Sympathetic TV portrayals can still legitimize suspicion of all Arabs as threats

Evidence

While the episode flirts with the idea that exceptional circumstances merit changing the rules, the jury’s verdict implies that we must fight to maintain legal standards during times of crisis. The episode’s ultimate message, however, is more ambiguous: the logic of exception is indeed critiqued, but the Arab man’s identity as a terrorist ultimately confirms that suspicion of all Arabs/Muslims is justified, or at least necessary. According to the preferred meaning of this episode, Arabs are indeed a threat to national security; a seemingly innocent Arab man, after all, who seems to be the victim of a terrible hate crime could actually be a real terrorist. The logic of the episode does not support sympathy for the Arab and Muslim American plight but mourning for the end of the American dream. Ultimately, discourses of the nation in crisis not only trump the Arab and Muslim American plight but also support U.S. government initiatives in the War on Terror. This is achieved through benevolent emotions that connect the viewer’s feelings of sympathy, remorse, and mourning to the identity of the nation. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s frame of how surface sympathy masks underlying ideology — and to broader media-studies work on sympathy as a vehicle for domination. — 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
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the sympathetic villain’ — how benevolent TV representations of minorities can function as propaganda for the very policies that harm them.