WEBVTT 00:00:00.170 --> 00:00:03.966 Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the 00:00:03.988 --> 00:00:07.758 Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number 00:00:07.764 --> 00:00:10.926 of amazing people and simply had a conversation about the subject of 00:00:10.948 --> 00:00:14.766 inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a 00:00:14.788 --> 00:00:18.638 better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the 00:00:18.644 --> 00:00:22.494 future, then please do drop me a line to Joe dot Lockwood at 00:00:22.494 --> 00:00:25.996 seechangehappen.co.uk that's SEE Change Happen dot 00:00:25.996 --> 00:00:29.798 co dot uk. You can catch up with 00:00:29.804 --> 00:00:33.234 all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. 00:00:33.282 --> 00:00:36.886 So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf 00:00:36.908 --> 00:00:39.020 and let's get going. Today 00:00:40.590 --> 00:00:44.266 is Episode 79 with the title 00:00:44.288 --> 00:00:47.770 Humanising Arabs and Muslims, and 00:00:48.430 --> 00:00:52.254 I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Evelyn Alsultany. 00:00:52.292 --> 00:00:56.090 Evelyn describes herself as a professor, author 00:00:56.170 --> 00:00:59.882 and leading expert on the history of representations of 00:00:59.946 --> 00:01:03.140 Arabs Muslims in the US media. When 00:01:03.670 --> 00:01:07.346 I asked Evelyn to describe her superpower, she said that she has a warm 00:01:07.368 --> 00:01:11.058 personality and see makes others feel included. 00:01:11.144 --> 00:01:14.146 Hello, Evelyn, welcome to the show. 00:01:15.032 --> 00:01:17.620 Hi, Joanne. Thanks so much for having me. 00:01:18.410 --> 00:01:21.910 Pleasure. So, Evelyn, we were chatting in the green room before we 00:01:21.980 --> 00:01:25.602 gone live, the title Humanising 00:01:25.666 --> 00:01:29.160 Arabs and Muslims. Tell me more about that. 00:01:30.730 --> 00:01:34.506 So, Joanne, when you asked me what my superpower was, I was stumped on 00:01:34.528 --> 00:01:38.186 that question and I reached out to two friends and one of them 00:01:38.208 --> 00:01:41.450 said, your superpower is Humanising, Arabs and Muslims. 00:01:41.530 --> 00:01:45.246 And the unfortunate part of 00:01:45.268 --> 00:01:48.750 this equation is that humanising is necessary 00:01:49.730 --> 00:01:53.318 because Arabs and Muslims have been dehumanised 00:01:53.514 --> 00:01:57.038 for so long in media representations, 00:01:57.214 --> 00:02:01.010 in government policies, in politician speeches. 00:02:01.590 --> 00:02:04.754 Many people think it started around 911, it intensified after 00:02:04.792 --> 00:02:06.120 911, but 00:02:08.410 --> 00:02:10.840 at least in the US, it's been part of 00:02:11.930 --> 00:02:15.160 US media representations for over 100 years. 00:02:15.530 --> 00:02:19.100 And so part of my mission is to 00:02:19.630 --> 00:02:22.986 both Humanise Arabs and Muslims, but also to study the 00:02:23.008 --> 00:02:26.220 processes of dehumanisation. How does that even happen? 00:02:26.590 --> 00:02:30.234 And it happens to so many different communities in different ways. 00:02:30.352 --> 00:02:34.186 So, in my case, I have been studying Arabs 00:02:34.218 --> 00:02:38.046 and Muslims for over 20 years. Have they been represented in the media? Have 00:02:38.068 --> 00:02:41.598 they been dehumanised? What are processes through which they can be 00:02:41.684 --> 00:02:45.042 included? What are efforts out there that seek to 00:02:45.176 --> 00:02:48.750 create more diverse and inclusive possibilities 00:02:48.910 --> 00:02:52.674 for Arabs and Muslims? So you use the word 00:02:52.712 --> 00:02:56.342 dehumanise a couple of times and 00:02:56.476 --> 00:03:00.134 we look at examples throughout history. As soon as we 00:03:00.172 --> 00:03:03.746 remove the humanity, as soon as we remove someone's 00:03:03.778 --> 00:03:06.726 identity like that, we treat them as 00:03:06.908 --> 00:03:10.694 subhuman, not human I e dehumanise, then 00:03:10.732 --> 00:03:13.640 it gives us permission to treat people 00:03:14.250 --> 00:03:17.686 without without any respect. And that's what we're talking about here, isn't 00:03:17.718 --> 00:03:21.022 it? That's exactly what we're talking about. When we 00:03:21.076 --> 00:03:24.350 dehumanise people, it allows us to justify 00:03:24.770 --> 00:03:28.586 not giving those people rights, not treating them with respect 00:03:28.618 --> 00:03:32.278 and dignity. In the case of Arabs and Muslims, it includes 00:03:32.394 --> 00:03:36.050 justifying going to war in Muslim majority countries 00:03:36.550 --> 00:03:40.286 after 911 that included Afghanistan and Iraq. 00:03:40.478 --> 00:03:43.966 And Iraq actually had nothing to do with 911, 00:03:44.078 --> 00:03:47.922 but it led to over 150,000 Iraqi civilians 00:03:47.986 --> 00:03:51.480 being killed. So I often think what made that possible 00:03:51.930 --> 00:03:55.766 for the United States to go to war with a 00:03:55.788 --> 00:03:59.434 country on the guise of 911 when there was 00:03:59.472 --> 00:04:02.458 no connection to that, and to lead to such 00:04:02.624 --> 00:04:06.470 devastating outcomes that have such tremendous 00:04:06.630 --> 00:04:09.962 impact on human life? So dehumanisation is 00:04:10.016 --> 00:04:13.694 necessary. And it's not to say that the whole American public was 00:04:13.732 --> 00:04:17.310 in favour of it. It was a very contentious moment. Some were in favour, 00:04:17.380 --> 00:04:20.654 some weren't. But dehumanising is 00:04:20.692 --> 00:04:24.434 necessary to construct an enemy or to construct groups of 00:04:24.472 --> 00:04:27.650 people as not worthy of the same 00:04:27.800 --> 00:04:30.580 rights as the dominant group. 00:04:31.590 --> 00:04:35.306 I suppose it's the same logic as when we think about animal welfare, 00:04:35.358 --> 00:04:39.190 because they're not humans, we have permission to eat them, to kill them, 00:04:39.260 --> 00:04:42.200 to not care about them. And 00:04:43.050 --> 00:04:46.454 dehumanisation is effectively treating people as 00:04:46.572 --> 00:04:49.894 animals or not having the same sentient 00:04:49.942 --> 00:04:53.126 rights. I run unconscious bias 00:04:53.238 --> 00:04:56.826 privileged workshops. I hate the word unconscious bias. It doesn't work for me. 00:04:56.848 --> 00:05:00.546 But that's what people tend to refer it to as. And one of the 00:05:00.588 --> 00:05:04.090 examples I use is I ask people to come up with words and phrases 00:05:04.690 --> 00:05:08.314 that you hear in the media, in the ether, that you're kind of pervasive 00:05:08.362 --> 00:05:12.174 about different people. And one of the questions I asked to come up with 00:05:12.212 --> 00:05:15.714 words associated with Muslims, and 00:05:15.832 --> 00:05:19.394 not one of them has ever come back and said, the 00:05:19.432 --> 00:05:22.820 person next door not my friend. 00:05:23.350 --> 00:05:26.726 They always create this picture of someone 00:05:26.828 --> 00:05:30.360 firing a semiautomatic machine gun in the air, 00:05:30.730 --> 00:05:34.150 firing bullets, chanting, wearing 00:05:34.490 --> 00:05:37.878 a turban or a hat, living in the desert in a tent. These are the 00:05:37.884 --> 00:05:41.674 words they come out with. Not once if someone said, 00:05:41.712 --> 00:05:44.620 the person next door or anybody 00:05:45.630 --> 00:05:49.180 that you know, or my friend in the room here. 00:05:50.030 --> 00:05:53.694 So that's what's? That we've been bombarded with that stuff all the time, 00:05:53.732 --> 00:05:57.486 aren't we? We have been bombarded. There is 00:05:57.668 --> 00:06:01.098 a book by the late scholar Jack Shaheen 00:06:01.194 --> 00:06:04.922 about representations of Arabs in the history of Hollywood, 00:06:04.986 --> 00:06:08.706 and Arabs and Muslim identities have been coproduced as one and the same. And 00:06:08.728 --> 00:06:12.450 right now we're finally in the process of disentangling and trying to explain 00:06:12.520 --> 00:06:16.338 to the public that Muslims, that is a religious identity, it 00:06:16.344 --> 00:06:19.766 is a very diverse group of people, and approximately 15 or 00:06:19.788 --> 00:06:23.314 20% of Muslims are actually Arab. But we have this Arab, Middle Eastern 00:06:23.362 --> 00:06:27.062 Muslim construction that has come out of a history 00:06:27.116 --> 00:06:30.694 of filmmaking. So Jackson, he wrote a book called Real Bad Arabs how 00:06:30.732 --> 00:06:34.294 Hollywood Vilifies a People. And he looked at 100 years of filmmaking 00:06:34.342 --> 00:06:38.154 starting in the early 19 hundreds. He looks at almost 00:06:38.192 --> 00:06:41.658 a thousand movies and he said, out of the thousand movies that represent Arabs, 00:06:41.754 --> 00:06:45.306 52 are even handed and twelve are positive. 00:06:45.498 --> 00:06:49.034 So by the time we get to 911, we've been consuming Hollywood 00:06:49.082 --> 00:06:52.766 movies that have been demonising Arabs for a very, 00:06:52.788 --> 00:06:56.418 very long time. And in terms of the exercise that you do in 00:06:56.504 --> 00:06:59.954 your trainings, arab, Muslim, Middle 00:06:59.992 --> 00:07:03.746 Eastern, this identity category has been constructed as a threat to 00:07:03.768 --> 00:07:07.446 national security. They're unamerican. They are a 00:07:07.468 --> 00:07:10.546 threat to us. They're fanatics, they're anti 00:07:10.578 --> 00:07:14.230 Semitic, they oppress their women. So 00:07:14.300 --> 00:07:17.974 we have this picture of who Muslims are. 00:07:18.012 --> 00:07:21.562 They're almost 2 billion Muslims in the world. And according to this 00:07:21.616 --> 00:07:25.386 logic, 2 billion Muslims means that 00:07:25.408 --> 00:07:29.114 25% of the world's population is Muslim. So that means 00:07:29.152 --> 00:07:32.974 that 25% of the world's population would fall under this kind of 00:07:33.012 --> 00:07:36.494 descriptor. And some studies of the 00:07:36.532 --> 00:07:40.286 news news reporting have shown there was 00:07:40.308 --> 00:07:44.026 one study about the New York Times and how Muslims 00:07:44.058 --> 00:07:47.282 were reported in the New York Times in the in the early 00:07:47.336 --> 00:07:51.170 2000s that showed that whenever there was a terrorist attack committed by 00:07:51.240 --> 00:07:54.910 a Muslim that it was described in a way in which 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:58.374 all Muslims bear collective responsibility. So we are all 00:07:58.412 --> 00:08:01.634 responsible for an individual's 00:08:01.682 --> 00:08:05.334 action. There's another study that 00:08:05.372 --> 00:08:08.870 showed the more media that we consume that show 00:08:08.940 --> 00:08:12.300 Muslims enacting violence, the more likely we are to support 00:08:12.830 --> 00:08:16.566 war in Muslim majority countries and policies that restrict Muslim 00:08:16.598 --> 00:08:19.580 civil liberties. So a lot of my work has been on the media 00:08:20.210 --> 00:08:23.200 to try to understand how this 00:08:24.130 --> 00:08:27.518 institution that's so powerful, even though it's not making 00:08:27.604 --> 00:08:31.134 policies, can be so influential in terms 00:08:31.172 --> 00:08:34.846 of, well, what do we see about Muslims in the media? What do we know 00:08:34.868 --> 00:08:38.658 about them? If we have this era of Muslim Middle Eastern conflation, what 00:08:38.664 --> 00:08:41.698 do we know about the Middle East? What are the stories we're getting? And a 00:08:41.704 --> 00:08:45.262 lot of the stories are about have been historically about 00:08:45.336 --> 00:08:48.326 terrorism, about rich oil chic's are going to threaten the 00:08:48.348 --> 00:08:52.006 economy, about Oppressed veiled women. 00:08:52.188 --> 00:08:55.922 And so we have a very limited number of stories 00:08:55.986 --> 00:08:59.274 that we have been consuming repeatedly for a very long 00:08:59.312 --> 00:08:59.900 time. 00:09:02.830 --> 00:09:06.538 I'm not intending to take the spotlight off of wisdoms and 00:09:06.544 --> 00:09:09.260 Arabs here, but we look at the media. 00:09:10.670 --> 00:09:14.474 It wants to create good and bad, doesn't it? That's what sells clicks, 00:09:14.602 --> 00:09:18.366 polarisation. Since the early movies, we've had a good person and 00:09:18.388 --> 00:09:21.934 a bad person having a fight. And you look at 00:09:21.972 --> 00:09:25.810 early, okay, some of it was Charlie Chaplin. Some of that was kind of 00:09:25.880 --> 00:09:28.594 fairly sort of innocence, but it quickly moved on to 00:09:28.792 --> 00:09:31.810 Westerns cowboys and Indians. 00:09:32.390 --> 00:09:35.794 White is good, native, indigenous 00:09:35.922 --> 00:09:39.330 American people, bad, savages, 00:09:39.490 --> 00:09:43.286 decency, all those sort of then that played out in the 00:09:43.308 --> 00:09:46.278 Allies and Nazis, the kind of Tommy's and 00:09:46.284 --> 00:09:50.006 Jerry's, east and West, Cold 00:09:50.038 --> 00:09:53.738 War, Soviets versus America. We 00:09:53.744 --> 00:09:57.562 had good and bad, didn't we? And 00:09:57.616 --> 00:10:01.214 Muslims and Arabs are fitting into that same narrative. Good and 00:10:01.252 --> 00:10:04.960 bad, white is good, everybody else is bad. 00:10:06.210 --> 00:10:09.530 Dehumanised, as you say, savages painted, 00:10:09.610 --> 00:10:13.166 painted in a bad light. And that's not just in the US. It's 00:10:13.198 --> 00:10:16.722 across certainly the English speaking Western world and probably 00:10:16.776 --> 00:10:20.546 throughout Europe as well. Yes, the good 00:10:20.568 --> 00:10:23.970 guy and the bad guy. It is a very 00:10:24.040 --> 00:10:26.840 common theme. What's interesting 00:10:27.530 --> 00:10:31.074 recently is that Hollywood has started creating 00:10:31.122 --> 00:10:34.534 more complex portrayals. And 00:10:34.572 --> 00:10:38.314 so after 911, when it came to 00:10:38.512 --> 00:10:42.342 Arabs and Muslims, we start seeing terrorist 00:10:42.406 --> 00:10:46.074 storylines that instead of this one dimensional terrorist bad 00:10:46.112 --> 00:10:49.802 guy, where I think about movies like True 00:10:49.856 --> 00:10:53.214 Lies that Arnold Schwarzenegger was in in the 1990s, 00:10:53.252 --> 00:10:56.990 or the siege with Denzel Washington 00:10:57.970 --> 00:11:01.786 that portray Arab Muslims as terrorists, when the bad guy dies, 00:11:01.818 --> 00:11:05.598 you celebrate in the audience. You're applauding. It's a good thing. Yeah, I get 00:11:05.604 --> 00:11:08.802 to get the bad guy. Get the bad arab. But more 00:11:08.856 --> 00:11:12.546 recently, writers and producers have been trying to 00:11:12.728 --> 00:11:16.434 create more complicated characters. So we have Arab 00:11:16.482 --> 00:11:20.274 Muslim characters who are terrorists, who are given an elaborate 00:11:20.322 --> 00:11:23.480 backstory, as if it's supposed to 00:11:24.090 --> 00:11:27.926 compensate for this long history. So one example that comes 00:11:27.948 --> 00:11:31.606 to my mind is Jack Ryan on Amazon 00:11:31.638 --> 00:11:35.242 Prime during season one, there was an Arab Muslim bad 00:11:35.296 --> 00:11:39.066 guy. And we learned that when he was a child in an 00:11:39.088 --> 00:11:42.886 Arab country, I think it was in Syria that the US. Sent drone 00:11:42.918 --> 00:11:46.622 strikes and killed his family. So he grew up without his family. 00:11:46.756 --> 00:11:50.414 That did not make him a terrorist. He moved to France and he was very 00:11:50.452 --> 00:11:54.046 educated and smart, and he couldn't get a job because of anti Arab and 00:11:54.068 --> 00:11:57.666 antimuslim racism. And that didn't turn him into a terrorist. But then he 00:11:57.688 --> 00:12:01.534 ended up going to jail. And while he was in jail, he converted to Islam 00:12:01.582 --> 00:12:05.090 and became actually he was Muslim, but he reconnected to his 00:12:05.160 --> 00:12:08.518 Muslim identity in a whole new way. Exactly. 00:12:08.684 --> 00:12:11.842 He became radicalised. So we have these complicated 00:12:11.906 --> 00:12:15.702 backstories, and then the question is, is this helping? Okay, 00:12:15.756 --> 00:12:19.494 it's better than the one dimensional. You're getting some kind of backstory, 00:12:19.622 --> 00:12:23.034 but you're still having a story about Arabs and Muslims as 00:12:23.072 --> 00:12:26.554 terrorists. And the other development after 911 was the 00:12:26.592 --> 00:12:30.426 patriotic Arab or Muslim Americans, which would be a 00:12:30.448 --> 00:12:34.270 character who works for the CIA or the FBI, who's helping the United 00:12:34.340 --> 00:12:38.122 States fight against terrorism. And in this Jack Ryan episode, 00:12:38.266 --> 00:12:41.440 there is a black Muslim CIA agent 00:12:41.970 --> 00:12:45.460 who's he's part of the CIA team, and he is 00:12:45.830 --> 00:12:49.342 there to counteract the Muslim 00:12:49.406 --> 00:12:53.074 terrorists to show that there are patriotic ones, too. And in my 00:12:53.112 --> 00:12:56.746 research, what I found is that even though it seems positive 00:12:56.798 --> 00:13:00.578 and yes, it's better that it's still a very limited 00:13:00.754 --> 00:13:04.246 imagining of who Muslims can be. So you can be 00:13:04.268 --> 00:13:08.018 good in the context of terrorism if you are pro 00:13:08.204 --> 00:13:11.770 US policies, if you work for government agencies, 00:13:12.110 --> 00:13:14.620 but then what if you're just a person? 00:13:16.510 --> 00:13:20.140 Yeah, the news the other week about 00:13:20.610 --> 00:13:24.426 there were a number of people executed in Saudi 00:13:24.458 --> 00:13:27.886 in one day or something, and there was a big story. 00:13:27.988 --> 00:13:31.614 But it's not the same story when the 00:13:31.652 --> 00:13:35.300 US. Are executing people in prisons day in, day out. 00:13:36.870 --> 00:13:38.660 Well, that's all right. They're bad people. 00:13:40.310 --> 00:13:43.826 Again, it's that dual standard that dual narrative, isn't it? 00:13:43.928 --> 00:13:47.320 It really is. I think that's a great example 00:13:47.770 --> 00:13:51.334 that we have the best death penalty in the US, 00:13:51.452 --> 00:13:55.234 but it's not headline news around the world. Look at these barbaric Americans 00:13:55.282 --> 00:13:58.566 killing people. But in other countries, that practise the death 00:13:58.598 --> 00:14:02.426 penalty. It's a symbol. It symbolises how barbaric they 00:14:02.448 --> 00:14:06.134 are, how undemocratic they are. Guantanamo 00:14:06.182 --> 00:14:08.410 Bay was a travesty. 00:14:09.630 --> 00:14:13.230 It's such a travesty. It had to be offshored into a different country 00:14:13.300 --> 00:14:17.102 to make it palatable, to protect 00:14:17.156 --> 00:14:20.942 the world from terrorists. And 00:14:20.996 --> 00:14:24.706 yet my understanding is that many, many people who are 00:14:24.728 --> 00:14:28.494 held there have been released after many years with no evidence, 00:14:28.542 --> 00:14:32.114 no change, no trial, no nothing, just for 00:14:32.152 --> 00:14:35.458 maybe being Arab or Muslim in the wrong place. 00:14:35.624 --> 00:14:38.854 Exactly. Held for years, bites destroyed, no 00:14:38.892 --> 00:14:42.502 charges. And then the question is, what makes that possible? How is it 00:14:42.556 --> 00:14:45.526 possible? So it's all of this messaging, all of the 00:14:45.548 --> 00:14:49.346 dehumanisation, because the idea is, well, they're Muslim 00:14:49.378 --> 00:14:53.162 men, so if they're not guilty of terrorism, they must be guilty of something else. 00:14:53.216 --> 00:14:56.938 Whether it's oppressing women or being anti American or anti Semitic, they 00:14:56.944 --> 00:15:00.718 must be guilty of something, even if it's not 00:15:00.884 --> 00:15:04.080 what they are purportedly being held for. 00:15:04.610 --> 00:15:06.800 I was reading something the other day, I think it was 00:15:08.530 --> 00:15:10.830 no, it was on the radio. It was George Takai 00:15:11.810 --> 00:15:15.314 of Star Trek Fame. Sulu and Star 00:15:15.352 --> 00:15:18.994 Trek. He was talking about how he was a 00:15:19.032 --> 00:15:22.626 young American at the time of 00:15:22.648 --> 00:15:25.986 Pearl Harbour, and his entire communities 00:15:26.178 --> 00:15:30.022 around him were rounded up because they had 00:15:30.076 --> 00:15:33.686 Japanese descent. And again, they were dehumanised. So 00:15:33.788 --> 00:15:37.240 they were shipped off to concentration camps, effectively within the US 00:15:37.790 --> 00:15:41.462 and just purely because they had Japanese heritage. 00:15:41.606 --> 00:15:44.330 And the white people got scared. 00:15:45.790 --> 00:15:49.482 It's very similar. Kind of rounding up. Yes. After 00:15:49.536 --> 00:15:53.134 911, many people said, we're at this new moment, we're not 00:15:53.172 --> 00:15:56.890 rounding up all Arabs and Muslims like we did with Japanese Americans. 00:15:56.970 --> 00:16:00.714 We're enlightened, we've change. But it seemed 00:16:00.762 --> 00:16:04.306 that the technology had change because you could surveil people 00:16:04.488 --> 00:16:08.066 more easily. And then there were instances like the 00:16:08.088 --> 00:16:10.500 Guantanamo Bay one that you mentioned, where 00:16:12.070 --> 00:16:15.106 people were picked up and locked up 00:16:15.208 --> 00:16:18.530 indefinitely for years and years. So it wasn't 00:16:18.610 --> 00:16:22.294 everybody in the way that it was for Japanese Americans during World War 00:16:22.332 --> 00:16:25.782 II, but the idea that we had 00:16:25.916 --> 00:16:29.562 evolved and we weren't doing that anymore because we were a better 00:16:29.616 --> 00:16:30.220 country, 00:16:33.150 --> 00:16:36.630 I'm not buying that. With Abu Grey prison 00:16:36.710 --> 00:16:40.474 and the USA Patriot Act and these wars that have killed 00:16:40.522 --> 00:16:43.774 countless numbers of people, so much death, so much 00:16:43.812 --> 00:16:47.550 destruction, but a lot of it 00:16:47.620 --> 00:16:51.466 was made possible through some quote 00:16:51.498 --> 00:16:55.074 unquote positive images of Arabs and Muslims. There were a lot 00:16:55.112 --> 00:16:58.354 of TV shows after 911 that had the feeling of 00:16:58.392 --> 00:17:02.066 remorse. We're so sorry that we have 00:17:02.088 --> 00:17:05.602 to discriminate, we're against racial profiling, but given 00:17:05.656 --> 00:17:09.366 the emergency we're in, given the national security crisis, we 00:17:09.388 --> 00:17:13.126 don't want to racially profile, but we have to. So there were 00:17:13.148 --> 00:17:16.902 narratives like, we are against torture. We're the United States. We're against 00:17:16.956 --> 00:17:20.586 torture. But because of the state of national security 00:17:20.768 --> 00:17:24.346 that we're in, we have no choice. So there was a particular kind of 00:17:24.368 --> 00:17:28.074 logic that was saying, that's not us, but we have no 00:17:28.112 --> 00:17:30.490 choice. We're going to enact 00:17:32.210 --> 00:17:35.390 racist, violent policies 00:17:36.050 --> 00:17:39.806 because it has to be justified under the emergency situation that we're 00:17:39.828 --> 00:17:40.400 in. 00:17:43.730 --> 00:17:47.346 A couple of years ago. So, 2020, we had the murder of 00:17:47.368 --> 00:17:50.450 George Floyd and the big Black Lives Matter 00:17:50.520 --> 00:17:53.666 movement. Lots of 00:17:53.688 --> 00:17:57.426 outcry, lots of public trial, the 00:17:57.448 --> 00:18:00.706 police officer that murdered him, lots of 00:18:00.728 --> 00:18:04.306 shakara shows that it still ingrained 00:18:04.338 --> 00:18:08.186 racism in much of the US and in many states. It hasn't changed much 00:18:08.208 --> 00:18:11.834 since the 50s or 40s. Has 00:18:11.872 --> 00:18:15.594 the Muslim Arab community benefited at 00:18:15.632 --> 00:18:19.434 all from this? Or is it Black 00:18:19.472 --> 00:18:23.102 Lives Matter, but not Brown Lives? I do 00:18:23.156 --> 00:18:25.360 think Muslims have benefited. So 00:18:26.930 --> 00:18:30.106 I've written a book called Broken the Failed Promise of Muslim 00:18:30.138 --> 00:18:33.886 Inclusion that looks at how Muslims have come to be included 00:18:33.918 --> 00:18:37.762 in diversity politics. And one of the ways 00:18:37.816 --> 00:18:41.394 that it has become possible is through a recognition of 00:18:41.432 --> 00:18:45.122 Islamophobia as a problem. So even though Islamophobia is old, 00:18:45.176 --> 00:18:48.866 very old, so in the UK, apparently 00:18:48.978 --> 00:18:52.626 it was recognised in the late 1990s because the running Mead 00:18:52.658 --> 00:18:56.278 Trust wrote a report on Islamophobia. And then 00:18:56.364 --> 00:19:00.106 this idea of Islamophobia became part of the lexicon in the UK. From 00:19:00.128 --> 00:19:03.966 my understanding in the US, we didn't start using Islamophobia till around 2010. 00:19:03.968 --> 00:19:07.130 And it's around that time 00:19:07.200 --> 00:19:10.558 that diversity, equity, inclusion language is on the 00:19:10.564 --> 00:19:14.240 rise. George Floyd from a few years ago. 00:19:15.010 --> 00:19:18.590 Oscar so white controversy. And 00:19:18.660 --> 00:19:21.150 I think Donald Trump's presidency 00:19:22.130 --> 00:19:25.138 led to a reaction from people that was 00:19:25.224 --> 00:19:29.026 unprecedented that people saw. It 00:19:29.048 --> 00:19:32.846 seems to me that people don't act unless discrimination is explicit 00:19:32.878 --> 00:19:36.726 and in your face. So even though we know that we 00:19:36.748 --> 00:19:39.782 are in a society that has been constructed to 00:19:39.836 --> 00:19:43.522 privilege white, male, cisgender, 00:19:43.586 --> 00:19:47.186 heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, et 00:19:47.218 --> 00:19:50.694 cetera, we only act when we see something 00:19:50.732 --> 00:19:54.474 horrific happen. And so I think I've been thinking 00:19:54.512 --> 00:19:57.980 about George Floyd. Like, George Floyd led to 00:19:58.510 --> 00:20:02.302 some changes. Like, finally, I don't have to see Aunt Jemima in the grocery store 00:20:02.356 --> 00:20:05.694 or Uncle Ben. Finally, the 00:20:05.812 --> 00:20:09.514 Washington Redskins changed their name, even though it was decades 00:20:09.562 --> 00:20:13.310 of people protesting it. So I've had moments like, why now? What change? 00:20:13.380 --> 00:20:16.942 We've seen many black people be killed on television, 00:20:17.006 --> 00:20:20.034 recorded. But it was this that led to 00:20:20.072 --> 00:20:23.566 unprecedented response and change. And I think it's because of Donald 00:20:23.598 --> 00:20:27.110 Trump that he represented this explicit, 00:20:27.450 --> 00:20:31.286 in your face discrimination, and it led people to 00:20:31.388 --> 00:20:34.854 want to do something about it. So Muslims have benefited from a 00:20:34.892 --> 00:20:38.166 whirlwind of different events coming together, from recognising 00:20:38.198 --> 00:20:41.686 Islamophobia to George Floyd to Donald Trump saying, Muslim 00:20:41.718 --> 00:20:45.558 ban. Oscar So White the rise 00:20:45.574 --> 00:20:49.226 of diversity, which I see also as the 00:20:49.248 --> 00:20:52.906 fall of affirmative action and diversity, inclusion, equity, 00:20:52.938 --> 00:20:56.554 inclusion, coming to replace that. And I think diversity, 00:20:56.602 --> 00:21:00.282 equity, inclusion, on the one hand, allows for groups 00:21:00.346 --> 00:21:03.842 who are not part of affirmative action to be included, whether 00:21:03.896 --> 00:21:07.346 it's Muslim, LGBTQ, people who are 00:21:07.368 --> 00:21:10.674 disabled, so it widens the 00:21:10.712 --> 00:21:14.466 possibilities of inclusion, but at the same time, it 00:21:14.488 --> 00:21:18.166 could also be further divorced from 00:21:18.268 --> 00:21:21.106 a social justice or restorative justice 00:21:21.218 --> 00:21:24.662 objective. So a lot of what I've been thinking 00:21:24.716 --> 00:21:28.406 about is what are the limits and possibilities of the diversity 00:21:28.438 --> 00:21:29.980 work that we are doing today? 00:21:32.270 --> 00:21:36.090 I agree that Trump certainly catalysed 00:21:37.710 --> 00:21:41.374 not only his supporters, but also his anti supporters, the people 00:21:41.412 --> 00:21:44.080 who are seeing what's going on. But 00:21:45.330 --> 00:21:49.006 that era of Trump spread across Europe, it spread into the UK. We 00:21:49.028 --> 00:21:52.400 ended up with our government being a bit more, 00:21:52.930 --> 00:21:56.290 a lot more right wing. We've seen that rise of that right wing 00:21:56.870 --> 00:22:00.562 anti wokeness all the way across Europe and other parts of the country, 00:22:00.616 --> 00:22:04.020 brazil and lots of other countries. It's rising up. 00:22:05.610 --> 00:22:08.966 Trumpism hasn't gone away, has it? It's still there. I 00:22:08.988 --> 00:22:12.150 mean, Bites didn't win a landslide. 00:22:13.370 --> 00:22:17.158 It was fighting to the last couple of states. And was 00:22:17.164 --> 00:22:20.140 it the Florida governor? Is it DeSantos? Correct. 00:22:20.590 --> 00:22:24.022 He's talking about banning EDI 00:22:24.086 --> 00:22:27.834 training in all government institutions, defunding it, basically, to try and 00:22:27.872 --> 00:22:28.940 stamp it out. 00:22:31.710 --> 00:22:35.306 Critical race theory is what he calls it, isn't it? Trying to stamp out critical 00:22:35.338 --> 00:22:39.166 race theory, ban the word intersectionality, this kind 00:22:39.188 --> 00:22:42.990 of phraseology. So the world's not safe yet, is it? 00:22:43.140 --> 00:22:46.946 We haven't woken up and gone, we've escaped, we're still right in 00:22:46.968 --> 00:22:50.114 it. Yeah, we are not. No, we are not 00:22:50.152 --> 00:22:53.970 safe. I do think we're in a different moment than we have 00:22:54.040 --> 00:22:57.138 ever been in terms of 00:22:57.224 --> 00:23:00.678 inclusion, and I think that's been made possible through these moments of 00:23:00.684 --> 00:23:04.326 crisis where people respond. In my book, I call it 00:23:04.348 --> 00:23:08.110 crisis diversity, where there's an event, let's say Muslim ban. 00:23:08.290 --> 00:23:11.894 And again, what's interesting to me is we had the USA 00:23:11.942 --> 00:23:15.674 Patriot Act, we had special registration war in Iraq, war 00:23:15.712 --> 00:23:19.174 in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay prison. But Muslim 00:23:19.222 --> 00:23:22.762 ban led to an unprecedented response. It's not to say that people 00:23:22.816 --> 00:23:26.638 didn't react, respond, protest, those other things, but it was in a 00:23:26.644 --> 00:23:30.254 level that I've never witnessed before, and I do think it was because of 00:23:30.372 --> 00:23:34.010 Donald Trump, but it led to corporations 00:23:34.090 --> 00:23:37.746 issuing statements, universities, including Muslims, and 00:23:37.768 --> 00:23:41.426 diversity plans. All of us who do work, and I actually wanted to ask you 00:23:41.448 --> 00:23:45.122 about this around crisis diversity, that something happens and then 00:23:45.176 --> 00:23:48.258 those of us who do work in the area we're called upon, we have to 00:23:48.264 --> 00:23:52.114 give lectures and we're happy to do it, but it's exhausting. All of a sudden, 00:23:52.162 --> 00:23:55.478 there's interest in this thing that we've been working on for a very long time. 00:23:55.644 --> 00:23:58.934 The crisis passes and then things get quiet and 00:23:58.972 --> 00:24:02.714 then the next crisis comes along and then 00:24:02.752 --> 00:24:06.074 your phone's ringing off the hook again. And I was wondering if you experience that 00:24:06.112 --> 00:24:09.340 as well. If there's like, an event, for sure. 00:24:11.810 --> 00:24:15.022 There'S a term that we would often use in the DNI space around 00:24:15.076 --> 00:24:18.782 performative. So, as you say, 00:24:18.836 --> 00:24:22.510 this crisis diversity, this reaction, the Black Lives Matter, 00:24:22.580 --> 00:24:26.362 we had the rape, murder and kidnapping and rape, 00:24:26.426 --> 00:24:30.158 murder and kidnap of a young woman in this country by a police officer. 00:24:30.174 --> 00:24:33.566 So we had a lot of pushback. It was kind of a me too, violence 00:24:33.598 --> 00:24:36.578 against women and girls. We did a lot of talking about this. We raised the 00:24:36.584 --> 00:24:40.114 issues. We'd start to talk about it. Trans rights, LGBT 00:24:40.162 --> 00:24:43.746