--- title: "Humanising Arabs And Muslims" episode: 79 date: 2023-09-14 guest: "Dr Evelyn Alsultany" canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/79-humanising-arabs-and-muslims audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-079/audio.mp3 --- # Humanising Arabs And Muslims Joanne Lockwood is joined by professor and author Evelyn Alsultany to examine why “humanising” Arabs and Muslims is still necessary, and how dehumanising portrayals in media have shaped public attitudes and political decisions for decades. Evelyn shares research on the long history of Hollywood and news narratives that conflate Arab and Muslim identities and repeatedly frame them through threat and terrorism. They discuss how these portrayals can create collective blame, reinforce bias, and help legitimise discriminatory practices and policies, from surveillance and profiling through to the broader “national security” framing. The conversation also looks at what progress can look like: a wider range of stories, more nuanced representation created by people telling their own stories, and the limits of “feel good” diversity efforts that become performative or detached from restorative justice. Together, they reflect on crisis-driven cycles of attention, the backlash to inclusion work, and the long-term cultural shift needed to make inclusion stick across institutions, media, and everyday life. ## Chapters - 00:01:30 — Superpower: Humanising Arabs and Muslims. - 00:05:54 — Arabs and Muslims are misrepresented in Hollywood. - 00:10:18 — Hollywood complexifies character portrayals after 9/11. - 00:12:08 — Muslims portrayed as terrorists or patriots only. - 00:18:22 — Muslims benefit from recognising Islamophobia and diversity. - 00:24:11 — DNI performative, pushback due to lack of action. - 00:26:19 — Crises expose root causes of societal issues. - 00:30:47 — Global population shifts causing societal pushback. - 00:35:00 — Five shows humanise Muslims amid opposition. Diversity diluted. - 00:37:52 — Humanity leads to compliance and benefits. - 00:41:21 — Media needs more stories to humanize Muslims. - 00:46:24 — Change takes time, but progress is visible. - 00:48:19 — Representation and diversity are important for progress. - 00:53:44 — Subscribe, share, and thank you. Bye. ## FAQs ### What is the speaker's main point regarding Muslims in Hollywood? The speaker argues that long-standing portrayals of Arabs as villains and Muslims as a threat to national security in Hollywood movies have contributed to a negative perception of these groups. She also notes that only a few stories are representing the diversity within the Muslim community. ### How has the media influenced public opinion about Muslims? The media, despite not creating policies, can influence public opinion and support for policies that restrict Muslim civil liberties. The stories perpetuated in the media about terrorism, oppressive veiled women, and rich oil sheiks are limited in number and repeatedly consumed. ### What is crisis diversity? Crisis diversity refers to moments of crisis such as the Muslim ban, which led to an unprecedented response where corporations and universities implemented diversity plans. However, those who work in this area are often called upon to give lectures, and it can be exhausting as interest in the topic fades until the next crisis arises. ### What is the significance of the Greek philosophy of logos ethos and pathos for diversity in the workplace? The speaker notes that compliance with laws and treating people fairly make great logical sense, but the human factor should involve making the world of work a better place for everyone through inclusion, culture, and treating each other with decency. By prioritizing the human factor, businesses will naturally experience positive outcomes such as high levels of psychological safety and an improved bottom line. ### What are some examples of positive representation of Muslims in media? Several TV shows, including "We Are Lady Parts," "Rami," "Mo," and "Ms. Marvel," are mentioned as examples of positive representation. However, the speaker acknowledges that there is still opposition to diversity and representation, particularly from the political right. She also notes that diversity has become a "feel good solution," which sometimes excludes the important piece of restorative justice and acknowledgment of past oppressions. ## Transcript Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation about the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to Joe dot Lockwood at seechangehappen.co.uk that's SEE Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 79 with the title Humanising Arabs and Muslims, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Evelyn Alsultany. Evelyn describes herself as a professor, author and leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs Muslims in the US media. When I asked Evelyn to describe her superpower, she said that she has a warm personality and see makes others feel included. Hello, Evelyn, welcome to the show. Evelyn Alsultany: Hi, Joanne. Thanks so much for having me. Joanne Lockwood: Pleasure. So, Evelyn, we were chatting in the green room before we gone live, the title Humanising Arabs and Muslims. Tell me more about that. Evelyn Alsultany: So, Joanne, when you asked me what my superpower was, I was stumped on that question and I reached out to two friends and one of them said, your superpower is Humanising, Arabs and Muslims. And the unfortunate part of this equation is that humanising is necessary because Arabs and Muslims have been dehumanised for so long in media representations, in government policies, in politician speeches. Many people think it started around 911, it intensified after 911, but at least in the US, it's been part of US media representations for over 100 years. And so part of my mission is to both Humanise Arabs and Muslims, but also to study the processes of dehumanisation. How does that even happen? And it happens to so many different communities in different ways. So, in my case, I have been studying Arabs and Muslims for over 20 years. Have they been represented in the media? Have they been dehumanised? What are processes through which they can be included? What are efforts out there that seek to create more diverse and inclusive possibilities for Arabs and Muslims? So you use the word Joanne Lockwood: dehumanise a couple of times and we look at examples throughout history. As soon as we remove the humanity, as soon as we remove someone's identity like that, we treat them as subhuman, not human I e dehumanise, then it gives us permission to treat people without without any respect. And that's what we're talking about here, isn't it? That's exactly what we're talking about. When we Evelyn Alsultany: dehumanise people, it allows us to justify not giving those people rights, not treating them with respect and dignity. In the case of Arabs and Muslims, it includes justifying going to war in Muslim majority countries after 911 that included Afghanistan and Iraq. And Iraq actually had nothing to do with 911, but it led to over 150,000 Iraqi civilians being killed. So I often think what made that possible for the United States to go to war with a country on the guise of 911 when there was no connection to that, and to lead to such devastating outcomes that have such tremendous impact on human life? So dehumanisation is necessary. And it's not to say that the whole American public was in favour of it. It was a very contentious moment. Some were in favour, some weren't. But dehumanising is necessary to construct an enemy or to construct groups of people as not worthy of the same rights as the dominant group. Joanne Lockwood: I suppose it's the same logic as when we think about animal welfare, because they're not humans, we have permission to eat them, to kill them, to not care about them. And dehumanisation is effectively treating people as animals or not having the same sentient rights. I run unconscious bias privileged workshops. I hate the word unconscious bias. It doesn't work for me. But that's what people tend to refer it to as. And one of the examples I use is I ask people to come up with words and phrases that you hear in the media, in the ether, that you're kind of pervasive about different people. And one of the questions I asked to come up with words associated with Muslims, and not one of them has ever come back and said, the person next door not my friend. They always create this picture of someone firing a semiautomatic machine gun in the air, firing bullets, chanting, wearing a turban or a hat, living in the desert in a tent. These are the words they come out with. Not once if someone said, the person next door or anybody that you know, or my friend in the room here. So that's what's? That we've been bombarded with that stuff all the time, aren't we? We have been bombarded. There is Evelyn Alsultany: a book by the late scholar Jack Shaheen about representations of Arabs in the history of Hollywood, and Arabs and Muslim identities have been coproduced as one and the same. And right now we're finally in the process of disentangling and trying to explain to the public that Muslims, that is a religious identity, it is a very diverse group of people, and approximately 15 or 20% of Muslims are actually Arab. But we have this Arab, Middle Eastern Muslim construction that has come out of a history of filmmaking. So Jackson, he wrote a book called Real Bad Arabs how Hollywood Vilifies a People. And he looked at 100 years of filmmaking starting in the early 19 hundreds. He looks at almost a thousand movies and he said, out of the thousand movies that represent Arabs, 52 are even handed and twelve are positive. So by the time we get to 911, we've been consuming Hollywood movies that have been demonising Arabs for a very, very long time. And in terms of the exercise that you do in your trainings, arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, this identity category has been constructed as a threat to national security. They're unamerican. They are a threat to us. They're fanatics, they're anti Semitic, they oppress their women. So we have this picture of who Muslims are. They're almost 2 billion Muslims in the world. And according to this logic, 2 billion Muslims means that 25% of the world's population is Muslim. So that means that 25% of the world's population would fall under this kind of descriptor. And some studies of the news news reporting have shown there was one study about the New York Times and how Muslims were reported in the New York Times in the in the early 2000s that showed that whenever there was a terrorist attack committed by a Muslim that it was described in a way in which all Muslims bear collective responsibility. So we are all responsible for an individual's action. There's another study that showed the more media that we consume that show Muslims enacting violence, the more likely we are to support war in Muslim majority countries and policies that restrict Muslim civil liberties. So a lot of my work has been on the media to try to understand how this institution that's so powerful, even though it's not making policies, can be so influential in terms of, well, what do we see about Muslims in the media? What do we know about them? If we have this era of Muslim Middle Eastern conflation, what do we know about the Middle East? What are the stories we're getting? And a lot of the stories are about have been historically about terrorism, about rich oil chic's are going to threaten the economy, about Oppressed veiled women. And so we have a very limited number of stories that we have been consuming repeatedly for a very long time. Joanne Lockwood: I'm not intending to take the spotlight off of wisdoms and Arabs here, but we look at the media. It wants to create good and bad, doesn't it? That's what sells clicks, polarisation. Since the early movies, we've had a good person and a bad person having a fight. And you look at early, okay, some of it was Charlie Chaplin. Some of that was kind of fairly sort of innocence, but it quickly moved on to Westerns cowboys and Indians. White is good, native, indigenous American people, bad, savages, decency, all those sort of then that played out in the Allies and Nazis, the kind of Tommy's and Jerry's, east and West, Cold War, Soviets versus America. We had good and bad, didn't we? And Muslims and Arabs are fitting into that same narrative. Good and bad, white is good, everybody else is bad. Dehumanised, as you say, savages painted, painted in a bad light. And that's not just in the US. It's across certainly the English speaking Western world and probably throughout Europe as well. Yes, the good Evelyn Alsultany: guy and the bad guy. It is a very common theme. What's interesting recently is that Hollywood has started creating more complex portrayals. And so after 911, when it came to Arabs and Muslims, we start seeing terrorist storylines that instead of this one dimensional terrorist bad guy, where I think about movies like True Lies that Arnold Schwarzenegger was in in the 1990s, or the siege with Denzel Washington that portray Arab Muslims as terrorists, when the bad guy dies, you celebrate in the audience. You're applauding. It's a good thing. Yeah, I get to get the bad guy. Get the bad arab. But more recently, writers and producers have been trying to create more complicated characters. So we have Arab Muslim characters who are terrorists, who are given an elaborate backstory, as if it's supposed to compensate for this long history. So one example that comes to my mind is Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime during season one, there was an Arab Muslim bad guy. And we learned that when he was a child in an Arab country, I think it was in Syria that the US. Sent drone strikes and killed his family. So he grew up without his family. That did not make him a terrorist. He moved to France and he was very educated and smart, and he couldn't get a job because of anti Arab and antimuslim racism. And that didn't turn him into a terrorist. But then he ended up going to jail. And while he was in jail, he converted to Islam and became actually he was Muslim, but he reconnected to his Muslim identity in a whole new way. Exactly. He became radicalised. So we have these complicated backstories, and then the question is, is this helping? Okay, it's better than the one dimensional. You're getting some kind of backstory, but you're still having a story about Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. And the other development after 911 was the patriotic Arab or Muslim Americans, which would be a character who works for the CIA or the FBI, who's helping the United States fight against terrorism. And in this Jack Ryan episode, there is a black Muslim CIA agent who's he's part of the CIA team, and he is there to counteract the Muslim terrorists to show that there are patriotic ones, too. And in my research, what I found is that even though it seems positive and yes, it's better that it's still a very limited imagining of who Muslims can be. So you can be good in the context of terrorism if you are pro US policies, if you work for government agencies, but then what if you're just a person? Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, the news the other week about there were a number of people executed in Saudi in one day or something, and there was a big story. But it's not the same story when the US. Are executing people in prisons day in, day out. Well, that's all right. They're bad people. Again, it's that dual standard that dual narrative, isn't it? Evelyn Alsultany: It really is. I think that's a great example that we have the best death penalty in the US, but it's not headline news around the world. Look at these barbaric Americans killing people. But in other countries, that practise the death penalty. It's a symbol. It symbolises how barbaric they are, how undemocratic they are. Guantanamo Joanne Lockwood: Bay was a travesty. It's such a travesty. It had to be offshored into a different country to make it palatable, to protect the world from terrorists. And yet my understanding is that many, many people who are held there have been released after many years with no evidence, no change, no trial, no nothing, just for maybe being Arab or Muslim in the wrong place. Evelyn Alsultany: Exactly. Held for years, bites destroyed, no charges. And then the question is, what makes that possible? How is it possible? So it's all of this messaging, all of the dehumanisation, because the idea is, well, they're Muslim men, so if they're not guilty of terrorism, they must be guilty of something else. Whether it's oppressing women or being anti American or anti Semitic, they must be guilty of something, even if it's not what they are purportedly being held for. Joanne Lockwood: I was reading something the other day, I think it was no, it was on the radio. It was George Takai of Star Trek Fame. Sulu and Star Trek. He was talking about how he was a young American at the time of Pearl Harbour, and his entire communities around him were rounded up because they had Japanese descent. And again, they were dehumanised. So they were shipped off to concentration camps, effectively within the US and just purely because they had Japanese heritage. And the white people got scared. It's very similar. Kind of rounding up. Yes. After Evelyn Alsultany: 911, many people said, we're at this new moment, we're not rounding up all Arabs and Muslims like we did with Japanese Americans. We're enlightened, we've change. But it seemed that the technology had change because you could surveil people more easily. And then there were instances like the Guantanamo Bay one that you mentioned, where people were picked up and locked up indefinitely for years and years. So it wasn't everybody in the way that it was for Japanese Americans during World War II, but the idea that we had evolved and we weren't doing that anymore because we were a better country, I'm not buying that. With Abu Grey prison and the USA Patriot Act and these wars that have killed countless numbers of people, so much death, so much destruction, but a lot of it was made possible through some quote unquote positive images of Arabs and Muslims. There were a lot of TV shows after 911 that had the feeling of remorse. We're so sorry that we have to discriminate, we're against racial profiling, but given the emergency we're in, given the national security crisis, we don't want to racially profile, but we have to. So there were narratives like, we are against torture. We're the United States. We're against torture. But because of the state of national security that we're in, we have no choice. So there was a particular kind of logic that was saying, that's not us, but we have no choice. We're going to enact racist, violent policies because it has to be justified under the emergency situation that we're in. Joanne Lockwood: A couple of years ago. So, 2020, we had the murder of George Floyd and the big Black Lives Matter movement. Lots of outcry, lots of public trial, the police officer that murdered him, lots of shakara shows that it still ingrained racism in much of the US and in many states. It hasn't changed much since the 50s or 40s. Has the Muslim Arab community benefited at all from this? Or is it Black Lives Matter, but not Brown Lives? I do Evelyn Alsultany: think Muslims have benefited. So I've written a book called Broken the Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion that looks at how Muslims have come to be included in diversity politics. And one of the ways that it has become possible is through a recognition of Islamophobia as a problem. So even though Islamophobia is old, very old, so in the UK, apparently it was recognised in the late 1990s because the running Mead Trust wrote a report on Islamophobia. And then this idea of Islamophobia became part of the lexicon in the UK. From my understanding in the US, we didn't start using Islamophobia till around 2010. And it's around that time that diversity, equity, inclusion language is on the rise. George Floyd from a few years ago. Oscar so white controversy. And I think Donald Trump's presidency led to a reaction from people that was unprecedented that people saw. It seems to me that people don't act unless discrimination is explicit and in your face. So even though we know that we are in a society that has been constructed to privilege white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, et cetera, we only act when we see something horrific happen. And so I think I've been thinking about George Floyd. Like, George Floyd led to some changes. Like, finally, I don't have to see Aunt Jemima in the grocery store or Uncle Ben. Finally, the Washington Redskins changed their name, even though it was decades of people protesting it. So I've had moments like, why now? What change? We've seen many black people be killed on television, recorded. But it was this that led to unprecedented response and change. And I think it's because of Donald Trump that he represented this explicit, in your face discrimination, and it led people to want to do something about it. So Muslims have benefited from a whirlwind of different events coming together, from recognising Islamophobia to George Floyd to Donald Trump saying, Muslim ban. Oscar So White the rise of diversity, which I see also as the fall of affirmative action and diversity, inclusion, equity, inclusion, coming to replace that. And I think diversity, equity, inclusion, on the one hand, allows for groups who are not part of affirmative action to be included, whether it's Muslim, LGBTQ, people who are disabled, so it widens the possibilities of inclusion, but at the same time, it could also be further divorced from a social justice or restorative justice objective. So a lot of what I've been thinking about is what are the limits and possibilities of the diversity work that we are doing today? Joanne Lockwood: I agree that Trump certainly catalysed not only his supporters, but also his anti supporters, the people who are seeing what's going on. But that era of Trump spread across Europe, it spread into the UK. We ended up with our government being a bit more, a lot more right wing. We've seen that rise of that right wing anti wokeness all the way across Europe and other parts of the country, brazil and lots of other countries. It's rising up. Trumpism hasn't gone away, has it? It's still there. I mean, Bites didn't win a landslide. It was fighting to the last couple of states. And was it the Florida governor? Is it DeSantos? Correct. He's talking about banning EDI training in all government institutions, defunding it, basically, to try and stamp it out. Critical race theory is what he calls it, isn't it? Trying to stamp out critical race theory, ban the word intersectionality, this kind of phraseology. So the world's not safe yet, is it? We haven't woken up and gone, we've escaped, we're still right in it. Yeah, we are not. No, we are not Evelyn Alsultany: safe. I do think we're in a different moment than we have ever been in terms of inclusion, and I think that's been made possible through these moments of crisis where people respond. In my book, I call it crisis diversity, where there's an event, let's say Muslim ban. And again, what's interesting to me is we had the USA Patriot Act, we had special registration war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay prison. But Muslim ban led to an unprecedented response. It's not to say that people didn't react, respond, protest, those other things, but it was in a level that I've never witnessed before, and I do think it was because of Donald Trump, but it led to corporations issuing statements, universities, including Muslims, and diversity plans. All of us who do work, and I actually wanted to ask you about this around crisis diversity, that something happens and then those of us who do work in the area we're called upon, we have to give lectures and we're happy to do it, but it's exhausting. All of a sudden, there's interest in this thing that we've been working on for a very long time. The crisis passes and then things get quiet and then the next crisis comes along and then your phone's ringing off the hook again. And I was wondering if you experience that as well. If there's like, an event, for sure. Joanne Lockwood: There'S a term that we would often use in the DNI space around performative. So, as you say, this crisis diversity, this reaction, the Black Lives Matter, we had the rape, murder and kidnapping and rape, murder and kidnap of a young woman in this country by a police officer. So we had a lot of pushback. It was kind of a me too, violence against women and girls. We did a lot of talking about this. We raised the issues. We'd start to talk about it. Trans rights, LGBT rights. Again, classic examples. Everyone loves to paint, change their logo once a year. They love to say what they're doing. They're a Black History Month for us. It's in October for us. It's Black History Month now, in February for you right now, october for us. This is our LGBT history month now. So everyone wants to do the right thing, and everyone can latch onto hashtags to do stuff, but how do we make it sticky? How do we make it a habit and embedded? And there seems to be a lack of the trouble sometimes is we end up in an echo chamber. We're corralled as a minority candidate, characteristic, a marginalised group or voiceless group, whatever it may be, and we're fed this kind of, yeah, it's going to go away, it's going to be nice, we're going to sort stuff out. Then they just shut the door on us, and they carry on doing their own thing. And we're left there talking amongst each other, thinking, yes, we're making change, but the only people actually hearing that is our own community. We're not getting the white people in the room, not getting the men in the room, not getting the able bodied. You mentioned earlier about the neurotypical, and I think hang on a minute. I'm sure some of the people who are having these troubles are not neurotypical. There's a whole spectrum of diversity going on. There's some people here, but we've got to get the people who can bring change into the room. That's the politicians, that's the people in power, that's the allies. We got to get in there, not just have conversations, our communities, because the trans community can go and have a conversation. The queer community can. The Muslim community can. Evelyn Alsultany: Yes. Black community, yes. But unless it breaks Joanne Lockwood: out into the mainstream, we're just talking to ourselves. I Evelyn Alsultany: agree. This is one of my big concerns around crisis diversity, that they are opportunities, because during this period after 911 that I described where we had this sorrowful messaging, people were under the impression that we were in a quote unquote post race era. We were on the cusp of electing a black man to be president, and finally we did. So I don't think that George Floyd would have been possible under Obama or even Biden because it gives certain people a sense of security and peacefulness, and it did take someone like Trump to galvanise people into unprecedented action. But I do think that this cycle of we see the problem because there's a crisis, the crisis is a historical one, it's a momentary crisis, just clues us in and reminds us that it's there. So, in terms of long term solution, I mean, I'm not saying anything new here, but we need to look at the root causes. And a lot of the root causes are around centuries of creating a society with this normative identity where whoever's not in that normative identity is on the margins, meant to feel bad. You're from the over the hill. Yeah. Joanne Lockwood: You're a danger. That bias, that protections. We have anyone who's different to us is a threat. Exactly. Certainly the British and half the Europeans before America was even thought about were going to the Holy Land of the Holy Wars. And they were probably half French, half German mongrel Saxons at the time, not British as such. They were just the mongrels of Europe going to the Holy Land to sort of to fight for Christianity and the righteous. And that was setting the Muslims and Arabs as heathens, wasn't it, at that time there. And that's Richard the Lionheart, was that 1400 something, 1300 something? It's been going back way before then, hasn't it? That kind of the Moors and that kind of the black people who are Muslim or from that part of Africa, murdered Christ or something, got the blame for that. That's what we're building on. And this is centuries and centuries, even almost 1000 years of this going on. Exactly. Evelyn Alsultany: Very long history. And so I think about Hollywood, and Hollywood responded to the Muslim ban and created Muslim characters outside of the context of terrorism. Many and it was been amazing to see some are better than others. But there was a concerted effort and we finally have characters in TV shows. There's a show called 911 Lone Star and there's a female firefighter. She wears a hijab, she's a firefighter. Part of the team. Amazing character. Orange Is The New Black included a prison inmate. Alison Abdullah loved it. So we have a black Muslim prison. Inmate, trans characters, we have brown characters, we Joanne Lockwood: had lesbian characters, we had straight characters, old characters, young characters. Evelyn Alsultany: Yes. Yeah. We had a whole heap of different Joanne Lockwood: characters in that. I thought it was an amazing series. I think in Evelyn Alsultany: Hollywood we are at a diversifying moment and they're also noticing with Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, that you can even make money doing that being more inclusive and diverse. Joanne Lockwood: Welcome to Wakanda. Yes. And crazy, rich, Asians. I watched that on Teller the other night. That's a fantastic film as well. Evelyn Alsultany: Yeah. There's a Canadian TV show called sort of about a Pakistani Muslim transgender person in Canada. It's an amazing it's about a person. We are lady parts out of the UK. It's my favourite, about five Muslim women joining a punk rock band. So we're seeing some productions that are actually written by Muslims and makes all the difference when you actually have people of the identity telling their own stories. So I think we're at an important opening point. It's just hard to I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't know where it's going. But I feel nervous about our tendency to be open to change or enact change only when there's an explicit and evident crisis. Are white men under Joanne Lockwood: threat? They think they are. Yeah, they do, don't they? If we look at the birth rates are going down in most of the world that can be put down to impair women. Women not wanting to be a person's property or just a baby machine. They want to have their family. Later. We see the rise of something called the incel movement. I don't know if you have that in the US. This is the enforced celibacy. It's men believing that women are the problem, which is why they're not having sex, having babies. Women are denying them access to their rights to have sex whenever they want it. We also see people talking about people use the phrase global majority. So white people globally in a minority compared with others. We see Islam being one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Okay? We got China, we got India with massive populations. Most of the world isn't white. And are people feeling threatened? So the men are feeling threatened by the rise of female empowerment, rise of LGBT. So straight men are getting even more squeezed and then white men are thinking, Hang on a minute. Brown, black, brown. People of colour are getting all this assistance, all this motion. What about me? What about my lives matter? Is that what we're saying? We're seeing this pushback. I think that Evelyn Alsultany: the way you described it. It just makes me think that it's more about power than identity. Right. Because diversity, equity and inclusion. Yes. We're trying to right historical wrongs and trying to include people who have been marginalised. But it doesn't mean that white people aren't included. White people have always been included. They will continue to be included. But it's about power and anxiety around losing being the normative. I guess if you're used to that for so long, how do you give it up? There's a great quote, and I don't know who Joanne Lockwood: said it, but it's something like online, when you're used to privilege equality, feels like oppression. Evelyn Alsultany: Yes. So it's almost this feeling that I'm giving Joanne Lockwood: something up to allow you in. When I apply for a job and there are more people who aren't like me, they're only there to make up the numbers and I should be getting the job. I now have to share it with a black person or a woman or a gay person. Whereas normally white straight men used to get these jobs and now you're denying me, making it harder for me. That's kind of the perception sometimes, isn't it? Yeah. I love. That quote. It's a great Evelyn Alsultany: quote. Very wellbeing. It says a lot about what white privilege is. You don't see it. It's so normalised that you don't see it. But the Joanne Lockwood: pushback is often that they've had a tough life, as well as many white people who live in trailer parks, who have low income, no income, unemployable, for whatever reason. So they think, Hang on a minute, what about me? I've got nothing as well. I'm not privileged. But there's a lack of concept between because their lack of their lack of privilege has got nothing to do with their skin colour. Their lack of privilege is for other socioeconomic reasons, whereas what we're talking about here is because of your skin colour, because of your faith, which is something you're born into. Evelyn Alsultany: Yes. And equality doesn't mean that we're out to marginalise white people or saying that all white people have great lives just because they're white. We're human. We all struggle. We all struggle Joanne Lockwood: with something. We've all got something in our past, something in our current, something in our future that means we're going to struggle. It doesn't mean to say we still have our base privilege that we fall back on. Evelyn Alsultany: Yeah, you can't get through life without struggle. It's not life. So we are where we are. Joanne Lockwood: It's not fair, it's not right, as you say, the dehumanisation, as you say, there's a level of awareness and improvement, post George Floyd, post COVID. But as I often say on this infinite journey, we may have come a long way, but there's still a long way to go. Evelyn Alsultany: Yeah, I agree. Right now, in terms of humanising Muslims, there are five shows that come to mind, two of them that I just mentioned. We are lady parts and sort of we have Rami on Hulu, Mo on Netflix and Ms. Marvel, which is about Disney Plus. Yeah. Disney plus. And those shows, for me, show the way. And I think for many other communities, there are a handful of shows that are like, finally we see ourselves represented in some way and it's so important. But as you mentioned, there is a very powerful opposition out there, so it's not a smooth sailing situation. I feel like those who are on the left who care about diversity tend to respond to crisis and then let the ball drop, and then we have those on the right, like DeSantis, who are trying to prevent it. And what I find particularly interesting is that diversity is on the rise because people hate affirmative action. In the United States, it's on the decline. But it was created in the 1960s as acknowledgment. Yes, we've had policies for centuries that have privileged white people, so we're going to institute affirmative action to try to get more marginalised groups, particularly black and Native American, Latino and Asian, have more opportunities. From the very beginning, there was opposition, and right now it's on the decline. And I think people who care about diversity have embraced diversity. And there's a scholar in England called Sarah Ahmed who says that diversity is a feel good solution. Affirmative action doesn't sound good, people don't like it, but diversity feels good. We're diverse, we're inclusive, we like it, everyone's included. But what I've been noticing is that in the process of diversity, even though more groups can be included, who should be included? That there is an easy watering down that takes place to make it palatable. So you've heard this many times. Diversity is good for education, which great. It is. Diversity is good for business. Okay, that's great too. And we're doing that to say to people, even if you don't like it, you should like it because you might profit or it might enhance your education, it might make you more profitable in the global marketplace. But when we start doing that, the restorative justice piece falls out of the conversation. And so are we doing diversity to make money? Are we doing diversity to feel good? Or are we doing it to actually acknowledge a history that's been damaging, exclusive, oppressive to many different groups of people? And is that our project or is our project to be palatable and fell? Diversity. I always Joanne Lockwood: come from the start that there are different sorts of people in this world that resonate with different messages. And that's the diversity of people's thinking and true. I always harp back to I think it's Greek philosophy or Aristotle, the Lagos Ethos and pathos, the logic, the emotion, and the compliance, if you like. So we got to comply with the law. We got laws, we got to treat people fairly because the law says so. And there's a business case, there's a logic. It makes great sense to do this because it's but then you've got the human factor. This is the right thing to do. I want to be treated right. We want to be treated fairly. Hopefully, most of us are born and work as good people. We are inherently good people. We don't wake up to be nasty specifically. So we want to be treated right. We really inherently want to treat others right. But what happens is we don't, for whatever reason, we have a bad hair day, we kick the cat, we get cut up at the light, suddenly our personality changes. But I always maintain that if we can get the human side right, get the inclusion right, get the culture right, make the world of work a better place for everybody, where people can thrive, out of that comes the business case. Out of that comes the compliance, rather than the compliance and the business case being the lead. They're fantastic byproducts of just being decent human beings, those things happen. You represent your customers, you represent society, you represent each other. People come to high levels of psychological safety. All of that happens. And then your bottom line will go up because you're a decent company employing with decent culture. So I was sort of saying, well, yeah, let's look at those three pillars, but recognise that the human factor has to be the lead. Everything else happens because of that. Evelyn Alsultany: I like what you said about diversity of thinking. So, in a sense, whatever it takes to reach you. And what's interesting is that even with the diverse pitches to get people on board, that even with all of that, there is still fierce opposition. Even though diversity is more palatable, there is still fierce opposition. Joanne Lockwood: Bites work. Monoculture has worked for centuries. It's like white people in charge. It was always good. Now we got brown and black and people of colour involved. It's not so good, it's not so white. So it's almost like the status quo seems to work. When men are in charge, it works. If we get women involved, it gets all emotional and complicated, isn't it? I mean, this is kind of what's happening. We're disrupting people's thinking. It's like so much easier when we just got to think about one thing white men. It's easy. Yeah, it was easier when we had these Evelyn Alsultany: categories. Don't get me wrong, I'm not Joanne Lockwood: demonising men or white men, because we need every voice in the conversation. It's just the stereotype of that personal privilege. Maybe we're using. And I don't want to be accused of demonising another group of people, because I'm not. Evelyn Alsultany: Yes, me too. Joanne Lockwood: We're on this journey. So how do we persuade good people, good organisations, to make a difference? What can we do? In terms of talk specifically about the Arab Muslim communities, what can we do? And I think you quoted five TV programmes that's out of many thousand, they're great. That's not a great ratio, really, is it? No, it's got Evelyn Alsultany: it's really not. A lot of my work is on the media, so when I think about the impact of media in terms of how important it is for us to see ourselves, it matters so much. And for many years, I've heard executives in Hollywood say, oh, it's just entertainment, it's not policy, but it's so powerful. So one of the visions is that we just need more stories. So if we have this terrorism story that we've seen repeated over and over again, then in terms of humanising Muslims, we need many, many stories of Muslims. There are 2 billion in the world, so five stories doesn't represent the whole Muslim community. And there's also a lot of pressure on those five film TV makers. That doesn't represent me, that represents you. That doesn't represent me. So there's so much pressure to represent everyone and it's not possible. So my vision is that we need so many stories that the terror story is one story. Just one story. I mean, when we see a white serial killer represented, we don't think white people need to take collective responsibility for this one person. It's one story. We have so many stories about white people as heroes, as villains, that it doesn't change how we understand that white people are a very diverse group of people, but with Muslims oh, yeah, terrorist fanatic, it sticks. And so, regarding the world of the media, I think stories are so powerful, so we need more and more stories, ideally written by when you said that. Joanne Lockwood: When we tell stories about Muslim Arab people, it sticks. I think the issue is it's already in the person's mind. It's not like a new thought that's sticking, it's an old thought that's being reinforced and layered upon and layered upon. So that's the trouble. It's how do we get down that stack and take out that original thought they've had about the association? That heavy bias that's the change we've got is making. We're probably not going to solve the problem with people over the age of 40 or 50. How do we stop that occurring in our new generations, our children? I think that's where the hard work has to be done in our children emerging teaching. I agree with you. Maybe the parent age group, because if you're a parent, you're bringing the education. So if you can get to the people now having children, 25 to 30 year olds, if we can hit that generation, make sure that generation is educating their children, we can start changing the narrative in schools, in kindergartens. Is that something that's going to we got to write ourselves off and say, it's never going to be fixed in my generation. How do we fix it for next? Yes, because I agree. The problem is not one Evelyn Alsultany: TV show, it's the repetition, it's the confirmation, oh, I already know this about these people and that confirmed it. And it's the repetition that's so dangerous. And I do think there is hope. There is generational hope. There is hope that the next generation. Someone was telling me recently that their kid is used to seeing diverse people on television and that he's still in a situation where if he sees a non white character on TV, he's like, come in the room and look at what's on television. And his kids are like, yeah, whatever. So he was making the case that for his kids, diversity is normal and it's hard for foreign to me. So maybe with the next generation, we. Might they talk about their gender, they talk about their Joanne Lockwood: sexuality, they talk about each other's culture. They're just friends or Evelyn Alsultany: pronouns is every day. No big deal. So that's Joanne Lockwood: where I see the hope. And we all want change. I think the last World Economic Forum was talking about, before we can get gender equality, they talk about they were talking about 2075. I think they was talking about that's, what, 60 years or something like that? You think, well, hang on a minute, gender equality is going to take 60 or 70 years. Even if we half that, it's going to take till 2040 something. You think, Hang on, a minute, I'll be 90, then maybe I'm a bit older, but you think, Hang on a minute. I don't want to wait 20, 30, 40 years for a leverage gender equality. And that's just gender. We intersect that with faith or religion or ethnicity. We intersect that with queer, we intersect that with disability, we insert with anything else. And we know the experience of a black woman or a brown woman or person of colour is far less than a white woman, for example, or a straight white woman. So that's the frustration. This cycle of change is glassially slow because it's got to hang in there, cling on and keep the momentum. Evelyn Alsultany: I'm okay with it taking that long. Yeah. The reason that I'm okay with it is that it seems, if I think in the US in 1790, all men are created equal, it was a false claim. And it took two centuries later to even try to create policies that prevented discrimination or would punish for discrimination. So if it took 300, 400 years to establish and reconfirm whiteness as the centre of everything, it might take 200 years to get somewhere else. It is hopeful now because I'm seeing change that I didn't expect. As a professor who teaches the history of racism, 20 years ago, it was very niche to say intersectionality. You would use that in your classroom, and now you turn on the news and people are saying intersectionality. 15 years ago, you didn't see conversations about racism on the news every day. And now racism is part of the national conversation. I have, like, a VHS tape in my closet where one day I turned on MTV in the they were having a forum on race and I couldn't believe it. They're talking about racism on TV. And I put the VHS in and recorded what I could catch. And so now this is part of our everyday conversation. So I think there's some hope in that. Despite all the opposition, despite the struggle, despite how difficult it is, despite how long it's going to take, I feel like the one nice thing about getting older is being able to think about what was it like 2030 years ago? What is it like now? Oh, wow, I've seen gay marriage, I've seen transgender issues on the agenda. That was not I'm sorry, 2.8 years ago? No. Joanne Lockwood: Rosa Parks. Was that fifty s? Nineteen fifty s, yes. Again, a lot's changed, but a lot hasn't changed. So where we are now, George Floyd, in 50 years time, we'll be probably where we were 50 years after Rosa Parks, maybe, or these big shifts, the Martin Luther King, all those kind of big moments. Nelson Mandela, South Africa, all these kind of big gravitational shift moments in the world. For me, I think it's important that we have to create representation wherever we can I agree. And embed diversity in every sphere, so that's whether in academia so we're educating children with more bottles of all backgrounds. We've got to get our politicians, we've got to get our news readers, our anchors, we've got to get our films, we've got to get our media representation, we've got to get people who drive the bus, people who open the doors, people who serve in the restaurants, not just the low paid workers, but the high paid workers. We need to make sure we get representation in society, because that's how we will win, by believing in ourselves. Because when we don't see ourselves represented, we have less faith, we have less trust. So it's about building trust, isn't it? It Evelyn Alsultany: is. I think that in most institutional arenas, people can do everything they can to make change. The one arena that I'm most concerned with that I think has so much influence is the policy level. And so when I think about how do you combat Islamophobia? Okay, more stories, that's great. More inclusion in the workplace and in universities, okay, but you can do all that and you can still have policies that convey to you that Muslims are a threat to national security. So part of me feels that there's a lot of great work being done, but as long as there's this American government machine that is conveying that message, it'll be very hard to actually really shift the problem. And Joanne Lockwood: you see exactly the same dehumanisation playing out with trans people. Black, brown, people of colour. We see women being described as less than a man, more emotional. How can they expect to have equality when they take ten years out of their jobs to have children, et cetera, et cetera? Or women who Evelyn Alsultany: can't have access to abortions anymore in the US, transgender bathroom bills that make it an impossibility. These kinds of policies are incredibly damaging. And it's not just the US, Joanne Lockwood: unfortunately, the US has a kind of a bleeding influence through the English speaking world, the UK, where transgender people are accused of everything these days, we even the root cause of Scottish independence. And our politicians get elected on who's the most transphobic, which is no different to some of the Trump type views, where you're trying to mobilise your masses by appealing to each different person individually to hear their pain, and then they forget that they've got nothing in common. They just hear their pain and think they've been spoken to. So it's happening in the world over, and I think it's incumbent on all of us who are currently voiceless, unheard, marginalised, minoritized, to mobilise our allies, the people who have the privilege, and get them to hear our stories. I think that's what we can do. And keep pushing. I agree. Evelyn, it's been absolutely amazing. I could chat to you all day and have another cup of Teacap with you. Tell us more about how people can get in contact with you. I want to hear more about your book. Tell us more about your book and the work you do. Thank you, Joanne. So I just published a book called Evelyn Alsultany: Broken the Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion, which looks at the process through which Muslims have come to be included in Hollywood corporations, universities and law enforcement, the promises and pitfalls of diversity inclusion. My book can be purchased at amazon.com NYU Press, which is the publisher, or wherever you buy your book. And I'd also like to mention that I co created a test to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. It's called the Obati al Sultani test. I created it with Sue Obati, who is the director of the Hollywood Bureau at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and it offers some guidance on how to better diversify representations of Muslims. And your listeners can learn more about me at my website, EvelynAlsultany.com, and I'm also on Twitter and Instagram a little bit, not too much, and you can find me there at Evelyn Alsultany. Thank you so much, Joanne. Pleasure. So that's Evelyn Joanne Lockwood: E-V-E-L-Y-N Alsultany. A-L-S-U-L-T-A-N-Y. That's how you spell your name. Brilliant. Thank you. So I think we've got that. Well, it's been amazing talking to you, as I've said, and yeah, your stories and what, the work you're doing is incredible. Even if we're only moving that needle a couple of degrees, we're still moving that needle. We're not going back because we're holding that strength. So I think really important. So thank you very much and also a huge thank you to you, the listener, for staying with us to get to the end. I really appreciate this. If you're not already, please subscribe. To keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. It's B-I-T-E-S. Please share this episode. Please share all the episodes. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues to subscribe. We would love your support. And of course, I've got a number of other guests lined up over the next few weeks and months. If you'd like to be a guest, I'd love to have you on the show. All you need to do is drop me an email to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. Tell me you'd like to appear. We can sort that out. Tell me how we can improve if you think we can. So, finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. I look forward to catching up with you next time. Bye.