Digital Turban‐Head: Racial Learning and Policing Muslims in Northwest China.

Automated systems harvesting and assessing data built by private state contractors, low-level Muslim police assistants, and Han settler commanders produced a project of racializing Muslim bodies while protecting the economy of the settler population. Instead, in this context the state is explicitly mandating anti-Muslim racism in the form of an institutionalized, colonial campaign that moves through the Xinjiang education, media, and banking systems to the hospital, the police, and the courts. While Roberto Castillo ([14]) argues it is likely that "institutional racism" may not yet be an accurate way of characterizing Chinese racialization toward African workers in China, the racialization of Muslims in Northwest China is not simply a problem of ethnic bias that the state is attempting to manage (as may be the case of Black African guest workers in China). It means that Uyghur schools are staffed with Han settler teachers who say things in the classroom like, "I have thought about learning Uyghur (language) because I have so many Uyghur students, but I'm worried that it will make me stupid" (A. and Byler, [1], 409) - implying that Uyghurs are stupid because of the Turkic language they speak. [Extracted from the article]