable skills such as personal finance and negotiation.” It mobilizes the category of “underserved youth” to direct youth of color toward the ends of capitalism. Soo Ah Kwon thus suggests that we view such nonprofits as technologies of neoliberal governance that limit the development of oppositional political activism in youth.14 And yet, even though the teens in my focus groups had come together under a program with such evidently neoliberal goals, their comments above indicate that these programs may also become sites where they develop a consciousness of their marginality. In the years since 2017, some of my focus group members have gone on to become social activists and leaders in their own right. Nonprofits or community organizations indeed facilitate the production of self-governing subjects within a neoliberal state. But as entities that gather together members of “underserved” Black and Brown populations, they can also exist as spaces for consciousness-raising among them.

Crafting an Uncontaminated Hindu Rashtra (Nation)

A video circulated in March 2021, first in India and eventually worldwide. It showed a teenage boy being slapped, kicked, and shoved to the ground by an adult man. The boy, it was later revealed, was a thirteen-year-old Muslim named Asif, who had entered a Hindu temple in Ghaziabad, India, looking for a drink of water. When caretaker Shringi Yadav asked the boy to identify himself and heard a Muslim name in response, he began to beat him. Another temple caretaker, Shivanand Saraswati, recorded the incident and posted it on social media with the caption: “Mulle ko napunsak bana diya.” Mulle is used as a disparaging term for Muslims (even though mullah technically refers to Muslims who are learned in Quran and theology). The term here appears within the caption’s broader insult: “Muslim has been made impotent.”15 As Asif is beaten, he cries over and over: “I had come to drink water, uncle.”

The temple caretaker’s vicious beating of Asif—a thirsty boy in search of water—was obviously disproportionate to the offense of entering the temple without permission. In that, it resembles the incident at Dulles airport with which I opened this book: why beat or detain a boy who obviously poses no threat to two adult guards (or, in the Dulles incident, to an airport staffed by dozens of armed security)? Why record the beating and post it on social media? What work is the video supposed to do?

The online response demonstrated an effort to reduce the disparity between Asif’s actions and the caretakers’ (over)reactions by building up the boy’s supposed offense. Some suggested the Ghaziabad temple caretakers beat Asif not because he had entered the temple, but because of actions he had allegedly taken within its walls. They claimed he was caught spitting; others alleged he had urinated in the temple space. Spit, blood, mucus, urine, and feces are of course viewed as polluting and pollutants, to be excreted from the body, flushed away. Spitting/urinating, in this narrative, sullied the purity of the temple and thus would justify the harsh discipline directed at the boy. But focusing on alleged behaviors elides the context in which the beating began—in the moment when Asif shared his legibly Muslim name. Asif had apparently ignored multiple signs outside the temple that prohibited Muslims from entering—or, perhaps more likely, as one news anchor pointed out, Asif was illiterate and thus could not read the warning signs.16 However he came to be within its walls, the boy’s entire being was unwelcome in the temple; spitting or urinating would be beside the point, since he himself was a pollutant. We can see in this incident how the Muslim boy presents a risk to the purity of the Hindu temple much in the same way as the Muslim boy, in its proto-terrorist formation, represents a risk to the nation’s security in the American context. Both iterations of Muslim boyhood gain force through the construction and surveillance of domains of purity/impurity, innocence/threat.

The temple’s exclusionary logic is more readily understood if we situate it within the current political landscape of India, where the ruling party now espouses and promulgates an ethnoreligious ideology in which Muslims are viewed en masse as contaminating, as matter out of place, as bodies to be expelled from India. Variously called Hindutva (literally, the essence of the Hindu) or Hindu nationalism, this political philosophy calls for the Indian state to be reorganized according to exclusively “Hindu” precepts.17 As Chetan Bhatt and Parita Mukta explain, this worldview ascribes nationhood to Aryan and non-Aryan people on the subcontinent—inclusive of not only Hindus of different castes but also Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs who have religions with roots in India—while excluding Christians and Muslims. The logic is premised on an assumption that Hindus share a common descent and are connected by blood to the ancient Vedic-Aryan forefathers.18 While Christians and Muslims may claim India as their country of birth (pitrabhumi), they cannot affiliate with it as the country of their religious traditions (punyabhumi), and hence their loyalty is always suspect.19 In a Hindu rashtra (nation) as thus conceived, the Muslim remains a forever foreigner, in a formulation not dissimilar to the articulation of Muslims in America. In fact, as Shruti Devgan has shown, even within its broader Aryan and non-Aryan parameters, those included in the Hindu rashtra do not partake equally in its claimed purity; Sikhs are simultaneously included and excluded, incorporated in the Indian Constitution as “Hindu,” but denied “authenticity” as Hindu by being cast as its “variant,” especially as “separatist Khalistanis,” when it suits the Indian state.20 In this sense, racialization in India unfolds through similar patterns that we saw in the American case: where nonconforming traits (or religious groups in this instance) are integrated in “increasingly eccentric and backward waves” in relation to a center.21 The Hindutva ideology is not new; it emerged in the 1920s as an upper-caste ideology. But it is now widespread due to the political and cultural efforts of organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). India’s present ruling party, Bharatiya Janata, traces its roots to Jan Sangh, the political arm of the right-wing RSS, which was launched in the early 1950s.

In the Hindutva worldview, religious minorities like Muslims must either be exterminated or assimilated, with the latter demonstrated by unconditional obeisance. Both routes—extermination/expulsion and absorption/assimilation—retain and enforce the center (purity of the Hindu rashtra). If we consider the Hindu temple at Ghaziabad as a material site that concretizes the ideology of Hindutva—and spaces of worship are often seen as material manifestations of religious ideologies—then Asif breached the purity that the temple represented and sought to foster (through signage to exclude Muslims, for example). The temple also becomes a site where Muslim presence is imagined as threatening Hindu women’s sexual purity—a theme that resonates with the American- or European-imagined Muslim threat to white women discussed earlier. When the head priest of the Ghaziabad temple rationalized Asif’s beating, he noted that in the past Muslims had sexually harassed female devotees.22 At work here is not only the sexualization of a supposed “threat” represented by Muslim boys—discussed at length above—but also a further discourse popularly known in India as “love jihad.” In the imaginary of love jihad, Muslim youth seduce Hindu women and convert them to Islam in an effort to “Islamize” India.

Against this background, the caretaker’s kicks and shoves were meant not only for Asif as a particular Muslim youth but also for the witnessing public, both online and offline. Shringi intentionally kicks Asif’s genital area; we see the boy trying to protect it with his left hand. In that moment we see an explicit act of violence and an implicit act of erasure. Shringi’s violence was both purposeful and didactic. As the video begins, we hear Shringi tell his colleague to make sure their faces can be seen. When his colleague Shivanand posts the video on social media with text celebrating the beating as making the boy “impotent,” that too is instructive: the two men had punished the boy for his infraction and claimed—in a reversal of the love jihad imaginary—to have destroyed his progeny (made him impotent) reducing the chance of further incursions of Hindu space in the future. While an adult Muslim man might already have children, a thirteen-year-old boy likely does not: to render him impotent would thus eradicate an entire line of future Muslims. In this orientation to the future (the destruction of future Muslims), the Indian reaction against Muslim boys resembles its American iteration, where enclosure and surveillance of Muslim boys is imagined as eliminating future terror.

A fixation on Muslim fertility (and relatedly, futurity) is an enduring feature of Hindutva discourse. Shringi had reportedly advocated for controlling the “rising population” of minority communities.23 When a reporter suggested to the temple’s head priest that Asif was likely unable to read the sign barring Muslims from the temple, the priest’s response jumped right to birth rates: “What is the point of raising so many children if they can’t even provide basic literacy? Is it to commit theft, robbery, and loot?”24 A similar criticism of Muslim families (mothers in particular) is evident in another video that went viral on August 25, 2023.25 In this incident, which took place at Neha Public School in Uttar Pradesh, we see a seven-year-old Muslim boy being hit and slapped by his peers, while a teacher sitting in the background encourages the students to hit him harder. When one student slaps the seven-year-old on the face, the teacher tells the next one to hit him on the back too. The Muslim child can now be seen wailing. The teacher Tripta Tyagi says: “I have declared that all the Mohammedan children whose mothers have left or are not present, their lives have been ruined.” And the person making the video (allegedly another teacher) agrees. During an investigation later on, the teacher maintained that she did not single out the child for being a Muslim but media commentators disagreed. As journalist Barkha Dutt retorted: “Let me tell you why mentioning the religion of the child is critical. Because in the same video the schoolteacher actually makes a reference to Muslims. She uses the word ‘Mohammadan,’ an old-style word, to reference the Muslim community.”26

Within the Hindutva imaginary, the rising population of Muslims signifies a threat to the integrity of the body politic. Muslim biological and cultural reproduction therefore often becomes a point of denigration. In this viewpoint, a healthy and harmonious body/polity is not a given, but must be actively produced, cared for, and attended to. Citizens—from temple guards to teachers—and state institutions are accordingly obligated to protect the body from corrupt elements both within and outside its borders. And some, including Hindu Mahasabha political party member Pooja Shakun Pandey, have argued that antidemocratic measures and even genocide of Muslims could be justified by this supposed obligation.27

The mother of the seven-year-old boy beaten at school said: “Yesterday, my son came home crying . . . He was traumatized. This is not how you treat kids.”28 And, when a news anchor on MOJO asked a heavily bandaged Asif if he would ever go to the temple again, the boy said no: “Nahi. Ab hamare dil main dehshat behthi [hai]. Ab dobara ghar say hum bahir nahi gaen gayi. (No, now there is fear in my heart. Now I will not leave home again).”29 In these statements, we see a similar shrinking and reduction of Muslim life that we previously saw in the case of Muslim boys in America.

I have closed with this brief reflection on Muslim boyhood in India not to suggest an exhaustive comparative study of this altogether different context, but to gesture toward some overlaps and commonalities. We observe how racial supremacy, carceral logics, and sexual/reproductive anxiety shape iterations of Muslim boyhood while also noticing its locally specific genealogies. Whether authorities detain a five-year-old at an airport in Washington, D.C., or ordinary citizens beat up a thirteen-year-old at a temple in Ghaziabad, these actions are aimed less at punishing current transgressions and more toward eliminating imagined future ones. These scattered illustrations show how purity and innocence may be centered differently on concerns around reproduction, terrorism, immigrants stealing jobs, or racial supremacy, across global contexts, and yet Muslim boyhood may serve as a useful heuristic device to investigate their workings. This exercise can also helpfully illustrate the synergies between different nationalist projects. Examining activism of members of the “Hindus for Trump” group alongside alt-right groups in the United States, Sitara Thobani argues that both projects rely on public construction of alterity epitomized by the Muslim other.30 Khaled Beydoun has likewise traced transnational connections by examining how the American War on Terror became a vehicle for exporting the fear of Islam to places such as India and China.31 A close examination of Muslim boyhood in different global contexts can show how the fears that Beydoun talks about merge and interact with longstanding local discourses about the Muslim other.

I have not tried to argue that Muslim boys should be granted access to the domain of innocence. Innocence is a disciplinary framework, and its production relies on a blameworthy other. I have been more interested in the politics of innocence and purity: if innocence (as a “space of purity,” per Ticktin) as an ideology will not be abandoned, and we continue to recognize suffering as valid only when it is experienced by those we categorize as innocent, then exclusion from the protective domain of innocence produces conditions that leave ordinary Muslim boys broadly vulnerable to violence. In elaborating the confluence of racial, capitalist, and carceral logics that sustain the political formation(s) of Muslim boyhood as a threat, my hope is not to simply document it but to issue a call for urgent action. Ultimately, what is at stake is Muslim life. Muslim boys in the United States (and India) today are denied the opportunity to experiment and fail, to experience joy and gain knowledge, to assert agency while also seeking care. It is impossible for Muslim boys to experience childhood and youth as the messy time that it often is—and thus Muslim boyhood itself becomes a truncated experience, a harbinger of premature death. As the high school boys I spoke with were well aware, Muslim life in America is a diminished life, defined by surveillance and by social and political exclusion.