A spiritual Ishmaelite

Nice Racism, Liberal Islamophobia, and the Ethics of Moral Time: Toward a Muslim-World Analogue of DiAngelo

Any serious attempt to develop a Muslim-world analogue of Robin DiAngelo must move beyond White Fragility and engage her more recent and more unsettling contribution: the concept of “nice racism.” This refinement is essential because liberal Islamophobia, like contemporary racism, rarely operates through explicit hostility. It is enacted through politeness, care, inclusionary language, and moral self-image. Without this analytic lens, Muslim critiques risk misdiagnosing the problem as ignorance or malice, rather than as a structurally rewarded mode of ethical self-maintenance.

DiAngelo’s notion of nice racism identifies a paradox at the heart of liberal moral culture: racism today is most effectively reproduced by those who experience themselves as kind, progressive, and well-intentioned. Niceness functions not as a moral virtue but as a technology of avoidance—a way to preserve comfort, innocence, and social harmony while leaving structural dominance intact. The key move is affective rather than ideological: niceness recenters the feelings of the dominant actor and reframes any challenge as a violation of civility rather than a request for accountability.

Translated into Muslim–liberal relations, this becomes what may be termed nice Islamophobia. Nice Islamophobia does not exclude Muslims; it welcomes them—selectively, conditionally, and pedagogically. It expresses itself through statements such as “I respect Islam, but…,” “I support Muslims who reform,” or “I’m concerned about human rights within Islamic cultures.” These utterances are not primarily arguments; they are moral shields. They pre-establish the speaker’s innocence and benevolence, thereby immunizing them against critique. As with nice racism, the issue is not individual sincerity but structural function.

Nice Islamophobia operates through several recurrent mechanisms. First, it performs care as control: concern for Muslim women, minorities, or dissenters becomes a license to speak over Muslim moral traditions while denying Muslims reciprocal interpretive authority. Second, it enacts conditional belonging: Muslims are accepted insofar as they mirror liberal expectations of belief, ethics, and affect. Third, it practices epistemic asymmetry: Islamic normativity is treated as an object of reform or diagnosis, while liberal normativity remains uninterrogated, naturalized as neutral reason. In each case, niceness ensures that power never has to name itself.

The affective economy here is crucial. When Muslims challenge these structures, the response is rarely overt repression. Instead, one encounters hurt feelings, disappointment, calls for civility, and accusations of ingratitude. The liberal actor experiences themselves as having offered respect and inclusion, and thus experiences critique as unfair or aggressive. This mirrors DiAngelo’s observation that nice racism is especially fragile: because niceness is bound to moral identity, any challenge feels like an attack on the self rather than an invitation to growth. Defensive moves—denial, tone-policing, and recentering—follow predictably.

A Muslim-world DiAngelo must therefore insist, as she does, that niceness is not the same as justice. Indeed, niceness often functions as justice’s primary obstacle. Liberal Islamophobia persists not despite good intentions but because good intentions are allowed to substitute for structural change. The analytic task is to separate moral self-image from moral impact and to show that harm can be reproduced precisely through the desire to be seen as ethical.

This insight becomes even more potent when integrated with an anti-accelerationist ethical framework. Nice Islamophobia is temporally coercive. It does not merely ask Muslims to change; it asks them to change quickly, visibly, and on liberal timelines. Reform must be legible to liberal audiences, framed in familiar moral idioms, and demonstrable within short cycles of evaluation. Slowness, hesitation, or civilizational continuity are recoded as resistance or moral failure. Niceness thus masks a demand for speed: a soft coercion that presents itself as concern.

Anti-accelerationist ethics exposes this temporal violence. It argues that ethical transformation cannot be reduced to rapid compliance without regard for cultural metabolism, intergenerational coherence, and trauma histories. When liberal niceness insists on immediacy—“why not now?”, “what’s the harm?”, “progress can’t wait”—it externalizes the costs of disruption onto Muslim societies while retaining the moral credit of concern. Islam, in this frame, is not a refusal of ethics but a counter-temporal moral ecology that resists the collapse of wisdom into speed.

The pedagogical posture required to advance this critique must mirror DiAngelo’s disciplined restraint. The goal is not to accuse liberals of bad faith, but to render visible the structural role of niceness in maintaining asymmetry. This requires sustained attention to patterns rather than personalities, to systems rather than sentiments. Workshops, institutional analyses, and comparative ethical frameworks are more effective than denunciation. As DiAngelo demonstrates, the work is slow, repetitive, and often met with resentment precisely because it destabilizes moral self-conceptions.

Backlash, in this context, should be anticipated and analytically integrated. Accusations of “silencing critique,” “Islamic exceptionalism,” or “identity politics” function analogously to claims of reverse racism. They are attempts to restore moral equilibrium without structural adjustment. The Muslim-world analogue must respond by returning, again and again, to the central distinction between niceness and justice, intent and impact, speed and responsibility.

Finally, a necessary ethical constraint must be acknowledged. To critique nice Islamophobia does not confer moral exemption upon Muslims or Islamic institutions. A credible interlocutor must be willing to interrogate internal injustices without outsourcing moral authority to liberalism. Otherwise, the critique collapses into reactive defensiveness. The credibility of the role depends on a demonstrated commitment to ethical accountability across civilizational lines.

In sum, to become a DiAngelo-like figure in the Muslim world is to name the most elusive form of contemporary domination: power that smiles, includes, and reassures itself of its goodness. It is to show that liberal Islamophobia, like modern racism, survives through kindness rather than cruelty, speed rather than force, and self-congratulation rather than self-examination. The task is not to reject universal ethics but to slow them down, deepen them, and demand that those who claim moral leadership submit themselves to the same scrutiny they so readily extend to others.