Ronan Bennett has written an excellent piece for the Guardian on Martin Amis, and our apparent inability or unwillingness to confront his racism. Writes Bennett:
“I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines.
“And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.”
Shame indeed. But we need to extend our outrage far beyond the lunatic fringe of figures like Amis. A film has just been produced, for instance, on Jack Shaheen’s classic study of the portrayal of Arabs in cinema, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. A great, illuminating excerpt from the film and interview with Shaheen were recently broadcast on Democracy Now!, revealing a frightening normalisation of racist imagery in popular culture. Says Shaheen:
“The humanity is not there. And if we cannot see the Arab humanity, what’s left? If we feel nothing, if we feel that Arabs are not like us or not like anyone else, then let's kill them all. Then they deserve to die, right? Islamophobia now is a part of our psyche. Words such as “Arab” and “Muslim” are perceived as threatening words. And if the words are threatening, what about the images that we see in the cinema and on our television screens?
“… as Goebbels said, if you take the same images and you repeat them over and over again, and the images teach us to hate a people and to hate their religion, what happens is that we, in spite of our intelligence, our innate goodness, actually turn around and let these images despise and vilify an entire people.”
Shaheen’s work trawls through a vast back-catalogue of Hollywood imagery and allusion, finding again and again the same tropes emerging – of Arab barbarism, irrationality and violence, untrustworthiness and decadence. What is most frightening of all is how entirely natural they seem to have become. There can be little doubt that Amis deserves our outrage and condemnation – but we also need to be turning over our own ingrained ideas, our own prejudices, and the institutional support they enjoy in our mass media and popular culture. The Democracy Now! extract provides an excellent example of the kind of de-familiarisation and critical examination that will help do so – I thoroughly recommend it.
