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An emerging consensus among scholars of Muslim political and social identity suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working-class Muslim men. While the results indeed reaffirm respondents' concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects' multiplicity is complicated by their desire to meet – not reject – the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals' responses suggest that they are trying to fulfil perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims' expressed and well-documented ‘identity crisis’, suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Diverse schools have become the norm throughout much of what is considered the West. Many urban classrooms feature few white European children but are located in nations dominated by Eurocentric epistemologies and discourses that oppress minority students by devaluing their cultures. Most European scholarship fails to analyse cultures of whiteness in educational settings. This paper addresses this gap by documenting cultural discourses of whiteness infusing a diverse primary school classroom in Amsterdam. Discourses reflecting white cultural norms of order, time, cleanliness, and Western and Christian superiority dominated a classroom containing only one white Dutch child. These discourses contribute to diverse students' explicit racialization while promoting the supremacy of white Dutch culture. They are both assimilationist and exclusionary, suggesting that many students, because of their backgrounds, will never be considered fully Dutch. Findings are of relevance to all nations dominated by white cultures with large populations of students of colour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]