From True Lies to American Sniper, from 24 to Call
of Duty: Modern Warfare, Western media is full of
images of evil brown people who need to be wiped
from the earth by noble, righteous white men
heroically fighting for freedom and justice. And
sure, it’s so commonplace by this point that maybe
you don’t even bat an eye at old-fashioned American
Islamophobia in our media.
Whoa! Even Back to the Future? that beloved comedy
classic, takes a moment to toss in a few scary
brown men to menace and terrorize our white heroes!
Unfortunately, we can’t hop in Doc Brown’s DeLorean
and undo all the harmful representations of
Muslims, Arabs and Middle-Easterners that have
haunted our stories since...well, basically the
Crusades. But we can try to make sure history
doesn’t keep repeating itself.
Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair. In some ways,
things have changed. Once upon a time, non-white
actors could hardly get any work in Hollywood at
all. These days, shows like Homeland and movies
like Executive Decision are providing some brown
actors with ample opportunity to portray scary
terrorists who get gunned down while screaming
something absurd like “Death to America”. It
doesn’t even matter if you’re not actually of
Middle-Eastern descent! If you’re vaguely brown,
you can stick around (to play bad guys).
Now, sure, not every Middle-Eastern character in
films is a villain. In the 1921 box-office smash
The Sheik, the dashing hero gets the girl in the
end. But the Arab world of the film is presented as
exotic and dangerous, and the sheik himself, the
one good, heroic Arab, is played by Italian-
American heartthrob Rudolph Valentino! You see,
since he’s not really Arab, he’s allowed to get the
girl in the end.
If you think this kind of racist coding to signify
the difference between “good Arabs” and “bad Arabs”
went away with the advent of talkies, think again.
Have you ever noticed how, in Disney’s Aladdin, the
good guy might as well be a tanned American surfer
dude...
...but the bad guys look and sound a little
more…”Arab”?
While Hollywood historically has sometimes given
“good Arab” roles to non-Arab actors, it has also
sometimes given not-so-good Arab and South Asian
roles to white actors, too, denying brown people
work and decent on-screen representation in one
fell swoop. It’s the world’s worst Catch 22! For
example, take “Mr. Habib,” the scheming Middle-
Eastern villain in Father of the Bride Part 2 who
is played by Eugene Levy.
Those aren’t even real words he says to his wife!
It’s just vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding
gibberish! [PAUSE-RESET] And the written equivalent
of this is very common as well: video games and TV
shows constantly just toss up some squiggly text
and try to pass it off as actual Arabic!
Well, this one is Arabic, but it sure doesn’t say
what the Homeland producers wanted it to!
As insidious as it is to flatten entire cultures
and populations into The Land of Squiggly Writing,
there is nothing so pervasive and damaging as
Hollywood’s tendency to constantly portray vaguely
Middle-Eastern people as generic terrorists. It’s
so common that on screen, brown skin has
practically become synonymous with bad guys who
have little or no character development beyond
hating America and freedom fries. One of the
biggest problems with this is that it erases the
actual lives and cultures of Middle-Eastern people,
and leads many Western viewers to lump all of them
into the same group.
So let’s start by clarifying a few terms whose
meaning has been obscured by media that paints the
entire Middle East with the same broad, shallow,
ignorant brush.
First of all, we’ve done a lot of research on this
and as it turns out, words actually have meanings!
Weird, right? You can’t just lump Arabs and Muslims
together because they are not the same thing! Arabs
are a specific ethnic group, united by culture and
language, and who primarily originate from middle
eastern countries. Arab is not, repeat NOT, a
racial category. Got that? You can be white, black,
brown and still be Arab. But not all people from
the Middle East are Arab and vice versa -- like,
oh say, ethnic Persians in Iran.
A Muslim is someone who practices Islam, a religion
with over 1.7 billion members spanning a vast
number of ethnic and cultural identities. The
“Muslim world” actually comprises a multitude of
groups that folks often forget, including:
Iranians, South Asians, North Africans,
Indonesians, black Americans. Islam is not confined
to the Middle East, to olive-skinned people, or
just people who speak Arabic.
But despite the fact that Islam is a religion, not
a race, it’s vital for us to understand that
Islamophobia is racism. [SHIFT] If you’ve been
paying attention thus far, then you might be asking
yourself, “If Islam isn’t a race, then how can
Islamophobia be racism?” The answer lies in another
“-ism,” one many Westerners aren’t particularly
familiar with: Orientalism.
In short, the term Orientalism refers to how, for
hundreds of years, Western artistic and academic
history has perpetuated an ignorant and prejudiced
view of the East. A view rooted in the idea of
Western culture as inherently more advanced and
enlightened, and Eastern culture as inherently more
ignorant, irrational, primitive, and often, highly-
sexualized. Again, Muslims come from many different
races and span a myriad of cultural identities. In
fact, the former president of the Islamic Society
of North America is a white woman, Dr. Ingrid
Mattson. But let’s be real: nobody who spreads the
hate of Islam is talking about white ladies.
Western media has contributed to a level of
ignorance so great that for many people it has
resulted in equating Islam with scary brown people,
particularly scary brown men, from the Middle East.
It’s been so effective that most of you probably
didn’t even know that this man isn’t Muslim, he’s
Sikh!
Sikhism and Islam are two completely different
religions! The fact that Sikhs are so often the
targets of anti-Muslim hate crimes makes it crystal
clear that Islamophobia is all about race. The only
reason some Sikhs--those with brown skin--are
sometimes the targets of Islamophobic violence is
that they are also perceived as Middle-Eastern, and
Middle-Eastern is perceived as Muslim, and Muslim
is perceived as scary!
Whew! Thanks, Jack Bauer, what would we do without
you It isn’t just film and television that
perpetuates this kind of ignorance. Here’s comedian
Kumail Nanjiani on how video games often don’t put
in even the absolute bare minimum of effort or
research when representing the Middle East.
Modern films, TV shows and games definitely
perpetuate Islamophobia, but it’s no exaggeration
to say that ignorant representations of people from
the Middle-East in Western media date back for
centuries. Orientalist paintings of the 1800s were
often characterized by overly sexualized depictions
of daily life, and Romantic Orientalist literature
of the late 1700s and early 1800s served to justify
European imperialism by presenting Middle-Eastern
people and cultures as inherently exotic and
strange.
So there’s a conflation of Arab with Muslim, and
because our ideas about Islam are so deeply linked
to stereotypes about terrorism and violence, both
of those categories are associated with masculinity
and men. While many male Muslim actors in Hollywood
can only find work playing bit parts as evil
terrorists, [SAD] Muslim women are often erased
altogether. The very real advances that Arab women
have made in many parts of the world are ignored
because depicting them would complicate the
simplistic racist narrative about Arabs and
Muslims, that Hollywood continues trying to cash in
on. [SARCASM] It’s *almost as if* we don’t know how
to contend with women as real people.
Filmmakers and TV producers know how to objectify
women, how to prize them for their physical
attributes and their appearance. The stories we
allow ourselves to tell about the Middle East, with
its different cultural mores, don’t allow for the
same kind of easy objectification of these brown
women’s bodies -- and so we resist including them
at all.
And when Arab or Muslim women do appear, they’re
either offered as mysterious, sexually wanton
creatures who offer temptations for white male
heroes -- think belly dancing seductresses if the
story is set in the past -- or niqab-clad secret
purveyors of violence, if the story is set in the
present.
At least we can thank 24 again for casting the
great Iranian actor Shohreh Aghdashloo show-RAY ag-
DASH-loo in season four as a Muslim terrorist who
is also a wife and mother! [PAUSE] But there are
artists, critics, and writers who are out there
speaking about what it means to be the target of
all-this anti-brown racism, and a lot of the most
interesting critiques are coming from Muslim women
themselves. Oh crap, I think we just missed a call
from Muslim comedian, Zahra Noorbakhsh … let’s see
if she left a message, cause I know she has
feelings about all this.
Oh crap, I think we missed a call, I wonder who it
could be. To the feminist answering machine.
There’s tremendous harm in centuries of images that
reduce entire nations, cultures and religions to
the status of subhuman savages. As Jack Shaheen,
the author of Reel Bad Arabs, has said,
In the wake of the September 11th attacks [PAUSE]
former “Worst President Ever” George W. Bush used
the term “axis of evil” to describe nations
including Iran and Iraq, in an effort to drum up
support for the “War on Terror”. And it worked.
More recently, during the 2016 presidential
campaign Republican candidates tossed around the
phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” as if it were
some kind of magic spell they could use to make
votes appear out of thin air.
And again, it worked! The only reason tactics like
these have any effect is that, to so many
Americans, people in the Middle East have never
been established as human beings, with real lives,
hopes, dreams, and struggles. [SERIOUS] When almost
every story you’ve ever seen about a particular
part of the world paints the people who live there
AS monolithic, evil, and scary, you’re a lot more
likely to believe that it’s actually true.
When people believe it's true, they aren't just
more likely to support politicians or policies that
appeal to fear and ignorance about the Middle East.
They're also more likely to act on that fear and
ignorance themselves. The Southern Poverty Law
Center notes that the number of anti-Muslim hate
groups tripled in the United States in 2016. The
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee noted
the same increase after the release of patriotic
fever dream, American Sniper. 2016 also saw a 67%
increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes, and there's no
question that Trump's racist, fear-mongering
rhetoric has played a part in this surge of
xenophobia and violence. Of course, Trump doesn’t
stop with rhetoric himself. Within the first 100
days of his presidency:
He has repeatedly tried to push through bans
preventing the citizens of several Muslim-majority
countries from entering the United States.
He dropped the US military’s most powerful non-
nuclear bomb on Afghanistan.
And he fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at, I don’t know,
some Middle-Eastern country while eating the most
beautiful piece of chocolate cake!
Iraq, Syria, what’s the difference?! It was one of
those countries the evil, scary brown people live
in.
Now, I can already hear the army of Richard
Dawkins-parroting, anti-feminist Twitter users typing
up their responses about how Islam is a religion
dedicated to oppressing women. It’s amazing how
suddenly everybody’s a feminist when it lets them
perpetuate hate against brown people or dismiss
concerns about how women are oppressed in their own
culture. So let’s be clear, misogyny is not a
problem with Islam; misogyny is a problem that some cultures which happen to be Muslim use the religion
to perpetuate and justify. Christianity has been
used as a tool to oppress women around the world
for millennia! It’s specifically because our media perpetually equates Islam -- a religion followed by
nearly ¼ of the world’s population -- with evil,
terrorism, and oppression, that so many people
believe that’s what Islam actually is.
And make no mistake: Islamophobia is big business –
- and not just for Hollywood. Hundreds of millions
of dollars each year go into feeding what activist
Taz Ahmed calls “the fear industrial
complex that perpetuates racism.” Devious Russian
generals and Nazi scientists from the Cold War
won’t prop up our defense industry anymore, so we
needed some new bad guys. Come on it’s not like
we’re just going to stop making bombs, right?
Our entertainment media's insistence on constantly
portraying people from the Middle East as scheming
oil sheiks, slavers, snake charmers and suicide
bombers--but never as real people--has real
consequences. Muslims here in the U.S., and
everyone who is or looks like they could be Middle
Eastern, constantly face ignorance and racism. They
live in fear of the very real possibility of being
accosted or attacked because someone takes a look
at them and associates them with everything they've
seen in the movies and everything the president has
said about people from the Middle East. What we
need now are more stories that dispel the deeply
harmful stereotypes and encourage us to see people
from the Middle East--whether they're Arab or
Muslim or neither or both--as what they REALLY are:
human beings.