"Has the crowd dispersed now?"
"No, its still out there, but unarmed.
Just chanting. You know, standard
'Death to America' stuff."
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.
"[laughter]
[characters speaking in Arabic]
[protestors chanting in Arabic]
"This is a hijack!"
[passengers screaming]
"Sit down! Sit down!"
"Nobody move! Nobody!"
"All right!"
"Engage hostile targets as they appear!"
"Waste the motherfuckers!"
"You have killed our women and our children.
"Bombed our cities from afar...
"like cowards...and you dare
"to call us 'terrorists"?!"
"Here, my desert blossom.
"Keep the change!
"Have you ever considered joining a harem?"
"Oh my God. They found me.
"I don't know how, but they found me."
"Nooooooo!"
What?! Back to the Future!!
Even 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 since the Crusades.
But we can make sure that history
doesn't keep repeating itself.
Ok, ok. 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).
"Oh, are you an artist, Mr. Thurkettle?"
"No, uh, sir. I work for a little company
"called Texan Oil."
"Well, there is no oil here, Mr Thurkettle."
"Just sand."
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...
uh, Arab?
"You are late."
"A thousand apologies, oh patient one."
"You have it then?"
"I had to slit a few throats,
but I got it."
While Hollywood has historically given
"good" Arab roles to non-Arab actors,
it has also 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 basically the world's worst Catch-22.
For example, take Mr. Habib,
the scheming Middle Eastern villain in
Father of the Bride 2,
who's played by Eugene Levy.
"The Habibs would like to buy the house, George."
"It's exactly what they've been looking for!"
"We've lived here for 18 years."
"I don't know if we can get everything--"
[gibberish]
Those aren't even real words
he's saying to his wife!
It's just vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding gibberish
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
producers of Homeland wanted it to!
As insidious as it is to flatten
entire cultures and populations into
The Land of Squiggly Writing,
there's 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.
[screaming]
"Allahu Akbar!"
Ah! Thanks, Jack Bauer!
What would we do without you?
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're 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 it?
You can be white, black, brown
and still be Arab.
But not all people from the Middle East are Arab,
and vice versa.
Like, 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.
If you've been paying attention thus far,
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 familar with: that's 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 more 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!
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 the
absolute bare minimum of effort or research
when representing the Middle East --
or South Asia for that matter--
which is not the same thing as
the Middle East!
"Ok, so the language we speak in Pakistan
"is Urdu.
"That's the name of the language we speak: Urdu.
"But all the street signs in Karachi in
"Call of Duty are in Arabic...
"yeah, it's a completely different language.
"And I know it does not seem like a big deal,
"but this game took three years to make.
"If you look at it, the graphics are perfect.
"You can see individual hairs on people's heads;
"when they run, they sweat.
"When they run, their shoelaces bounce!
"All they had to do was Google:
"Pakistan language."
"They were literally like,
'What language do they speak in Pakistan?'
'I don't care.
"I can't get his sideburns even."
Modern films, tv shows, and games
definitely perpetuate Islamophobia,
but it's no exxageration 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,
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,
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.
It's almost as if we don't know how to contend with women
as real people!
"Say what?!!!"
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
dont allow for the same kind of easy objectification
of these brown women's bodies,
and so we resist including them at all.
"Mom!"
At least we can thank 24 again for casting the great
Iranian actor, Shohreh Aghdashloo in season 4
as a Muslim terrorist who is also a wife and mother!
But there are artists, critics, and writers 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.
[Phone rings]
Crap! I think I missed a call.
I wonder if they left a message?
Feminist Answering Machine!
What's up, Anita???!
It's your favorite feminist Muslim Iranian-American
comedian calling!
I was just thinking...
how come, in all the like, terroristy movies,
you know the ones where brown people are in,
why are we always, like, late?
To all of our, like, terroristy adventures.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Like, they always have these brown dudes yelling,
"Yalla! Yalla! Yalla!"
"Yalla" just means "hurry up."
It's like a thing you say when you want
somebody to hurry up.
"Yalla, let's go."
"Yalla, kids! Hop in the car so we could go to school!"
And get in on some wicked adventures
against Claire Danes and Homeland.
What is the deal with that?
Yo, seriously!
What is up with that?
"Yalla" in my house just meant
"hurry up because dinner's getting cold."
There's tremendous harm in centuries of images
that reduce entire nations, cultures, and religions
to the status of sub-human savages.
As Jack Shaheen, the author of
Reel Bad Arabs has said,
"Politics and Hollywood's images are linked.
They reinforce one another.
Policy enforces mythical images;
mythical images help enforce policy.
"We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones;
and unite the civilized world against
radical Islamic terrorism."
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.
"Radical Islamic terrorism."
"President Obama, if you won't say it,
I will: radical Islam."
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.
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
and 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 Commitee 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,
fearmongering 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.
"I was sitting at the table,
we had finished dinner and we're now having dessert
and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake
that you've ever seen...and we've just launched
59 missiles heading to Iraq.
"...Headed to Syria."
"Yes, heading toward Syria."
[waaaaah-waaaah sound]
Iraq, Syria: what's the difference?`
It was just one of those countries
that 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 everyone'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 millenia.
It's specifically because our media perpetually
equates Islam, a religion followed by nearly a quarter
of the world's population,
with evil, terrorism, and oppression
that so many people believe that that's what Islam
actually is.
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 US 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.