Page - 183 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 183 - A nutritional health company targeted a U.S. Congressman for opposing its interests by sending out flyers with a picture of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin in a turban with the messages: “Get a Turban for Durbin!” and “Keep Congressional Terrorists At Bay!” At the outset we should fully understand that not all Muslims are Arabs. Nor are all Arabs Muslims. This is a confusion that persists widely, contributing to careless generalizations about groups of individuals. An effort will be made here to avoid such confusion, though the terms have become so intertwined that some ambiguity may still intrude. A few statistics concerning religion and ethnicity may lift some of the fog. Though it is difficult if not impossible to classify with any precision immigrant populations over time, estimates are that of the roughly 3.5 million people of Arabic heritage living in the U.S. about 63 percent are Christian, 24 percent are Muslim and the remaining 13 percent are other or no religion (Kayyali 2006, whose data are based on several sources, including the Arab American Institute Foundation and Zogby International). For further context, it is worth noting that: there are 1.7 billion Muslims in the world; 44 countries have majority Muslim populations; Arabs make up about 16 percent of Muslims worldwide; and 90 percent of Arabs are Muslim. Research for this paper is based on an extensive review of the literature pertaining to Arabs in the United States. It draws heavily on two bodies of literature. One is historical, tapping into the rich body of work sketching Arab immigration patterns. The other and predominant body of work for this pro- ject comes from the literature on media. This includes theoretical formulations concerning the role and impact of media in society as well as specific studies of Arab representation in media ranging from textbooks to films, from newspa- pers to television. The works have been analyzed and results synthesized from a critical perspective. While many studies deal with media portrayal of the Middle East, this paper’s primary focus will be on Arab Americans, that is, those who have immigrated and settled in the U.S.1 This paper does not purport to encompass the substantial body of literature pertaining specifically to Muslim immigrants in the United States (e.g., Haddad, Smith & Moore 2006; Haddad 2004; Haddad 2002; Waugh, Abu-Laban & Qureshi 1983), including their portrayal by media (e.g., Noakes 1998). 1 A note concerning the hyphen: In general, the practice among scholars has been to omit the hyphen between “Arab” and “America” but to insert it when the two words are used in conjunction as an adjectival phrase, such as “Arab-American” community. That is the style employed in this paper and should not be construed to imply any particular significance.