War Side to West Side, Afghan Americans in Little Kabul: An Exploration of Refugee Integration and the Racialization of Islam

Ahmad-Sediqe, Iman

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-yjjd-qq35

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War Side to West Side, Afghan Americans in Little Kabul: An Exploration of Refugee Integration and the Racialization of Islam

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In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration has been. I update our understanding of how present day immigrants integrate into American society, tracing their process of negotiating religion and culture. By tracing a refugee community, I expand literature beyond communities that came after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act to focus on more recent immigrant groups. I demonstrate the importance of including political status in our consideration of racial boundary making through this case study of refugees. I find that regardless of levels of religious practice, as a result of the racialization of Islam, religion serves as an overarching identity that Afghans seek as a form of belonging and sense of community, similar to a pan-ethnic identity, conceptualizing the term “pan-ethnic religious identification” to capture this process. I identify the concept of “Cultural Chameleons,” individuals who suppress their own ethnic and racial identity and make an active effort to assimilate as White passing. Religious identity is so closely bound to cultural identity as Afghans that it is not a choice for them, even for Cultural Chameleons or atheists, to abandon their religious identity. Despite their religious practice, religion serves as a vehicle to find cultural clarity in their identity. I conceptualize the term “Identity Fluctuation” to capture a process in which racial and ethnic minorities fluctuate in their self-identification with their racial, ethnic, and religious identities, such that the relationship with these identities can shift over time. In moments when their minority status in either their racial, ethnic, or religious identity becomes more salient or charged than in their typical day to day life, their relationship with these identities becomes fluid and they move on where they find belonging in this spectrum of their complex relationship with these identities. I argue that identity fluctuation accurately captures the experience of how recent immigrants will continue to integrate, particularly for racialized communities.

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