Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means For Politics Today
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Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means For Politics Today
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Overview
Steven Salaita explores the reality of Anti-Arab racism in America. He blends personal narrative, theory and polemics to show how this deep-rooted racism affects everything from legislation to cultural life, shining a light on the consequences of Anti-Arab racism both at home and abroad.
The book shows how ingrained racist attitudes can be found within the progressive movements on the political left, as well as the right. Salaita argues that, under the guise of patriotism, Anti-Arab racism fuels support for policies such as the Patriot Act.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783715954 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 439 KB |
About the Author
Steven Salaita is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author of Anti-Arab Racism in the USA (Pluto, 2006), and writes frequently about Arab America and the Arab World.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Perilous World of Savages and Barbarians
Nearly a year after 9/11, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a column by John O'Sullivan assessing post-9/11 discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans. The column is thorough and impassioned, with a healthy undercurrent of moral indignation. It connects the backlash against Arab and Muslim Americans to the 2002 Israeli massacre in Jenin and the epidemic of Black church burnings in 1996. There is only one problem: according to O'Sullivan, the backlash was a myth.
O'Sullivan also believes, as do most supporters of Israel, that the Jenin massacre was a well-orchestrated myth. To his credit, he never disputes the fact that Black churches were burned in the United States in 1996. The physical disappearance of those churches is difficult to deny, but so is the physical disappearance of countless Palestinian civilians in Jenin, and yet O'Sullivan persists in advancing the notion, drawn from the classic discourse of ethnic cleansing, that Israel never massacres civilians. Despite the destruction of the Black churches in 1996, O'Sullivan explains that church burnings have actually decreased since 1980, as if this fact absolves the perpetrators of the 1996 crimes. He never actually presents evidence that the church burnings weren't inspired by racism; instead, he offers evidence that since 1990 "'only random links to racism' could be found in black church burnings," as if those supposedly "random" cases are benign or unimportant.
The major part of O'Sullivan's article examines what he considers a mythical backlash post-9/11 against Arab and Muslim Americans generated by a liberal media eager to sensationalize harmless minutiae as institutional racism to reinforce a pernicious multicultural agenda. (In fact, the very real backlash against Arab and Muslim Americans was woefully underreported by the same media O'Sullivan criticizes.) O'Sullivan obviously failed to consult the American–Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the Arab American Institute (AAI), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), and countless other nonprofit organizations that painstakingly documented hundreds of cases of discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans in the months following 9/11. Or he could have consulted directly with Arab and Muslim Americans, a novel idea to him, no doubt, but certainly one that might have been useful considering his article claims to represent this demographic — and in effect calls them liars.
O'Sullivan's piece is clichéd because it corresponds with a plethora of mainstream and rightwing political analysis that considers racism overexaggerated or nonexistent and construes any attempt to discuss racism as minority propaganda or an attack on American values. Today, Arabs are so frequently a subject of this argument that, despite our marginalization, we have been appropriated into the mainstream of the American consciousness. That is to say, we know we've become American because American racism has thoroughly naturalized us.
Yet O'Sullivan's article is noteworthy for two reasons: it illustrates how racism can be expressed through the denial of racism and it attaches the concerns of Arabs to those of other ethnic groups. The first point is self-evident because American racists have long articulated racism by denying the very racism they articulate, but it is noteworthy because it implicates Arabs as the mythmakers. The existence of an Arab community in the United States, then, is exploited to sustain the racist metanarrative underlying O'Sullivan's assertions. The second point is more crucial because O'Sullivan doesn't decontextualize what he calls Arab mythmaking. Instead, he places it within a tradition of anti-racism activism and hopes that readers will do the same and eventually dismiss that tradition as faulty or hysterical. Two cautions thus follow: analysts of anti-Arab racism are tasked with exploring the metanarrative O'Sullivan utilizes; and anti-racism activists would be foolish to overlook Arabs, as many do today.
I wonder sometimes how best to respond to claims like O'Sullivan's. On the one hand, many of his readers will accept those claims automatically because they fortify a preexisting ideology or ameliorate any anxiety readers may feel about the possibility of racism influencing their worldviews. On the other hand, O'Sullivan is totally wrong and the flippancy with which he dismisses a dangerous reality appears to warrant some type of response even if it won't convince O'Sullivan's target audience. If carefully researched work like David Cole's Enemy Aliens, which documents countless cases of institutionalized discrimination, can be ignored (intentionally or not) by writers who purport to demythologize racism, then we are faced with the reality that no amount of quality journalism or scholarship can resonate effectively with a portion of the American public. This fact highlights a corresponding reality: that a large number of people in American society are unalterably racist and can be continually absolved of their racism by the fantasies peddled by O'Sullivan and others.
O'Sullivan's article provides us with a classic example of White patrimony. Because he has never experienced racism, he finds it impossible to imagine that racism actually exists, which is ironic since he illuminates one of its classic features in the article under discussion. And because he articulates racism while concurrently arguing against its existence, he must manufacture a discourse that delegitimizes those who document it empirically or through personal exposition. He thus anoints himself a spokesperson for Arabs, especially Arabs who claim to be victims of racism. O'Sullivan, in other words, attempts to control Arab discourse so he can manage the role of Arabs in American society, a technique used by Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, and other critics of Middle East Studies when they complain about the desire of Arabs to teach courses about their own cultures and histories. Or, to put it more thoroughly, O'Sullivan's discourse indicates that he wants himself and his colleagues to maintain their dominant position vis-à-vis Arabs in American society and simultaneously influence public opinion effectively enough to canonize their racism. This move is accomplished by dismissing legitimate Arab concerns about harassment as a tacit conspiracy arising from false ethnic verisimilitude, a move that unfairly invents and then totalizes group consciousness.
It doesn't require research expertise to uncover instances of anti-Arab racism in the United States (for Arabs it requires nothing more than being Arab). USA Today, for instance, reports that since 9/11 Muslim communities across the United States are having difficulty opening mosques because of local opposition. In Voorhees, New Jersey, anti-mosque advocates distributed "fliers that warned residents that extremists 'with connections to terrorists' might worship [in the proposed mosque]." Agence France Presse, picking up a story from the Detroit News, notes that "[p]rosecutions of Arab and Muslim Americans [in Dearborn] ... have shot up since the September 11 attacks." In the two years following 9/11, the number of Arab and Muslim defendants rose 9.3 per cent while the prosecution of non-Arabs dropped 6.7 per cent. In 2002, the American Jewish Committee ran television ads that dehumanized Palestinians and reduced them all to the category of terrorists.
In 2004, a George Bush Jr. reelection ad focusing on terrorism displayed a swarthy Arab, something James Zogby called "a form of racial profiling." In the commercial, the picture of the Arab appears when the word terrorism is spoken, which not only implies that all Arabs are terrorists, but also that terrorism exists exclusively in the Arab World (as opposed to, say, the White House, where Bush is responsible for more unwarranted civilian deaths than Osama bin Laden). The juxtaposition of the word terrorism and the stereotyped image of a bearded Arab is symbolic of how the Arab is perceived in the American consciousness. The visual reproduction of an abstract, hypothetically faceless concept (terrorism) connotes how those who manage the production of stereotype rely on caricature to reduce complex political phenomena to binaristic truths.
Young Arabs in the United States, according to the Baltimore Sun, are aware of how their culture is reproduced in visual caricatures. They also understand how stereotypical images affect their lives in the United States: "Arab-American students at local private schools say that after the terrorist attacks [9/11], strangers stared or made hurtful remarks when they were with their families because they spoke a foreign language, had an accent or dressed differently." A student at Baltimore's Boys' Latin School, Ridwan Yaseen Tomhe, delivered a senior speech in which he claimed, "The word 'Arab' to some people is synonymous with the word 'terrorist,' implying that all Arabs are terrorists." Tomhe, like most Arab American youth, knows this to be true based on experience, because Arab American youth also are included in the totalizing media and political discourse that rarely offers nuanced discussion of Arab cultures and societies. Commercials like the one Bush ran in 2004 not only reinforce that discourse, they generate it.
A Culture of Hate?
Since 1990, Iraq has been to varying degrees a topic of debate in the United States. The relationship of the American government with the Saudi ruling family has drawn much ire on both the Right and Left, particularly after 9/11, culminating with Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud. The merits and downfalls of "moderate" and "fundamentalist" Arab governments respectively are usually included in American foreign policy discussions. Human rights in the Arab World often are incorporated into deliberations on American ethics. Since 9/11, the so-called modernization of Islamic societies has assumed great importance to Americans. All of these issues contribute in some way to the proliferation of anti-Arab racism because they construe the Arab World as crucial to the well-being of the United States and usually conclude that the Arab World is a detriment to American progress. By involving itself militarily and economically in the Arab World the American government has ensured that productive intercultural dialogue and meaningful political interchange among Americans and Arabs will rarely take place.
No issue, however, has generated more anti-Arab racism than Israel's occupation of Palestine. Popular and governmental support for Israel has amplified the importance of Arabs to American foreign policy. More important, Israel's well-accepted rationalizations for occupying and settling the territories — security, terrorism, divine mandate, and so forth — necessarily subordinate Palestinians to an inferior position vis-à-vis Israeli Jews — and, by extension, Americans. Because Israel is a staunch ally of the United States and is the subject of much media coverage here, the Palestinians are represented overwhelmingly in American media. These representations, which often marginalize Palestinians by privileging Israeli narratives of suffering and American-style pioneering, produce a rhetorical framework in which anti-Arab racism flourishes. In fact, I would argue that Zionists (Christian and Jewish) in the United States are the biggest progenitors of anti-Arab racism today. This isn't necessarily to say that Zionism per se equals racism (a debate we will examine in Chapter Four), but Zionists without doubt have been successful in selling their settlement project to Americans — and any time a settlement project is underway, the indigenes whose land is being settled are invariably bastardized as uncivilized or savage.
For example, in an article titled "The Palestinian Culture of Hate," John Perazzo writes,
Given the degree to which the Palestinian Authority (PA) has, for years, systematically infused its subjects' hearts with violent bigotry, there is reason to wonder whether the current Palestinian population possesses the moral or ethical foundation necessary to pursue peaceful coexistence with Israel. The generations of Palestinians already raised on this steady diet of hate may in fact be lost forever — incapable of truly accepting such coexistence even under the most favorable terms imaginable.
It is, of course, problematic (and inevitably false) any time somebody denigrates an entire culture as hateful. Beyond this elemental problem, Perazzo's article is flawed for numerous reasons.
Using the traditional vocabulary of European and Euro-American colonization, Perazzo decries "the seeds of barbarism" in Palestinian society as well as their "hateful bigotry," concluding, without grammatical nuance, that they are "homicidal degenerates." This homicidal degeneration, according to Perazzo, exists largely because of the textbooks used in Palestinian schools, which "turn the minds of Palestinians into reservoirs of venom." Perazzo's reliance on these silly metaphors connotes a lack of intellectual authority, as does his claim about Palestinian textbooks, repeated ad infinitum in an assortment of Zionist publications. Are there some hateful messages about Jews in Palestinian textbooks and Arab media? Yes. Are those hateful messages as pervasive as Perazzo contends? Absolutely not. Many of the claims that Zionists and neoconservatives consider "venomous" focus on Israel's displacement of the Palestinians in 1948, 1967, and today, something Palestinian children don't need to study to understand. Settler societies never want to be reminded of the moral failings of their policies and so they mitigate their complicity in ethnic cleansing by resorting to a victimology continually informed by defensive language, which precludes any ability to recognize the dilemma of indigenes because the indigenes were dehumanized in the act of ethnic cleansing the settler society works so hard to deny.
More crucial, had Perazzo taken the time to research the problem — and it appears that neoconservatives think research is a multicultural conspiracy — he would have found at least three studies claiming that Israeli children's textbooks are filled with "venom." The first study was published by Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University and concludes "that Israeli textbooks present the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refuses to accept and acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel." Like American textbooks in relation to Indians, "Israeli textbooks continue to present Jews as industrious, brave and determined to cope with the difficulties of 'improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of.'" Bar-Tal explains that the textbooks stereotype Arabs as "unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic. ... 'The message was that the Palestinians were primitive and neglected the country and did not cultivate the land.'" Arabs, according to the textbooks, "burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed," and are described in the following terms: "tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored."
Another study, by Eli Podeh of the Hebrew University, suggests that "while certain changes in Israeli textbooks are slowly being implemented, the discussion of Palestinian national and civil identity is never touched upon. ... 'Especially evident is the lack of a discussion on the orientation of Palestinians to the [occupied] territories.'" A 17-year-old Israeli high school student observes that "our books basically tell us that everything the Jews do is fine and legitimate and Arabs are wrong and violent and are trying to exterminate us." The student's observation is corroborated by Adir Cohen's 1999 An Ugly Face in the Mirror, which presents some disturbing survey results: among fourth to sixth-grade Jewish children at a school in Haifa "seventy five percent ... described the 'Arab' as a murderer, one who kidnaps children, a criminal and a terrorist. Eighty per cent said they saw the Arab as someone dirty with a terrifying face. Ninety per cent of the students stated they believe that Palestinians have no rights whatsoever to the land in Israel or Palestine."
Among 1,700 children's books published since 1967, Cohen "found that 520 of [them] contained humiliating, negative descriptions of Palestinians ... . Sixty six per cent of the 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 per cent as evil; 37 per cent as liars; 31 per cent as greedy; 28 per cent as two-faced; 27 per cent as traitors, etc." Furthermore, Cohen "counted the following descriptions used to dehumanize Arabs: murderer was used 21 times; snake, 6 times; dirty, 9 times; vicious animal, 17 times; bloodthirsty, 21 times; warmonger, 17 times; killer, 13 times; believer in myths, 9 times; and a camel's hump, 2 times." Cohen didn't complete his study in a vacuum, for it concludes that such descriptions of Arabs are part and parcel of convictions and a culture rampant in Hebrew literature and history books. He writes that Israeli authors and writers confess to deliberately portraying the Arab character in this way, particularly to their younger audience, in order to influence their outlook early on so as to prepare them to deal with Arabs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Anti-Arab Racism in the USA"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Steven Salaita.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Evolution of White Supremacy1. The Perilous World of Savages and Barbarians
2. Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11
3. Observations on a New Fifth Column: Anti-Arab Racism in the American University
4. Is Zionism Racism?
5. Why God Hates Me
6. Re-Dressing Abu Ghraib: The Racism of Denial
Conclusion: Stories of a Different Kind
Notes
Index