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! 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. 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, 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. 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 in season four as a Muslim terrorist who is also a wife and mother! 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. In the wake of the September 11th attacks 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. 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.