Stereotyping Of Arabs Pros And Cons

Nydell, Margaret K. (. K. Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Modern Times. Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, ME, 2006.

Like other ethnic minority groups in America, Arab Americans face daily challenges in their overall development and well-being. These challenges take the form of discrimination, stereotyping, and general negative reactions to them as an ethnic group.

As American singer-song writer Duncan Sheik once said, “It’s inevitable your environment will influence what you do.” It is not a secret that the environment a person grows up in helps shape their views of the world and how he or she perceives different issues. The United State of America are known as the melting pot. We have many cultures and races all living within the same cities working together peacefully for the most part. To outsiders America is the place to come to achieve the “American Dream”, and it is the place where fresh starts, entrepreneurship, and individualism are highly encouraged. There are freedoms in American that many other people across the world are not as lucky to have.

What are Arab Americans? An individual can be classified as “Arab” if the person speaks Arabic, practices Islam, and identifies with the traditions of Arabic-speaking peoples. (Aguirre and Turner 276)These individuals are usually subject to negative and differential treatment by others. It is essential to identify the differential treatment of Arab Americans by others in society. The mistreatment of Arabs in the United States can be contributed to many factors; however, there have been certain events that have occurred in the United States, which have increased and enraged these strong emotional feelings in many Americans. Discrimination and stereotypes of a culture or group mainly develops from a lack of understanding. We can become a

In this photo a Middle Eastern woman is pointing a gun directly towards the camera, symbolizing the way she, like many others, are stereotyped in America. The picture is clear and concise, with front view and level angles that let the viewers see the struggles she has gone faced. Her face and arms display Arabic writings that symbolize the stereotypes given to them in America: terrorists, muslims, extremists, and fanatics. The picture is limited to the colors black and white to represent the seriousness of this issue. Her eyes staring directly towards the viewer causes them to feel sympathy, leading them to wonder why there is such hate towards Middle Easterners. The concepts of this picture go back to the main idea of the research question

Stereotypes are widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular person or thing. Racial stereotypes are when you mentally exaggerate a racial group that we hold automatically, not as an individual. We develop stereotypes through our cognitive scheme, which we know for categorization, to make the world more predictable. Just like the worldly opposites, there are negative and positive stereotypes for African Americans. Some negative stereotypes are that black people are criminals or affiliated with drugs. And some positive stereotypes are black people are good singers or really great athletes. The victim(s) of the stereotype takes the steps to counter the bias opinion about themselves. In the series of questions asked, the determination of whether one's bias opinion is true and the group own up to that stereotype to make it true. Or one actually creating the stereotype for their group which is pointed out by another group. These questions were asked towards white and black members of Argo Community High School. White Response (WR) and Black Response (BR) is how the determination will be evaluated, to infer a theory as an general answer.

While we deal with our own feelings of fear and anger regarding the violence perpetrated against us, both physical and non-physical, it’s important to remember that we aren’t the only ones who feel victimized in the conflict. Perhaps it is true that the Middle East, for the most part, distains the West, but not for nothing and not even

As a country, the United States has propagated an image of a "melting pot" of all human ethnicities. One of the many groups of people who have chosen the United States to be their home is that of the Arab Americans. This ethnicity typically describes those of ancestry from the Middle East, but this group can have a wide range of religious and cultural beliefs from different countries. Often Arab Americans are perceived to all have similar appearances, however phenotypically they can range from "people with blonde hair, blues eyes, or kinky hair and dark skin" (Alimahomed, 2011). The experience of Arab Americans changed drastically after the September 11th attacks on American soil in 2001. This paper attempts to explore the effects

The typical stereotype of Arabs and Middle Easterners comes from early Europeans who traveled to these countries. The United States took the images brought back and made it into the fictional setting of "Arab Land" seen today. Those images consist mostly of a

Ever since September 11, 2000 every one’s views of the Arab ethnicity have become bitter. Anyone from the Middle East is assumed to be Arab and assumed to be a terrorist. Neither the Hispanic nor the

If one were to survey Americans about what they think a terrorist looks like, it is not surprising what the most common description would be. The majority of people would likely describe a bearded, turban-clad middle eastern man waving around an AK-47 while shouting, “allahu akbar!” Although there is nothing inherently frightening about bearded men and practicing religion, somehow being middle eastern and practicing Islam became one of the dirtiest crimes in the United States. After 9/11 it seems that almost overnight, America developed an irrational phobia of anyone who remotely looks middle eastern, and has since systematically oppressed and mistreated innocent

Concerning the issue of prejudice against Arab Americans, few researches have been done. It is surprising seeing as little attention has been paid to this ethno-religious group whose population rate has tremendously increased after 9/11. However, one study by Park, Felix, and Lee (2007) do give us an idea of how prejudice is expressed, implicitly or explicitly, against Muslim people. In their study, they found that discrimination against Arab Muslims is never shown in an explicit way but rather in a subtle way. They used an Implicit Association

According to Steven Salaita, the author of Anit-Arab Racism in the USA, “Anti-Arab racism has existed in the United States since the arrival of the first Arab in North America, but since 9/11 anti-Arab racism is, to use a cliché, America’s elephant in the living room—an enormous elephant, at that” (Salaita 7). Therefore, it is more accurate to think of 9/11 not so much as the beginning of anti-Arab racism, but rather the turning point of Arab and Muslim American engagements with race and racialization. With this said, we will focus briefly on outlining the events the led to and anti-Arab American perception before 9/11 and primarily on the American perception of people from Middle Eastern decent after 9/11.

Viewing Arabs and Muslims as evil and threatening people began long before the terrorist attacks on September 11 (Akram, pg 61.) It can be traced back to myths created by film and media. Individuals of Middle Eastern descent were often the villains in older American films and have been consistently misrepresented for many years. There have also been multiple government laws and policies dating back to the 1970s that have “steadily targeted Arab and Muslim non-citizens for selective interrogation, detention, harassment, presumption of terrorist involvement, and removal from this country” (Akram, 61).

In the essay to “Any Would-Be Terrorist”, Shihab Nye expresses her preoccupation and “rational anger” towards the repercussions of the 9/11 attack, assuming that the authors of the events will read and be touched by the facts and arguments she explains throughout the text. Nye writes “I beg you, as your distant cousin, as your American neighbor, listen to me. Our hearts are broken, as yours may also feel broken in some ways we can't understand unless you tell us in words” (173). Lamentably, Nye fails to recognize the context in which the terrorists committed the attack since she can only try to understand the “Arab tragedy” experience from an external, contrasting, and Americanized point of view. The author assumes that, before committing the terrorist attacks, the terrorists couldn't find another way of denouncing the crisis lived in their country or the suffering caused by the US military invasions.