AN INTERSECTIONAL THEORY OF STRATEGIC DECISIONS: MUSLIM AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE DILEMMAS OF POLICING * Hajar Yazdiha † When faced with a collective dilemma, why do individuals from the same group perceive their strategic choices differently? A growing actor-centered stream of social movements research shows that strategic decision making is a cultural process where actors decide upon a strategy by drawing on past experiences to make sense of the present and anticipate what might happen if they act in a particular way. However, actors’ past experiences are not only contextual and variable, they are also patterned by social location. It is in these patterns that we can better understand the relationship between structure and agency in processes of social change. Integrating an inter- sectional framework, I draw on evidence from forty focus groups with about 200 Muslim community members discussing the policing of Muslim communities. I find that perceptions of agency are patterned across intersections of race and ethnicity, gender, class, and nativity, driving three central interpretations of the dilemma and strategic decisions: fear and disengagement; anger and grassroots mobilization against police; and neutrality and collaboration with police. When faced with a collective dilemma, why do individuals from the same group perceive their strategic choices differently? How do these actors reconcile competing perspectives and make a collective decision to act? Studies of strategic decision making document the array of perspectives that may be brought to collective deliberations and the challenges of reconciling them (Blee 2013; Dugan and Reger 2006; Jasper 2006; Ferree and Roth 1998). As Jasper wrote in his generative call to revive the study of agency in social movement studies, “We must recognize the full panoply of goals, meanings, and feelings players have, rather than reducing them to a mathematically tractable minimum” (Jasper 2004: 4). Jasper joins other scholars in acknowledging that insti- tutional and cultural contexts shape actors’ behaviors, the options they perceive, the choices they bring to the table, and their outcomes (Downey and Rohlinger 2008; Fligstein and McAdam 2011; Ganz 2000; Jasper 2006). He argues that an overly structuralist perspective misses human agency, creativity, and everyday resistance. However, actors’ perceptions of their strategic choices are not only contextual and variable, their social locations also pattern them. It is in these patterns that we can better understand the relationship between structure and agency in processes of social change. Critical race scholars have argued as much when they call for social movement theorists to integrate a conceptualization of systemic racism into their studies of ethnoracial movements and the state (Bracey 2016; Luna 2017; Reyes and Ragon 2018; Robinson 2019). The stakes are not merely descriptive nuance, adding race, class, and gender as variables in the analysis. Instead, they change the analysis altogether to show how power is distributed, organized, and reproduced (Carbado et al. 2013; Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016; Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002). * Direct Correspondence to Hajar Yazdiha, Assistant Professor of Sociology. Department of Sociology, University of Southern California 851 Downey Way HSH 314 Los Angeles, CA 90089-1059, hyazdiha@usc.edu † I offer the greatest thanks to the participants of this study. I also thank collaborators on the larger study: Charlie Kurzman, David Schanzer, and Ahsan Kamal (NIJ 2012-ZA-BX-0002) and the Philip Kayal Arab American Research Fund. I am grateful to special issue editors Zakiya Luna, Sujatha Jesudason, and Mimi Kim, and the anonymous re- viewers for their incisive critiques and thoughtful feedback. Previous versions of this article were presented at the UC Irvine Sociology Colloquium Series, the 2018 Junior Theorists Symposium, the 2019 American Sociological Asso- ciation conference in New York City, and the 2020 Gender/Power/Theory Workshop, with extra thanks to discussants Nina Eliasoph and Celene Reynolds. © 2020 Mobilization: An International Journal 25(4):475-492 DOI 10.17813/1086-671X-25-4-475 Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/mobilization/article-pdf/25/4/475/2687912/i1086-671x-25-4-475.pdf by University of Southern California user on 29 December 2020