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My presence makes a difference
By Lina Hashem
1999 Scholar
Posted: April 10, 2000
I still feel the sting of front-page phrases like "Islamic
terrorism" blindly linking acts of violence to my religion
or my Arab ethnicity.
I still see journalists attribute everything from bombings
to absurd naiveté to chilling behavior to Islam or
Arab weirdness.
And I still have seen very few positive stories about regular
folks who dress or talk or pray like me to balance all the
"bad Muslim" and "bad Arab" stories in the papers. (I have
noticed several such stories on the wire that editors could
have chosen had they wanted to.)
But every so often I find a ray of hope here or there: One
writer understands a loaded word; an editor omits a brief
with little news value save the "strangeness" of the Muslims
described.
Just recently I saw not just another ray but a big rainbow
of hope.
It came in the form of a fellow editor's column at The
Review, the University of Delaware paper I now edit. The
story in question: the Egypt Air 990 crash into the Atlantic
Ocean last October, which killed all 217 people aboard.
A few days after the crash, I was sitting in The Review
office proofing pages. A managing editor was reading the national
news briefs, which I had just proofed. The "black box" of
the plane had just been found and the editor was reading ominous
reports saying the pilot had "prayed to Allah" before the
crash.
Wire-service reporters -- no doubt raised on a diet of movies
like "True Lies" and "Delta Force," in which Arabic words
or Islamic rituals ominously precede very bad things -- found
this Arabic prayer to be proof that the crash was a murder-suicide.
(This even before reports began to circulate about the phrase
"I have made my decision now," a phrase no investigator has
since been able to find.)
My mind slipped back to the prayer-to-Allah revelations.
I had briefly considered writing a column about the knee-jerk
media reaction to the crash, but I didn't want to appear overzealous.
I already had written two columns about Islam and Muslim stereotyping.
I had brought up similar topics before to Review staff.
And when I wasn't talking, the hijab I wear on my head is
a silent reminder of my religion and ethnicity.
I breathed deeply.
I decided to let this one slide.
Suddenly the editor looked up and pronounced: "You know what?
This is a stereotype! I should write a column about this!"
He jumped up and headed for a computer.
In the next issue, his column pointed out the hypocrisy of
the American media's response to the crash. If the pilot had
prayed in English, in phrases familiar to Americans, we would
have found it entirely ordinary -- or perhaps even a poignant
insight into an unthinkable moment of tragedy.
So, my colleague wrote, why do we get so weird when the prayer
is in Arabic?
Why does proffering a Muslim prayer imply some kind of guilt?
I sat back and beamed as I read his words.
The colleague in question is not particularly interested
in political correctness. When The Review staff was
discussing Crayola's decision to change the name of the "Indian
Red" crayon, he had little sympathy.
But there are as yet no Native Americans in The Review
newsroom to offer that perspective.
There is, however, an Arab-American Muslim.
She sits across from that colleague every day, wearing her
hijab.
That's me.
And I like to believe that's what made the difference.
Sitting every day next to a person with a particular skin
color or a particular scarf on her head lets us see that people
are alive, that they are people, that they are individuals
-- not a collection of assumptions that congeal on cold sheets
of paper and impersonal computer screens.
When many races are represented in the newsroom, then many
concerns can come alive to editors like my column-writing
colleague.
It really works.
I'm living proof.
Lina Hashem was a 1999 Scholar at The News Journal
in Wilmington, Del., where she now works as a copy editor.
She wrote this essay while attending the University of Delaware.
Reach her at lina_hashem@yahoo.com.
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