What Does Discrimination Look Like?
When going through airport security, and encountering someone who we think looks Muslim (dressed in traditional Middle Eastern attire) do we not automatically look twice and become cautious? When sitting inside the airplane and hearing two men speak in Arabic, do we not slightly become unsettled? Surely, suspicion and in some cases, fear, are a consequence of Islamophobia and sheer ignorance perpetuated by media messages not only nationally, but also globally.
The problem is not necessarily the number of security measures put in place, but the additional security measures imposed on Middle Easterners, as if only they are capable of terror. This cannot be farther from the truth. As Shahajahan Chowdhury notes on his piece, “Rationality of Airport Security,” there are many instances in which someone who appears to be Muslim, who is seen doing something that almost all people do within airport premises, they are seen as “dangerous.” For example, Hakime Abdulle, a Somali Muslim women who wore her hijab, a symbol of her faith, got asked to leave by the flight attendant after Abdulle asked to switch her plane seat. There seems to be an unspoken suspicion of Muslims in these public spaces in which their actions are thought to be malicious in some way. But this clear discrimination would not necessarily happen to someone who better fit the image of “American” or “normal.”
The most disturbing aspect of this discrimination and Islamophobia is that it does not manifest until the situation arises, at airports and locations where the media have pinpointed as “dangerous” zones. Post 9/11, media messages in America have invoked a sort of nationalism that is rooted deeply on the notion of a common enemy, and in this case, Islam. Of course it is the case that all Muslims are NOT terrorists. But media messages have solidified this false image of the middle easterner as a force threatening national traditions and security. Additionally, these messages define what it means to be American: have a common enemy and appear American. Propaganda of this sort is responsible for verbal and physical hostility to anyone considered to be “other,” reinforcing orientalist hegemonic ideologies.
But this raises the question: are we truly justified in this discrimination? Should the US take measures to prohibit an entire religion from being held to the same standard as the rest of the non-Muslim US? Why do we fail to recognize non-Muslim terror committed by an extremist Christian, for instance, as terror? Even though I cannot answer these questions in a way that would please everyone, I do raise them to have us begin interrogating notions of “justice,” “freedom,” and “church-state separation.”
