This is a project about race and religion – specifically about the inextricability of race and religion in a U.S. American context where both are frequently positioned at the intersections of social class, cultural identity, and gender. While these categories are frequently explored separately, I examine instances of their conflation and amalgamation. Through the unique portal provided by white American women who have converted to Islam and chosen to wear the hijab, I have traced the ways that false assumptions about race and culture are embedded within their experiences as publicly identifiable Muslim women. While a conversion to Islam obviously signals a religious transformation, the racial and cultural contours of this transformation are often overlooked or misunderstood. The women’s conversion experiences are particularly fascinating as they mark a transition from dominant to marginalized social spaces, offering a unique opportunity to examine how perceived norms around race, religion, culture, and gender are operationalized and interwoven within U.S. American contexts. More broadly, this research explores the intricate imbrications of race, religion, and gender within culture, not as signs of an inevitable march toward tolerance, but as a process characterized by unpredictability and set within historical and contemporary landscapes of exclusion. The ways one’s conversion to Islam and adoption of hijab help to reveal the racialized complexities within religious identities represent the empirical foundation of this dissertation. Methodologically, I utilized both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Through detailed surveys, in-depth interviews, and virtual ethnography via Facebook over the span of more than two years, I examine and compare the experiences of thirty-nine white U.S. American Muslim women to answer the questions: How does the racialization of Islam in the U.S.A. impact the convert’s experiences with and understandings of identity, privilege, and belonging, and what unique insights can be gained about race, religion, culture, and gender by studying individuals who have experienced public life as members of both a dominant and a subjugated group?