Seemingly progressive TV diversity can legitimize racist policies and torture

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core paradox — representations that appear to challenge stereotypes actually legitimize racist policy — is a dense, paradigm-level claim about how progressive-seeming media re-entrenches prejudice, worth sitting with.
• SEED: Angle for an article: how ‘diverse casting’ and ‘complex Muslim characters’ in prestige TV since 9/11 function as permission structures for torture and surveillance rather than genuine critique.
• XREF: connects to: Sympathetic multicultural TV portrayals can still legitimate racist counterterrorism policies.; Liberal multicultural TV can legitimate the security state as much as overtly racist shows