Week 7

In class we talked about “affect” and how we construct emotion, specifically how we construct emotion when in comes to thinking about any associations with the Middle East. Usually when people think about the “ArabMuslimSouthAsian” classification introduced by Vani Kannan, they are drawn to images of terrorism and are thus racializing bodies that they know nothing about. Especially as someone who was a young child when September 11^th occurred, I was led to believe that Muslims were dangerous. It was silently taught to me as a kid, whether I was in school or at home, but that was only because of the adult figures in my life and also the media, which painted this picture that every single Muslim was a potential terrorist.

            In elementary school, one of my best friends was ashamed of being called a Muslim because she also equated the Islamic population with the words “terrorist” and “national threat.” She grew up as a Muslim, but all of her friends (including myself) were Christians. For years she would tell us that she is also a Christian, but her family would say that they were Muslim. As a kid, I was confused as to how should could practice both, and my grandma (a strict Christian) would always tell me that is not possible. Possible or not, I wondered why my friend felt the need to assure people that she was not a Muslim. She certainly embraced the Islamic culture and practiced the religion of Islam, but she did not want to be labeled a Muslim. One day, she started crying to me because she felt so frustrated with people using her faith to stereotype her as a bad person. When I think about this now, it’s extremely frustrating and unfortunate to me that she felt she had to hide a part of herself out of fear of being judged and racialized as a threat. As of today, she has definitely grown out of it, but as a kid, she should not have had to face such unfair and unnecessary judgment.

Even though years have passed since September 11^th, kids today still seem to make endless terrorist jokes to Middle Easterners. At my high school, students would call a boy who practiced Hinduism and wore a turban a terrorist because they thought they were hilarious. This boy would laugh along with these kids and never did speak up or defend himself. Earlier this year, my 14 year old cousin told me that one of the boys in her class asked about her ethnicity, and once she told him she is half Pakistani, he has nicknamed her terrorist. After she tells me this story, she starts laughing and I proceed to ask her why she did not correct his poor choice of words. She tells me “oh don’t worry I know that he’s kidding it’s not a big deal.” The problem is, it IS a huge deal. It makes me sad to see that my cousin is immune to such absurd racial stereotypes. She’s laughing with them, but she does not understand the complexity of the problem. Fourteen years later, it seems we have not even slightly improved in eliminating racial discrimination and stereotyping of Middle Easterners.