Post #8

The articles for this week discuss the idea of race and the term racialization. According to both the Kubota/Lin article and the Rich/Troudy article, racialization is defined as a “racial categorization” where people are divided into groups based on their biological features. The Rich/Troudy article briefly mentions how new types of racism are beginning to form, which is what was discussed in the reading from the Holliday textbook from last week, the “New Racism.” The authors state that this type of racism is much more difficult to “name and detect.”

            Overall, the article by Rich/Troudy was particularly interesting to me since it covered a topic that I never knew there was an actual word for: Islamophobia, defined as “an irrational fear of Muslims and what Islam represents.” I knew that this type of fear existed but not that it was actually considered a type of phobia. According to the article, this is not a new idea, which surprised me, but since 9/11 there has been much more of this type of phobia in the media. The discourse of Islamophobia after 9/11 “takes the form of religious prejudice and discrimination.” Last week in class we watched part of a documentary about how Arabs are portrayed in movies, which fits well with the concept of this article. After seeing part of the documentary, even though I hadn’t seen most of the movies that they talked about, I was surprised to see how many Hollywood movies portray Arabs as the “bad people.” The movie that shocked me the most was Disney’s Aladdin. I loved that movie as a kid and still enjoy watching it today, but I never realized how badly Arabs are portrayed in it until watching the clips that they showed in the documentary. The song at the beginning of the movie has horrible lyrics, but I never noticed what they actually meant when I was watching the movie as a child. All of the movies that portray Arabs this way aren’t helping with the prejudices that people have against them, the movies most likely only make those prejudices stronger. The picture that comes to my mind when I think of people discriminating against Arabs and seeing them as the Other, is the classic scene in an airport going through the metal detectors at security. 9/11 is to blame for this type of discrimination in the airport. I sometimes wonder what runs through some peoples’ minds if they see a man with a turban walking through the airport. I also wonder what the TSA officials at the airport think as well, and whether they are told to watch and search Arabs more closely, only because of their race, religion, and appearance, and because of the events of 9/11.

            The purpose of the study in the article is to find out that ways that Arab Muslim students see racialization as having an impact on their experiences of Othering in the TESOL community in the UK. Qualitative data was collected by conducting interviews with the students and giving them questionnaires to fill out. The findings of the study are intriguing. The idea of gender came up often, and how it is linked to “nationality, ethnicity, and religion.” One student talked about how he thinks the other students have a negative concept of male Arabs. He states, “They ask me why in Islam they marry four wives.” Another student in the study also mentioned that she was often asked about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. At the end of the article, the authors discuss how the students who participated in the study will most likely go through a hard time because of the Islamophobic discourses that “determine how they are positioned in wider society.”