Beyond Propaganda: Resources from Arab Film Distribution‪.‬

A little understood truism about equity and identity is that people tend to acknowledge the diversity within their own identity groups while thinking about groups outside their identity as homogeneous. That explains, though does not justify, why, for example, many multicultural counseling textbooks--written primarily by white men--are divided into identity sections: here's how you counsel African American students, here's how you counsel Asian American students, and so on. Most white people using or writing these texts probably would be quick to point out the lunacy in the suggestion that one could write a chapter on how to counsel white students. How could one approach cover the diversity among white people? Any critical observation of U.S. "news" media (I use quotations in case anybody wants to include Fox News under the umbrella) uncovers myriad examples of this sort of pigeon-holing. Consider the images of Arabs, Arab Americans, Middle Easterners, and Muslims (terms that many mistakenly use interchangeably) portrayed through media. I rarely see an Arab face on television, whether in news accounts or dramas like 24, that is not connected to terrorism. I hear predominantly Arab countries described as part of the "axis of evil" or "evil empire," labeled indiscriminately as supporters of terrorism and harborers of terrorists.