Gelareh Asayesh Gelareh Asayesh knows what it feels like to be the object of American anger and ignorance.
An Iranian who moved to the United States with her family just before the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1977, she encountered Americans who viewed her with suspicion and prejudice after Iranian students held the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran hostage.
Asayesh (in photo at left) also knows what it means to be a journalist. A former staff writer for The Miami Herald and the Baltimore Sun, Asayesh understands what it takes to cover a story well on deadline. She still contributes articles and commentaries to such publications as The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The St. Petersburg Times as well as to National Public Radio.
She recognizes the tension and challenges involved in growing up outside the United States and then making her home here. She wrote about it in a book, Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America. The book chronicles her experiences of living in Iran and the United States and what she encountered during her regular trips back to Iran.
In these days when journalists must report and write about individuals who find the spotlight turned on them because of the terrorist attacks, Asayesh offers some perspective, both personal and journalistic, about the journalism she’s been observing.
Colón: How would you assess the journalism you’ve read, heard, or seen when it comes to covering people who belong to, or are mistaken for, the same country of origin as those accused of the terrorist attack?
Asayesh: In general, it has been vastly encouraging. It is such a contrast to the type of coverage that I saw as recently as two or three years ago, and certainly at the time of the hostage crisis.
Since the Palestinian Intifada and the student uprising and reform movement in Iran, the American public’s monolithic view of Arabs and Muslims in general seems to have shifted. The Middle East has been humanized more. You see more stories that acknowledge the Middle Eastern perspective in conflicts.
Subtle uses of language that revealed our biases are less frequent, such as talking about “The Arabs” (imagine talking about “The blacks” or “The Hispanics”). There is less tendency to proselytize. There’s more capacity to be skeptical of internal myths that assign lofty motives (freedom/democracy) to U.S. foreign policy, regardless of economic and political motivations.
There are exceptions, of course. A story about the Muslim world’s response to this terrorism earlier this week on NPR ended with a thinly veiled message that Muslims need to be held accountable for the radical elements in their midst, e.g. clean up their act.
Sounds reasonable, right? Except that there’s an implied moral superiority there as well as a double standard. Did Christianity as a whole have to do soul-searching after a member of the violent Christian fringe murdered a doctor who performed abortions? No. There was an ability to separate marginal elements from the religion as a whole.
Also, I think we, as journalists, have to be careful of the distortions inherent in our craft. We write about events, so we tend not to talk about non-events. Someone shooting a Sikh is an event. People calling their Muslim friends to offer support is not. Bush calling for war is an event. People wanting peace is not. A friend complained recently that from reading the papers you’d think all Americans want to go to war. I think we have to work twice as hard at providing context and multiple perspectives.
What do you believe journalists could do to improve their ability to connect and report on people of Arab ancestry?
Journalists are generalists. Therefore we tend not to be particularly informed about specifics. Clearly, in the modern world, it behooves us to learn more about Islam and the Middle East.
Common mistakes: Iranians are not Arabs (although there are Arabs as well as other ethnic minorities in Iran). Afghanis are not Arabs. Muslims are not exclusively Arabs; the most populous Muslim country in the world happens to be Indonesia.
Not all Muslim nations are fundamentalist. Iraq and Turkey, for example, are secular. Those that are fundamentalist often have different interpretations of Islam. For example, women in Iran can drive and participate in most professions. In Saudi Arabia, which tends to be the basis for most stereotypes of Islam, women do not drive and suffer greater restrictions. All Muslims are not devout any more than all Christians are. Know any Christians who have had sex outside of marriage lately?
What resources could journalists use to learn more about people who come from Arab countries [such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, United Arab Republic (Egypt), Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Yemen]?
I’m not an expert on resources, but I imagine the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee would be a good starting point. Specific questions are often addressed to the Gulf2000 network, a network of scholars, analysts, and journalists based at Columbia University and administered by Gary Sick, ggs2@columbia.edu. I imagine this would be an excellent project for Poynter to undertake, to put together not only some myth-busters, but also general facts and a list of resources. I know MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, has assisted in developing such primers in the past. In this Internet age, with so much information at our fingertips, we really have little excuse for remaining uninformed.
What stories are not being told that would help the public understand the lives of individuals who emigrate here from countries where Islam is the dominant religion?
Right now, I think it is important for us to write more about the people — not the rulers — of places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
We should see the faces of those we intend to bomb. The St. Petersburg Times series earlier this year about the human impact of sanctions on everyday people in Iraq was one of the few I’ve seen on this topic.
We need to write about more than “coups and earthquakes” to help people understand commonalties as well as differences. I suppose the same rule of thumb would apply to Muslims in the United States. Write about people as individuals, not as poster children for Islam or the Middle East. Seize opportunities to write about the software exec, the stripper, the dentist who just happen to be Middle Eastern. Don’t go looking for types who reinforce your image of what Muslims are: pious, Arab, violent. Stop looking at people solely through the prism of religion, nationality, and language. That to me is the definition of prejudice because it erases individuality.
What has surprised you about the coverage you have read, heard, or seen?
The degree of support for Muslims and Middle Easterners who are the victims of backlash. In the past, we have always been the “other.” Today, despite the backlash, there is a sense that we have been assimilated into the American “melting pot,” for lack of a better word, that we, too, are Americans.
What concerns you about the coverage you’re seeing?
The tendency to let pundits and so-called experts define reality. Let’s hear from the common man and woman. Their perspectives often do not jibe with that of the talking heads.
An example of how insidiously our assumptions can sneak into our coverage is a September 22 St. Petersburg Times story about Arab-Americans being kicked off of flights because of pilots’ and passengers’ “security concerns.”
While the paper is one of the few that wrote about this practice of discrimination, and identified it as such, language in the story legitimized the discrimination by accepting the pilots’ assertion that Arab-Americans’ very presence on a flight equals a security concern.
This paragraph is a prime example: “…with the heightened security, pilots are being extremely cautious and taking security steps they have not taken before.” Implicit in this sentence is the assumption that ejecting Arab-Americans from flights reflects legitimate security concerns rather than outright prejudice. The Arab-Americans on last week’s doomed flights were terrorists. [The language suggests that] these guys might be, too, purely by virtue of their nationality, religion, etc.
For contrast, think of the Florida restaurateur who cited a different type of “security concern” when he refused to serve Maryland legislator Talmadge Branch, who is African-American, in the regular room of the restaurant because the white customers there might give him a hard time. The stories about that incident treated that claim as the thinly veiled rationalization it was.
For another example, imagine a young Floridian man with dark hair and a handsome face being refused the right to rent an apartment in Gainesville. “You look like Ted Bundy, you’re from the same state; therefore, you might be a serial killer and I can’t in good conscience let you live here.”
Would that we could take in, at a gut level, that the millions of Muslims in the world do not pose an added security threat because of the actions of 19 or 900 of them.
Any other advice you give journalists involved in covering this story?
Anytime you want to check the fairness of something you’re writing, superimpose that situation on another group: gays, African-Americans, Canadians. Whatever fits. Bias is situational. It is revealed when we redefine the situation in terms of people we view as being one of “us” rather than one of “them.”
