Structural Islamophobia in Texas: How Midterm Ballot Battles Reflect Decades of Anti-Muslim Policy Engineering
Original framing: “As Islamophobia ramps up in US midterms, Texas Muslims eye local stakes” — Al Jazeera
The current wave of Islamophobia in Texas builds on a **century-long pattern** of anti-Muslim agitation, from the **1920s 'Red Scare' association of Islam with communism** to the **1980s Iran-Contra scandal**, where Muslim communities were scapegoated for geopolitical failures. The **1993 World Trade Center bombing** and subsequent backlash set a precedent for the **post-9/11 criminalization of Muslim identity**, with Texas serving as a laboratory for policies like the **2003 'Material Support' law**, which was later weaponized against humanitarian aid to Palestinian groups. Even earlier, the **19th-century 'Orientalism' of Texas Rangers**, who framed Mexican and Indigenous peoples as 'uncivilized,' laid the groundwork for modern racial and religious profiling. This historical continuity shows that Islamophobia is not a reaction to terrorism but a **strategic tool of state-building**, used to justify exclusionary policies.
The Islamophobia surging in Texas midterms is not a spontaneous outbreak of bigotry but the **deliberate engineering of a carceral, exclusionary state**, where policies targeting Muslim communities serve as a template for broader racial and religious control.
This system is **historically rooted** in the post-9/11 security apparatus, **economically sustained** by the surveillance and private prison industries, and **culturally reinforced** by media narratives that dehumanize Muslims while obscuring their contributions to Texas’s economy and culture. The erasure of **intersectional voices**—particularly Black Muslim women and South Asian immigrants—reveals how Islamophobia operates as a **multi-layered assault**, attacking religious identity, racial belonging, and economic stability simultaneously. Solutions must therefore be **multi-dimensional**: legal challenges to discriminatory policies, economic cooperatives to build resilience, cultural campaigns to reclaim narratives, and political coalitions to dismantle gerrymandering. The trickster figure of Coyote reminds us that this system is not natural but **constructed through deception**, and its undoing requires the same creativity and disruption that built it in the first place.