I'm Not Your Stereotype: One Middle

Eastern Girl Talks Growing Up in America

I'm not a Kardashian, and I'm not Jasmine from Aladdin. But where, exactly, does that
leave me?

BY ASHLEY RAHIMI SYED

I was 15 years old the first time I fully realized that I was not white. This fact was pointed out
to me at lunch one day when I asked my friends what we should dress up as for Halloween.
Almost immediately, someone exclaimed that I should be a terrorist—and the whole group
burst out laughing.

I was stunned. These people were my friends; they wouldn’t make a discriminatory joke about
me. They wouldn’t laugh at my expense. They wouldn’t silently uphold this racism. So I must
have misunderstood the joke, I thought, and then I laughed too.

Only later did the full nuance of the situation sink in: when I saw my friends, I didn’t see their
whiteness; when they saw me, almost all they saw was my brownness. That’s why it was so
easy to call me a terrorist, why it was so funny, and why I was so blindsided.

That joke hurt so much because it made fun of something I have no control over. It wasn’t
about a bad haircut or some social faux-pa; I was being put down because of my race. And I
had never experienced that from my friends before. After that incident, I became increasingly
aware of the ways my Middle-Eastern identity was handled by my white peers, and the ways
in which their opinions were supported by the media.

I began to notice that there were very few Middle-Eastern women I could actually relate to on
TV or in the press.

Instead, I saw the terrorist my friends labeled me as. Reports on the War on Terror showed
ominous, burqa-clad women working in terrorist cells across the Middle East. She was
dangerous, hated freedom, and was a threat to the United States. Today, this woman can be
seen as the suicide bomber in American Sniper or the menacing woman surrounding Claire
Danes in the recent print ads for Homeland.

But I am not this woman.

When the media doesn’t portray the Middle-Eastern woman as a terrorist, she is shown as a
war-torn refugee. This woman is subjected to horrific natural or man-made disaster, and then
her unbearable grief is exposed to invasive documentation for the benefit of foreign news
agencies. Think of the Afghan girl on National Geographic’s iconic cover, whose name we
didn’t even know until 2002. Only witnessed in these moments of extreme hardship,
mainstream American media denies her access to all the nuances of a complete human
existence. The only identity she is allowed is that of a war-torn victim. I am not this woman.

And, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I would often see the Middle-Eastern
woman on display as an exotic sexpot. She can be a bellydancer, harem concubine, genie, or
Arabian princess, as long as she looks good doing it. She is I Dream of Jeannie’s title
character or Aladdin’s Jasmine. When she isn’t naked, she wears semi-sheer scarves for
clothing. When she speaks, it is only to utter "Your wish is my command." I am not this
woman.

And yet, whenever I turn on the TV, sit down for a movie, open a magazine, or look at a
billboard, I rarely see anyone like myself. I don’t see Middle-Eastern women that are peaceful,
strong, independent, kind or funny. Far more often, I see a terrorist, refugee or sexpot. And
when people look at me, sometimes that’s all they see, too.

When I was first beginning to understand these patterns of ignorance, I wasn’t sure how to
react. But more than anything, I wanted to avoid the shame and hurt of being stereotyped
again.