Uncertain Safety
Rebecca A. Karam (2024) Uncertain safety: uncovering the religious racial socialization process among Muslim American families during the 2016 election, Journal of Family Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2024.2433488
Racial socialization refers to the process through which children come to understand their own and others’ racial identities, roles, and positions in various contexts, and how race will function in their lives. Although research on the racialization of Islam is growing, the socialization of racialized religious identities is less understood. This article draws on two years of ethnographic and interview data collected among Muslim American families whose children were enrolled in Islamic private schools in suburban Metro Detroit during the 2016 presidential election season. Within this political milieu, second-generation Muslim American parents engaged in what I term religious racial socialization. I show how the process of protecting children from the harms of Islamophobia meant practicing both cultural socialization and preparation for bias with the aid of Islamic schools and mosques. Yet, because the process is incapable of completely buffering against Islamophobia, parents’ strategies highlight the tension of individual survival strategies within the context of existing religious-racial hierarchies, offering Muslim American children uncertain safety. The findings from this study contribute to family studies by showing how for some religiously minoritized populations, the processes of racial, religious, and political socialization are not only inextricably linked but are also co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
Meeting the Moral Markers of Success
Rebecca A. Karam (2021) Meeting the Moral Markers of Success: Concerted Cultivation among Second-Generation Muslim Parents, Sociological Forum, https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12742
Concerted cultivation describes how parents reproduce middle-class status by preparing children for success through the organization of their family’s daily lives. Scholarship accounting for the potentially important role that minority religious identity plays in this process is warranted. The current study fills this theoretical and empirical niche by exploring the parenting practices of second-generation, upper-middle-class Muslim Americans. I show how within the context of rising Islamophobia, members of this group defined success for their children using both socioeconomic markers and moral markers, in which Islam and excellent character traits are crucial. With this definition in mind, parents aimed to reproduce both class and religion in the third generation using concerted cultivation strategies. I utilize data from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 72 in-depth interviews with second-generation Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans in suburban Metro-Detroit. I make contributions to sociology by presenting novel data on a little understood minority group and their institutions and by bringing religion into discussions of second-generation parenting styles and class reproduction.
Becoming American by Becoming Muslim
Rebecca A. Karam (2020) Becoming American by becoming Muslim: strategic assimilation among second-generation Muslim American parents, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2019.1578396
Strategic assimilation describes how individuals use boundary work to construct
identities which allow them to selectively maintain ties to a minority community while assimilating into the mainstream. However, scholarship that accounts for the role that minority religious identity plays in these processes is warranted. The current study fills a theoretical and empirical niche by exploring boundary work among not only racial, but religious minorities in their processes of identity construction and assimilation. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork as well as 72 in-depth interviews with Muslim Americans in Metro-Detroit, I demonstrate how upper-middle-class suburban second-generation parents actively deconstructed class, racial, and ethnic boundaries to construct boundaries around religious identity and generational identity. In so doing, they consciously crafted a de-ethnicized interpretation of Islam and hence a Muslim American identity that they saw as integral in promoting upward assimilation for themselves and their third-generation children.
Rebecca A. Karam 