Sympathetic media portrayals can mask ongoing racist policy

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the two named frameworks: Melamed’s ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and Bonilla-Silva’s ‘color-blind racism.’
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s interest in how progressive-sounding gestures (Qur’an provision, PATRIOT Act anti-discrimination clause) function as deflection — parallels ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of discourse as class/identity signaling. — 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
• DEEPTHINKING: The central thesis of the book: sympathetic representation as itself a mechanism of racism, not its antidote — a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion of conventional liberal assumptions about representation.