What does media bias have to do with how marginalized groups are perceived? EVERYTHING. Media bias—the way we see certain groups on TV and in movies—has a massive impact on how we view people in real life. And whether or not we see them as real human beings, or merely caricatures we don't have to care about. If people in the margins don't comport ourselves in a very specific way, then we aren't deemed worth giving a damn about.

In her book, Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion, Professor Evelyn Alsultany painstakingly tracks the "logics that legitimize excluding people, that legitimize inequality" and rejects the need for anyone to act like a "good" <insert marginalized person here> to be accepted. 

Aside from being an expert on Arab and Muslim representation, Evelyn is also a childfree Latina. As a Cuban-Iraqi American, her work exposing why we view Arabs and Muslims through a narrow, Hollywood-perpetuated lens can helps us understand why we might make unfair assumptions about people based on their choices, skin color, accent, religion, and so on. It's obnoxious, it's outrageous, and we shouldn't accept it! Professor Alsultany is pushing back, and she's inviting us to do it, too.

This episode contains mentions of terrorism, rape, school shootings, and genocide.

Evelyn's bio:
Evelyn Alsultany is a professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC’s Dornsife College and a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media and on forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.

Alsultany is the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (2022) which was listed as one of the 10 best scholarly books of 2022 by The Chronicle of Higher Education; was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ Prose Award; and received Honorable Mention for the Arab American National Museum book award. She is also the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012).

Alsultany has served as an educator and consultant for Hollywood studios (Netflix, Amazon, NBC Universal) and co-authored criteria, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. She has published op-eds in The Hollywood Reporter, Time, and Newsweek.  

To get the full show notes, and an episode transcript, go to PauletteErato.com/shownotes. This is episode 57.

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