Rejecting Media Stereotyping Made Me Comfortable With My Heritage

By Sabrina L. Ousmaal-Moin

Although I come from an Arab background, until five years ago I did not know much about Arab culture, about current events in the Middle East or even the negative pressures faced by Arabs living outside their own countries.

Part of my ignorance stemmed from my own unusual circumstances. My father immigrated to France from Algeria; my mother is English. Since I grew up in France, the socialization process I went through made me an Arab at home, but French for the outside world.

In fact I did not learn much about either my father's or my mother's cultures. The society into which I was born and where I was raised still suffers from the aftermath of the terrible Algerian war for independence from France. Besides pitting France against Algeria, that war pitted Frenchman against Frenchman and Algerian against Algerian. The losers in all categories settled in France, and some never stopped hating. Perhaps this is why racism, especially anti-Arab racism, can be found in all strata of the society.

Barely Hidden Racial Tension

When I first came as an exchange student to the southern United States, I recognized racial tensions barely hidden beneath the facade of hospitality. As a result, once again my public persona went through another type of anti-Arab socialization. The reasons for anti-Arab sentiment in the United States, however, were very different from those in France. What seemed to me to be very strong anti-Arab sentiment among some Americans arose not from actual personal contact with Arabs but solely from negative media stereotyping, rather than the unique combination of guilt, nostalgia and animosity remaining in France from its North African colonial experience.

In the U.S., few of my fellow students knew anything about North Africa. Many assumed the people were Black. I did not fit their image of an African, an "Arab terrorist," or of a veiled Muslim woman.

So, again, I was French to everyone. By allowing this impression to remain, I was, consciously or unconsciously, still rejecting my Arab background.

It took me five years to accept my true identity and then to be sure it was accepted by others. What brought my unconscious identity crisis to the surface was my election as president of the international student government at American University in Washington, DC. Despite its name, American University must be the most international university in the United States. There I met students with backgrounds, and personal identities, as difficult for me to understand as was mine for my peers in France and the United States.

As I assumed my new responsibilities, I realized that my primary duty was to represent all of those students and address their many different concerns in coping with the demands and expectations of the university and its faculty members. How could I be their voice? How could I explain to American students the international experience—the key to tolerance and comity in an increasingly interdependent world—if I did not come to terms with my own background first?

I began to look within myself and, for the first time, recognized that being a "foreigner" could be more of a boon than a hindrance in coming to terms with a culture. Helping international students face their special problems, and observing their different ways of coping with them, motivated me to learn more about the diverse elements in my own background.

A year later, I became an intern for a human rights organization. There I learned that everywhere in the world people must fight to be accepted by others for what they are, not for what others would like them to be. I decided to concentrate my research on America's enemy number one at the time, Iran, and try to understand a culture I had been socialized to hate.

As a graduate from the communications department, I began researching American media material on Iran. My first surprise was to learn how many Americans, including journalists, erroneously considered Iran to be an Arab country. Farsi, Iran's principal language, is Indo-European, not Semitic like Arabic and Hebrew.

The coverage, in both the established print and electronic media, was negative, violence-centered, and seemed to follow whatever agenda was set by the White House. The redundancy and repetitiveness of the negative reporting presented by most publications, and the scarcity of diverse, qualified and believable Iranian guests and experts in broadcast journalism, betrayed the bias and superficiality of a profession that spends more time discussing objective reporting than actually practicing it. I concluded that only the "underground" news organizations are able to escape the suffocating pressure to stay within the bounds defined by "official" sources.

Perhaps my impatience, after studying communications at American University, with the failure of most of the U.S. media to live up to the principles involved is heightened by my own experiences as a person of Arab background living in the United States. While one sometimes can find in the "alternative" media a balanced portrayal of the Arabs, unfortunately, it is not the readers of alternative publications who need to be educated.

What few Americans realize from exposure to the U.S. "mainstream" media is that violence, civil disturbances, and wars no more typify day-to-day life for 200 million citizens of 20 Arab countries than street terror in New York, Los Angeles or Washington, DC typifies the day-to-day lives of more than 250 million Americans.

Most Americans believe that a Middle Eastern woman suffocates at home, and that her life is one of despair and anguish. They learned it from television and they firmly believe it. I have little doubt that in some homes and in some countries women are treated differently than men. However, that was not so in my case. My parents offered me every chance to grow and learn and it was my choice to come to the U. S. to continue my education. My parents supported my decisions.

A year ago I married an Iranian whom I had met at American University who now is working in the United States. Of course I have met his mother, who has visited us from Iran, and other members of his family. None has objected to my ways, nor am I harassed or made to feel subservient in any way. In fact, although I am French by nationality and by now feel equally at home in the United States, I realize, increasingly, that I was raised the Middle Eastern way. Happily, I can add that I am very proud of all of these aspects of my identity.

I've "seen the light" about the essential compatibility of the three cultures, Middle Eastern, European and American, that define my identity—because I no longer let the media define any of those cultures for me. I know them all, better than most of the journalists who seek to interpret them for me. I wish that every journalist would make an effort to become more familiar with his/her beat—understanding far more about the people, their language, and their culture—and the similar human values that underlie the surface differences. I wish, too, that the public would make an effort to become more familiar with its media sources. People should determine which media are reliable, presenting the truth as they see it, and which "spin" the facts to conform with a preconceived bias or separate agenda.

At present the American media have become the principal obstacle to an understanding by Americans of their own diverse heritage and of their neighbors—particularly their Middle Eastern neighbors.

It does not have to be so. Freed of individual bias, government "spinning," and advertiser pressures, the media could be an educational force in helping Americans to see other people not as rivals, enemies, superiors or inferiors, but as products of diverse cultures who can, and someday will, exist as harmoniously with each other as my once diverse identities now coexist within me.

Sabrina L. Ousmaal-Moin is the business manager of the American Educational Trust.