Seemingly anti-stereotypical TV portrayals legitimize racist policies

Evidence

Simplified complex representations are strategies used by television producers, writers, and directors to give the impression that the representations they are producing are complex. While I focus on television, film uses these strategies as well. Below I lay out what I have found to be the most common ways that writers and producers of television dramas have depicted Arab and Muslim characters after 9/11. While some of these were used more frequently (and to greater narrative success) than others, they all help to shape the many layers of simplified complexity. I argue that simplified complex representations are the representational mode of the so-called post-race era, signifying a new era of racial representation. These representations appear to challenge or complicate former stereotypes and contribute to a multicultural or post-race illusion. Yet at the same time, most of the programs that employ simplified complex representational strategies promote logics that legitimize racist policies and practices, such as torturing Arabs and Muslims. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 134 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

These seemingly positive representations of Arabs and Muslims have helped to form a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices. It is no longer the case that the Other is explicitly demonized to justify war or injustice. Now, the Other is portrayed sympathetically in order to project the United States as an enlightened country that has entered a postracial era. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 115 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In this notion of color blindness, racial inequality persists by “still resorting to exclusionism and scapegoating when politically necessary, still invoking the supposed superiority of ‘mainstream’ (aka white) values, and cheerfully maintaining that equality has been largely achieved.” Within this new racial formation that Jodi Melamed calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” and that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “color-blind racism,” “racism constantly appears as disappearing according to conventional race categories, even as it takes on new forms that can signify as nonracial or even antiracist.” These new antiracist forms are aptly apparent when Guantanamo Bay prisoners are provided with copies of the Qur’an and time to pray as evidence of the cultural sensitivity of their captors; or when the USA PATRIOT Act contains a section that condemns discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans. Such gestures attempt to subvert the focus from the violation of civil and human rights in favor of highlighting multiculturalism and racial sensitivity. The emergence of sympathetic representations of Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans similarly deflects attention from the persistence of racist policies and practices post-9/11. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 92 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sympathetic multicultural portrayals can still legitimate racist policies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 374; Sympathetic multicultural TV portrayals can still legitimate racist counterterrorism policies.; Liberal multicultural TV can legitimate the security state as much as overtly racist shows (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Seemingly progressive TV diversity can legitimize racist policies and torture #corroborates (0.97) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 134
• Sympathetic media portrayals can function as a new form of racism legitimizing exclusionary policy. #corroborates (0.96) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 115
• Sympathetic media portrayals can mask ongoing racist policy #corroborates (0.95) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 92