Becoming “Black” and Muslim in Today's Russia

Abstract

Global anti-Muslim racism takes new and specific forms in contemporary Russia by mobilizing the shifting meanings of “Blackness” to stigmatize vulnerable populations. Stemming from the tsarist and Soviet pasts, these meanings of “Blackness” (and “whiteness”) have been refracted by the dramatic socioeconomic and political shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This article draws on the accounts of working-class devout Muslim women, with whom the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg between 2015 and 2017, to elucidate their experiences of how anti-Muslim racism operates as a tool of exclusion, deployed along racial, religious, ethnic, class, and gender lines. The women's daily responses to anti-Muslim racism suggest how solidarities might sustain communities targeted by racism, while laying the foundations for future intersectional anti-racist movements in the country.