‘Their mind is made up to attack you’; anti-Muslim racism and the systemic function of microaggressions

Research on anti-Muslim racism in Ireland has developed steadily over the past decade ([Brooks, M. C., M. D. Ezzani, Y. Sai, and F. Sanjakdar. 2023. “Racialization of Muslim students in Australia, Ireland, and the United States: cross-cultural perspectives.” Race Ethnicity and Education 26 (2): 164–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2021.1997977]; [Carr, J. 2016b. Experiences of Islamophobia: Living with racism in the neoliberal era. London: Routledge]). Despite this, gaps remain in our understanding of how anti-Muslim racism manifests in Ireland, including in the form of microaggressions. This paper commences with a discussion of the construction of Muslims as racialised Other, before unpacking the concept of microaggressions and moving to elaborate on their function in racialised social systems. We argue that anti-Muslim microaggressive acts are instantiations of power dynamics in the context of systemic racism, demarcating who belongs, and reminding the Other, in this case Muslims in Ireland, of their outsider place. Following a discussion of racism as a systemic phenomenon, this paper draws from data derived from original fieldwork with almost two hundred Muslim participants from across four Irish cities. Our findings provide new insights on microaggressions set to anti-Muslim racism and their ‘everyday’ function in Ireland as a racialised social system.