Reflection 9: Covering Religion, Terrorism and Peace
This week’s class topic was religion and our assignment was to check out a documentary. I watched "Constructing the Terrorist Threat" from Deepa Kumar, a scholar on Islamophobia.
Terrorism, specifically the way that political violence is perceived, argues Kumar, is a socially constructed process. But what does a “socially constructed process” really mean?
The textbook definition of terrorism is “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” The image of terrorism, though, varies from that definition.
For starters, there is an overwhelming association of brown men with terrorism. Look up images on Google. You’ll find mostly brown men with beards, but you won’t find white men. White men who commit acts of violence and kill innocent people are not labelled terrorists.
Certainly, when people commit acts of violence, their identity plays a huge role in how the media covers them. If it’s a white person, the news is far more likely to explain the act as a result of something internal and individual, i.e. perhaps that person has a psychological problem or has had difficult life circumstances.
Take someone who is Muslim, on the other hand. Their adherence to Islam is instead used as the explanation for why.
Another significant point Kumar makes: far-right wing groups are responsible for more killing of people in the United States than Muslim American citizens or residents. In fact, you’re more likely to die from getting struck by lightning or drowning in your bathtub than be killed by a Jihadi terrorist.
Actually, you’re most likely to die from cancer, and yet trillions of dollars are spent on the War on Terror.
Thus demonstrates Kumar’s original point: who is considered a terrorist threat is not actually an objective selection, but rather, it is socially constructed, and the media plays a significant role in that construction.
And when it is something that’s socially constructed, those associations become the way it is understood. Today, it’s understood as political violence perpetrated by Muslims and Arabs.
But Muslims aren’t the first group in U.S. history to have been turned into what Kumar calls a “racialized other.” That is, creating a narrative that a racial group is a threat in order to uphold unjust systems. Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans and even some white groups such as the Irish or Italians have been dehumanized and turned into racialized others throughout American history.
Actor George Takei makes a connection between former president Trump's 2017 ban on Muslims and the treatment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, all people in the United States of Japanese descent were blamed for the event; they became a racialized other.
As a result, over 100,000 Japanese Americans were put into internment camps. Takei argues that this was the same thing that is happening to Muslims, that the blaming of all terrorism on Islam is a prelude to internment.
In order to change this process of creating racialized others and defining what terrorism is and who terrorists look like, the media has to take responsibility in its coverage terrorist acts. It’s not okay for headlines to withhold “terrorist” when an act is committed by a white man.
This documentary was quite sobering and I think important for anyone considering a future as a reporter. As a potential journalist, I've learned I must be extremely cognizant of the way I treat the subjects of the stories I write.