Bystanders overwhelmingly condone discrimination against veiled Muslim women

Evidence

An episode of the popular ABC show “What would you do?,” which aired in early 2008, took up the issue of discrimination against Muslim women through the creation of a situation in which an actress wearing hijab entered a roadside bakery in Waco, Texas, and was refused service by a sales clerk (also an actor) because she was “dressed like that.” The reactions of other customers were recorded and some were later approached to discuss and explain their reactions. With the exception of very few responses supportive of the Muslim woman, the overwhelming majority of customers did not react, or supported the verbally offensive clerk. While not a proper measure of public opinion, the episode demonstrates the pervasiveness of negative attitudes to Muslim women in hijab who, in the episode, were invariably coded as foreign, from a different and alien culture, and associated with terrorism by those supporting the discrimination. When the young actress pointed out that she was a native Texan and not foreign at all, she was dismissed and insulted some more. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 516

Categorization

• XREF: The fake-scenario TV experiment parallels Milgram/Bystander-effect methodology; also echoes the reader’s interest in bystander complicity enabling intolerance.
• SEED: The actress’s claim to native Texan identity being dismissed shows the ascription of foreignness overrides self-identification — worth an essay on how perceived foreignness is un-earnable, unlike other disclaimable traits.