Six-Day War transformed the American Arab stereotype from nomad to defeated buffoon

Evidence

The costume for Princeton’s tenth-reunion class in 1967 had been planned before the June War. The motif—for it would be wrong to describe the costume as more than crudely suggestive—was to have been Arab: robes, headgear, sandals. Immediately after the war, when it had become clear that the Arab motif was an embarrassment, a change in the reunion plans was decreed. Wearing the costume as had been originally planned, the class was now to walk in procession, hands above heads in a gesture of abject defeat. This was what the Arab had become. From a faintly outlined stereotype as a camel-riding nomad to an accepted caricature as the embodiment of incompetence and easy defeat: that was all the scope given the Arab. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 725

Categorization

• SHARE: The Princeton 1967 reunion costume story is a vivid, narrow anecdote worth sending to anyone working on representational stereotyping.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 725