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Commentary by Sahar Khamis: Countering Islamophobia One Tweet at a Time
6/16/21

This commentary sheds light on some of the most creative online campaigns which have been launched to counter Islamophobia and overcome the negative stereotypes and skewed (mis)representations of Islam and Muslims, especially in the West. It provides a number of scholarly definitions of Islamophobia and explains why, and how, social media could act as a double-edged sword, which may fuel Islamophobia, on the one hand, while providing effective tools to counter it, on the other hand. It highlights several examples illustrating both effects of the social media, while focusing on the factors behind the success of some online countering Islamophobia campaigns, such as the amplification of Muslims’ voices, including gendered voices; the deployment of humor; and the selection of suitable strategies, tactics, and tools. It concludes with a few thoughts on what needs to be done to ensure the success and continuation of countering Islamophobia efforts, moving forward.

Introduction

Muslims globally are using the internet, not just as a window to see and be seen by the rest of the world, but also as a tool with which to push back against the many attempts to sideline them, profile them, stigmatize them and silence them.1 Their efforts to deploy digital media as a platform that gives voice to the voiceless, thus helping them to amplify and spread their messages, became particularly important in the midst of the rising wave of Islamophobia after 9/11, especially in the West. With the alarming increase in incidents of hatred against Muslims worldwide and the dangerous new wave of Islamophobia that has been witnessed more recently, many Muslims have resorted to online campaigns to fight against negative misrepresentations, rectify their images, and spread correct awareness about their faith and traditions, their multifaceted identities and lived realities. This commentary provides various examples illustrating how different groups of Muslims are engaging in tireless online efforts to achieve all of these goals.

Definitions of Islamophobia
The idea of fearing a certain group of people because of their culture, race, traditions, religious beliefs, or simply because they are different is not new. It has been around for centuries. This process of ethnic, racial, and religious profiling has been commonly referred to as stereotyping. One example of the process of profiling and stereotyping the ‘Other’ is Islamophobia.

Islamophobia could be defined as “an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life.”2 Its spread has prompted “an increasingly visible ‘backlash’ against Muslims across Europe and the United States.”3 The term ‘backlash’ encompasses all of the negative messages received by Muslims and all harmful acts against them, whether physical, psychological, or both. This includes the controversial cartoon drawings of Prophet Muhammad by Danish artists in 20064 that triggered negative reactions among many Muslims and some non-Muslims.

Some authors define Islamophobia as “an unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and, therefore, fear or dislike of all or most Muslims,”5 while others define it as “an allegedly irrational fear of losing life or liberty to Islamic rule merely because the laws, sacred texts, and traditional practices of Islam demand the submission of culture, politics, religion, and all social expression.”6 This last definition, unlike previous ones, mentions ‘losing life’ as a direct result of Islam. This fear could be attributed to the fact that many terrorist attacks are covered extensively and disproportionately, on national media in the West, especially if the attacker happens to have an Arab or a Muslim name, creating an association in the minds of Western audiences between Muslims and acts of terrorism. However, only a very tiny fringe of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims support terrorism, let alone engage in it.

There is no doubt that the rise of recent international trends, such as right-wing politics, populism, and White Supremacy, and the rhetoric associated with them, especially from some of the political leaders in Europe and the United States in recent years, have fueled Islamophobic sentiments, resulting in attacks on mosques, Islamic centers, and Muslim individuals on an unprecedented scale. These Islamophobic acts have a greater impact on those with visible Muslim identifies, such as women who wear the hijab (Islamic headscarf), for example.

Muslims in Europe suffer from different forms of discrimination, including racial and religious profiling, and sometimes even restrictions on their rights to adhere to various aspects of their Muslim faith. One glaring example is France’s repeated efforts to impose restrictions on Muslim women’s religious attire. The most recent of such efforts is France’s 2021 decision to ban girls under eighteen years of age from wearing the hijab in public, and prohibiting mothers wearing the hijab from accompanying their children on school field trips.7 These decisions are just the latest among a series of actions by the French government aimed at restricting the hijab in France.8 These include banning the wearing of the hijab in public schools in France, banning the burkini (the modest, religiously compliant swimwear worn by some Muslim women), and banning the niqab (full-face covering) by law in 2010 –an action that was subsequently critiqued by the UN Human Rights Commission as an unjustified decision that disproportionately targets the minority of Muslim women who wear it, thereby violating their rights of religious freedom.9

Islamophobia has been steadily on the rise in the United States since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which marked a seismic geopolitical shift in the portrayal of Muslims across the media. It changed people’s perceptions of Islam and made them anxious and fearful of an entire group of people. The attacks made people wonder if all Muslims were extremists and, if they were, when would they attack again? Given that thousands of people died that day, they were right to fear terrorists, who belong to extremist groups like al-Qaeda. However, the problem was the proliferation of overgeneralized stereotypes that are still widespread, even though terrorist groups represent only a tiny fraction of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims.

Already a problem, Islamophobia became exponentially much worse after President Trump came to office in 2016. During his presidency, some of the most prominent Islamophobes launched campaigns online, using the internet to spout hatred and fuel anger and discrimination against immigrants and minorities in general, and Muslims in particular.10 This new wave of Islamophobia during Trump’s presidency extended beyond mere rhetoric to include serious discriminatory policies targeting Muslims, such as the infamous Muslim Travel Ban,11 which was revoked by President Biden on the first day of his presidency.

As the above discussion clearly illustrates, we must acknowledge the complexities and nuances of the concept of Islamophobia by situating it within the appropriate historical, social, political, and cultural settings, as well as the appropriate temporal and spatial contextualization. Like all forms of discrimination and xenophobia, Islamophobia is part of an ever-evolving, multifaceted and elusive process that takes different forms; and is expressed through various manifestations, based on a multitude of underlying factors and shifting influences.

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Bipartisan political rhetoric about Asia leads to anti-Asian violence here
3/19/21

By Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong  

The Asian American sense of belonging was already fragile before a White gunman killed six of us among his eight victims in Atlanta this past week. The slayings reinforce a sense of heightened vulnerability among a group that had reported nearly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian bias over the last year. The alleged killer told police that race wasn’t a motive, but given his targets, that is just not credible. Partly, no doubt, those incidents came thanks to President Donald Trump’s insistence on calling the coronavirus the “China virus” and the “Kung flu.” Many recognized early that such words aligned him with a strain of hatred — and accompanying vigilante violence — that has existed in the United States for as long as Asian immigrants have been here.

But it’s too simple to blame Trump for what is happening. In the 1980s, officials from both parties cast Japan as the economic enemy; now it is China, one of the few issues about which Democrats and Republicans agree. And yes, it’s true that China is an extremely bad actor when it comes to espionage and human rights. But decades of official U.S. foreign policy and rhetoric from the pundit class have had a unique effect on Asian Americans. When the government frets about Russian hacking and election interference, there is little consequence for Americans of Russian heritage. When officials express fears over China or other Asian countries, Americans immediately turn to a timeworn racial script that questions the loyalty, allegiance and belonging of 20 million Asian Americans. Most Americans are not skilled at distinguishing between people of different Asian origins or ancestries, and the result is that whenever China is attacked, so are Asian Americans as a whole.

While former president Barack Obama and President Biden have both denounced anti-Asian violence, as they should, they have also spent their careers embracing critical takes on China that have overlapped with Trump’s and that may have helped accelerate Sinophobic sentiment in the United States. Trump called China a “threat to the world” and advocated a hard economic line against the country, but even Biden has vowed to continue a tough stance. This includes an initiative that civil rights groups say opens the door to the racial profiling of Chinese American scientists by giving extra scrutiny to their tax records, visa applications and other documents. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this month that “China is our pacing threat.”

[In Trump’s vision, immigrants should be grateful and servile]

The news is full of paranoia about Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. Some Chinese American scientists have been wrongly charged on the assumption that they are spies. In 1999, scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to China and held, often in shackles, for nine months. In the end, the judge overseeing his case freed him, complaining that he’d suffered an abuse of government power. To be sure, spies from China, like those from all major powers, operate here. But research shows that innocent Asian Americans fall under suspicion because of their race or last names. (This is the same instinct behind the racial profiling that targets Black and Brown people.) In 2014, for instance, Sherry Chen was wrongly arrested on suspicion of espionage, charged and suspended from her job as an analyst at the National Weather Service. The charges were later dropped.

While it is ever-lurking, the prominence of anti-Asian bias in U.S. life is cyclical. Though Asian Americans are often cast as a success story because of their high average levels of education and income, many Americans, at times of economic stress and uncertainty over U.S. global standing, associate Asian faces with a foreign threat. In the 1980s, alarm that Japan would corner the affordable-car market led to Asian-bashing and increased hate crimes against Asian Americans, including the murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in 1982 by two White Detroit autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese. The supposed threat was captured by the 1993 movie “Rising Sun,” in which the Japanese villain ate sushi off the body of a naked White woman, recalling World War II propaganda that showed Japanese soldiers threatening White women with rape.

Anti-Asian bias extends beyond people of Chinese origin. Four of the six Asian women who were killed in Atlanta were of Korean origin, with the two others possibly of Chinese origin. Last March, two young children and their father were stabbed in a Sam’s Club in Midland, Tex., by a man who believed the victims, of Myanmar origin, were from China and responsible for spreading the coronavirus. Data from the Asian American Voter Survey shows that, last summer, more than half of all Asian Americans, regardless of national origin, worried about pandemic-related hate crimes, harassment and discrimination.

There is historical reason that Asian Americans feel targeted, scapegoated and vilified. In the late 1800s, the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively ended Chinese immigration, based on fears that these immigrants would pollute the nation with disease, immorality and foreign habits. The laws were the official expression of many years of anti-Chinese violence, including the 1871 massacre of 17 Chinese men in Los Angeles and the 1887 killing of as many as 34 Chinese miners in Deep Creek, Ore. During World War II, many Americans assumed that Japanese Americans were no different from the Japanese and therefore constituted a subversive threat; more than 120,000, many of them citizens, were interned. Thirty years later, Vietnamese refugees faced hostility, including racist attacks on Vietnamese fishermen by the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. After 9/11, heightened American fears about Muslims led to violence that targeted anybody who appeared to be Muslim, including the murder of Sikh American Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Ariz., whose killer identified him as a “towel head.” In 2012, a white supremacist killed six Sikh worshipers in Oak Creek, Wis.

[Books by immigrants, foreigners and minorities don’t diminish the ‘classic’ curriculum. They enhance it.]

Meanwhile, China emerged in the 1990s to replace Japan as a future competitor the United States must beware of. The “Chinagate” controversy involved alleged efforts by Chinese operatives, supposedly at the behest of the Chinese government, to influence the Clinton administration with donations. National Review turned to yellowface to depict Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore as “Manchurian candidates” with buck teeth, foreshadowing how quickly Americans might turn to anti-Chinese stereotypes under sufficient fear or pressure, as Trump did. China obviously does compete economically with the United States. But so does the European Union, which Democrats, Republicans and the press do not characterize as a threat.

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UMD Expert: Shootings Followed ‘Intensified Feeling of Anxiety’ in Asian American Communities
3/22/21

By Liam Farrell

A disturbing trend of increased discrimination and violence against Asians and Asian Americans hit a terrifying new level in the United States last week with the shooting deaths of eight people, including six Asian women, at three Georgia spas.

A University of Maryland study last year that surveyed more than 500 Chinese Americans nationwide found nearly half had been targeted by racist vitriol blaming them for the coronavirus pandemic. A separate investigation found anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police spiked 150% from 2019 to 2020 in the 16 of the largest U.S. cities even as overall hate crime reports fell 7%.

Janelle Wong headshot

Janelle Wong, professor of American studies and government and politics, and a faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program at UMD, spoke to Maryland Today after the mass shooting about the anxiety building in the Asian American community for the past year, how racial history is replaying and ways that the UMD community can help prevent future tragedies.

How were Asian and Asian American communities feeling before Tuesday’s events?
There’s definitely been an intensified feeling of anxiety as the pandemic has rolled on—survey results from AAPI Data, where I am a senior researcher, show substantial numbers of Asian Americans worrying about experiencing hate crimes, harassment and discrimination because of COVID-19. It was triggered to some extent by some U.S. leaders and elected officials calling the pandemic the “China virus” and the “kung flu” and people in our communities knowing there is a much longer history of Asian Americans being blamed for the introduction of disease to the United States. As part of the political justification for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent acts that severely restricted immigration from Asia, they were painted as vessels of diseases like smallpox and bubonic plague. There is this stereotype of Asian Americans as fundamentally foreign, that they have dual loyalties and that they bring unfamiliar foods and culture and possibly disease.

How do you put the shootings into context with the overall rise of anti-Asian discrimination?
The roots of the anxiety over belonging and fears of Asian American otherness we see today go back much further in history, really to the moment Asian Americans arrived on U.S. shores. We saw it not only in the 1880s, when Chinese immigrants were driven out of small towns across the Western U.S. by vigilante gangs and when Congress had to find reasons to justify restrictions on immigration and naturalization based on race, but again in World War II with the internment of Japanese Americans. In the 1970s, when Vietnamese refugees were attacked and vilified as a foreign threat even though they were here as the result of U.S. war-making. We saw it again after 9/11 with attacks on Sikhs and South Asian Americans who were assumed to be terrorists. These same ideas about Asian invaders, what scholars refer to as the “Yellow Peril” trope, are easily and consistently called up and activated in times of national insecurity, economic instability or the uncertainty and fear of a global pandemic.  

There are unanswered questions about whether the alleged shooter was motivated by racial animus or sexual frustrations. Meanwhile, some alleged assailants of Asian Americans over the past year are also people of color. Are we looking at multiple motivations, or does something tie all this together?
What happened in Atlanta was both racialized and gendered violence. It affected some of the most vulnerable people in our communities: They were economically vulnerable, working outside of their homes, during the pandemic, in close quarters. It’s important for a full understanding to see the intersection of their race and their gender and their economic status. In addition, the shooter’s religious views seem like a critical part of the story.

I don’t think that every attack on Asian Americans is necessarily racially motivated. I think some of the incidents we are seeing are street crimes that might be a function of economic conditions and a concentration of stressors that are related to the pandemic. We are also seeing that racial discrimination presents itself in different forms. There is attention to violence and bias directed toward Asian Americans at this moment, for good reason. But Asian Americans are certainly not alone in experiencing violence based on race. Asian Americans are among the least likely to face police brutality while Black Americans are among the most. And racism is not only experienced through physical violence.  The form that racial discrimination takes varies across groups.

There is a high possibility that the shooter was focused on those establishments due to both racialized and sexualized fantasies that are applied to Asian American women via media images and other kinds of popular culture. We can’t really look at this incident simply in terms of Asian Americans’ racial position in society. Instead, it presents an opportunity to examine the ways that the experience of racism depends on gender and economic status. Equally critical is to take this moment as an opportunity to better see how discrimination travels both through and across communities of color. We see anti-Asian bias in communities of color, and we see anti-Black attitudes in Asian American communities. One key to decreasing that discrimination is to focus on the historical and systematic drivers of discrimination: racial segregation in neighborhoods, schools and the workplace. We must confront with policy changes the systems that have contributed to a society for which one prominent feature is racial caste. That means supporting proactive ways to dismantle racial inequality, including affirmative action, redistricting to create less segregated schools, fundamental reconsideration of policing systems, and redirecting economic resources and wealth. 

How does the “model minority” stereotype of Asian Americans as wealthy, educated high achievers complicate the discussions of racial discrimination?
On the one hand, Asian Americans are not always included in discussions of racial discrimination, even though they face racism as non-whites in the U.S. On the other, Asian Americans do possess some important group advantages that are related to race. For example, that Asian Americans exhibit, on average—although not across every Asian national-origin group—the highest levels of income and education in the U.S. This is in part due to immigration laws that recruit highly educated immigrants to the U.S. from Asia (less than 10% of Chinese have a college degree, but more than 50% of Chinese American immigrants do!). Asian Americans face bias in terms of being seen as foreign and perhaps lacking aggressive leadership qualities, but we are also the only non-white group that is assumed via implicit bias to be super competent and smart. The latter, when held by teachers, can actually improve academic performance among Asian American students. This is a complex moment, and it highlights the complicated position of Asian Americans in the larger racial landscape. To spin things out a bit further, the idea that Asian Americans are uber-smart and hardworking, what you refer to as the model minority stereotype, also serves to cover over the economic and mental health struggles of many in our community and reinforces the idea that Asian Americans don’t face any challenges related to race. The tragedy of the shootings in Atlanta are a sad reminder of that false claim.

What can people in the UMD community do to help?
This is really a moment where we can reflect on the potential for solidarity across different groups. The kind of racial profiling and racial targeting that Asians are experiencing is different from. but still related to, the profiling and stigmatization that other racial groups face. The pain we as Asian Americans feel is pain that is felt by so many groups, including Indigenous, Black, Latinx and LGBT people, and members of religious minorities. In these horrific moments we can see one another and recognize that these shared experiences are something we need to confront together.

What the University of Maryland has is the potential to develop a deeper understanding among all students of race and racism in the United States. We have a robust set of courses to help students understand how we got here, where these stereotypes come from and why attending to race, gender, sexuality and other kinds of potential axes of marginalization is critical. 

Conference: "Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black"
University of Maryland, College Park
Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 8:00 AM to Saturday, October 20, 2018 - 7:00 PM

Join the first national conference of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative at UMD.

Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Caribbean Literature & Culture
Tuesday, March 28, 2017 - 10:45 AM

Join for a day long forum addressing "Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Caribbean Literature and Culture".

ARHU RECEIVES GRANT TO EMPOWER MIGRANT YOUTH THROUGH DIGITAL STORYTELLING

The Center for Synergy in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund “Home Stories,” a digital storytelling project that empowers migrant youth to create and share their stories with the wider public.

The award is part of NEH’s inaugural Humanities Access grants, which provide cultural programming to underserved groups and were awarded to 34 organizations. The grant is designed to encourage fundraising and sustainability of ongoing programming.

The project co-directors are Ana Patricia Rodríguez, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Sheri Parks, associate dean of research, interdisciplinary scholarship and programming and associate professor of American studies.

The project responds to the growing number of often-unaccompanied migrant youth who travel to the U.S.-Mexico border and eventually seek to reunite with families, relatives or friends who live in the long-standing Central American communities near the University of Maryland. These newcomers navigate multiple identities but rarely have the opportunity to reflect on or share these experiences. Despite the scale of youth migration to this area, there is little research or ethnographic work generated about or by these youth.

“We are living in a historical moment where there is an explosion in migration,” says Rodríguez.  “Digital storytelling is a way of uncovering these stories and making them accessible to a wider public, and it is something that anyone can learn.”

“Home Stories” extends the Center for Synergy’s ongoing Social Innovation Scholars Program into the public humanities. Through the project, undergraduate students at the University of Maryland will enroll in a multi-semester course with Rodríguez to learn about the migrant experience while collaborating with migrant youth from local middle and high schools to explore digital storytelling.  Digital stories are multimedia movies that combine voiceovers, video, sound and text to create a narrative. Both in and out of the classroom, they are a tool for not only developing technical skills, but also promoting self-reflection and critical thinking.

“The project is a way of connecting students who have the technological skills with migrant youth in communities who have important stories to tell,” says Rodríguez.  “Digital storytelling is a democratizing tool that allows these stories to be created and shared across communities.”

The project will work with youth in local schools that enroll large numbers of recently arrived migrant youth from Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean and culminates in a community screening of the filmed stories these youth produce, which will then be available on a public website.

“The humanities help us study our past, understand our present, and prepare for our future,” says NEH Chairman William D. Adams. “The National Endowment for the Humanities is proud to support projects that will benefit all Americans and remind us of our shared human experience.”

 

Image Credit:
Close up of Child Migrant Quilt Project (September 2014)
© Ana Rosa Ventura-Molina 2014

Transcribing African American History: Documenting the Road from Slavery to Freedom
Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building, Room 4213
Monday, November 14, 2016 - 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Learn about projects that seek to transcribe the Freedmen's Bureau Records, the richest source of information on the African American experience post-Civil War.

Kick Off: Digital Humanities African American History Culture Project_ Session 3
VIDEO: AADHum Kick Off, Session 3

A group discussion on possible research questions related to themes of migration, labor and visual culture.

Arts and Humanities Center for Synergy, College of Arts and Humanities, Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, David C. Driskell Center
WORLDWISE: Arts & Humanities Dean's Lecture Series: Claudia Rankine in conversation with Sheri Parks
Thursday, September 29, 2016 - 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Award-winning poet Claudia Rankine discusses art in the making of American democracy.

UNIVERSITY SEED GRANT TO FUND ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY

A total $34,000 awarded by the university to Jorge Bravo, assistant professor of classics in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), will help fund efforts to continue archeological exploration of the ancient Greek port of Kenchreai.

Bravo will travel to Greece in the summer to conduct preliminary investigations in new areas of Kenchreai, the eastern port of ancient Corinth. The work is the first part of Bravo’s larger plan to seek permits from the Greek government for further excavation and to secure future grants.

Funding, which is being provided by the Division of Research, ARHU and the Department of Classics, will help to pay for soil coring and GIS modeling of the harbor. The university’s support will also help sustain a field school for undergraduate and graduate students to continue to explore ancient Greek culture, a program he helped develop with an earlier $5,000 seed grant from ARHU.

Bravo said that the coring work will help researchers define what the environment was like for the area’s settlers and how they interacted with it as it changed over time. A geophysical survey using ground-penetrating radar and other methods will also help give researchers an idea of what lies beneath the earth’s surface. Corinth was a thriving commercial area from as early as about 700 B.C. through the Roman Empire to around 500 A.D., but as Bravo explained, the port was forced to move during that time as the environment changed.

“The general suspicion is that it was a process of silting up of the harbor over time,” Bravo said.

Bravo co-directs the Kenchreai Excavations along with Joseph L. Rife, associate professor of classics and anthropology at Vanderbilt University.  The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. also supports the project.

Kenchreai was first explored by American archeologists in the 1960s.  Bravo said that he became interested in the site after collaborating with others who had also worked in the area. Funding will help build collaborations between the university’s departments of geography, anthropology, history, classics and others.

“It’s really building collaborations between the humanities and the other schools,” Bravo said.

In addition to the new seaside excavation work, he said, students attending the four-week field school will also have the opportunity to explore remains believed to have served as an ancient residence and warehouse, nearby Roman tombs and other sites and museums in the region.

For more information about the field school in Greece and how to apply, visit:  http://globalmaryland.umd.edu/offices/education-abroad/program/11005. 

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