Islamophobia Awareness Month Blog #1
Islamophobia Awareness Month Blog #1
We spend lots of time trying to define different types of racism so we can recognise and tackle them. But racism like Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, and antisemitism are all connected, and deeply built into our society. If we try to address Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) without understanding this, we're just scratching the surface. Racism, like Islamophobia, is part of the systems our world is built on. It’s important to understand what racism is, but it's even more important to understand how it works.
The debate on what the word Islamophobia means - which has been going for 20 years - is Islamophobic itself. It wants to distract us and stop us from doing anything to tackle the harm of Islamophobia.
As Toni Morrison put it:
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being…" - Toni Morrison
What does Islamophobia do?
This Islamophobia Awareness Month, we want to encourage everyone in the VAWG sector to think about how Islamophobia works. How does it shape how we think and the processes and procedures we design, including the ones we think will help survivors? Instead of asking ‘what is Islamophobia?’ We want you to ask ‘what does Islamophobia do?’
Like other types of racism, Islamophobia allows us to take a group of people and turn them into something to fear, to hate, to blame or to save. Alongside anti-Blackness, xenophobia, ableism and sexism, Islamophobia helps us to create superior and inferior groups. Once we decide that a group is less than us - in this case Muslims - we can justify and normalise violence towards those groups to reduce our fears. This allows us to continue blaming Muslims while we never actually address the root of the problem. Islamophobia is a useful tool for governments, political groups, individuals and institutions who rely on dividing and distracting us so that they can hold on to the power they have over us.
In the UK, the government uses Islamophobia to justify cruel laws that harm Muslims, like the Prevent program. We see this harm in sectors like the VAWG sector. These Islamophobic laws impact Black people, migrants, refugees, disabled people, trans, and genderqueer people. These groups aren’t separate from each other—they are all part of Muslim communities.