The 'Other' in Edward Said

While reading the first part of Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia’s book Edward Said, I found myself constantly thinking about how Middle Eastern countries are often unfairly portrayed in media. After the initiation of the 1967 Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the stigma that began to surround Arabs shortly after the conflict ensued, Edward Said began to analyze his own position as a Palestinian-born American living at the crux of two cultures. Said is quoted as saying: “Identity—who we are, where we come from, what we are—is difficult to maintain in exile…we are the ‘other,’ an opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement, an exodus.” The belief that “…the ‘East’ signifies danger and threat” has risen out of the stereotypes portraying all Arabs and Muslims as terrorists after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more recently, the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.

            While considering the stigma surrounding modern-day Arabs and stereotyping all Muslims or Middle Easterners as terrorists, I can’t help but compare the current unfair treatment of Muslims and Arabs to Japanese stigma and imprisonment during World War II. Stigmatizing Japanese-Americans as an ‘other’ that signified danger and a threat to the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during the height of World War II. Because it is obvious now that the discrimination against Japanese-Americans during World War II was completely unethical and racist, I hope that one day Americans will be able to look back at the belief that all Muslims are terrorists with the same sort of disdain.

            Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia state, “In any attempt to gain knowledge about the world, what is known is overwhelmingly determined by the way it is known.” Because the media portrays stories including Arabs only when they are pigeonholed as terrorists, many Americans know Muslims as terrorists and nothing else. In taking this class, I hope to learn about other cultures in a new way that defies the way Muslims are portrayed by the media and expand my own “worldliness.”