Zayn Malik And Racism In One Direction
The logical explanation would be that he was, perhaps, tired. He was tired from touring. He was tired from beginning to record a second album under the pressure of their unbelievably successful and chart-topping platinum debut. He was tired from doing press and, at the time that some of the photos surfaced, preparing for the band’s massive Olympics performance and their upcoming gig at the VMAs. He was tired from running around doing three photo shoots a day, all the while getting chastised over his choice of tattoos, the way he carries himself, and the unfounded rumours that he cheated on his girlfriend (which emerged after two fans disturbingly got away with filming him talking to a girl through a hotel peephole, but I digress).
Instead of thinking he was tired, though, a portion of his fans took to popular blogging platform Tumblr to call him a “homeless drug-addict,” quick to cite weed and cocaine as plausible choices of pop star poison.
This is especially disturbing when looked at in contrast to the way that fans were reacting to the other boys looking tired: the funny one, Louis Tomlinson, is just a little hungover. The cute one and the sensible one, Niall Horan and Liam Payne, are blessed enough to not show outwards signs of wear and tear. The heartthrob, Harry Styles, with his oversized shirts, low-hanging jeans, dishevelled hair, and dark sunglasses is just a harmless hipster.
In the end, it became sadly apparent that the lens through which a startling number of people viewed ‘bad boy’ Zayn seemed to paint him as the most likely to get in trouble, do drugs, and wind up on the street. For me, an Arab, Muslim, ‘brown’ woman who has gone out with my messy head of curls, an oversized Radiohead t-shirt, skinny jeans, and a pair of scuffed boots, only to be followed around by a security guard as a I browsed through racks of accessories at a local store, I find this kind of subconscious internalized racism to hit too close to home.
I have no doubt that Zayn has agency over his own actions, words, clothing choices, and other aspects of his public persona. They are some of the things I love about him the most, and they are the things that remind me so much of myself. But I also have no doubt that marketing schemes shape the way in which young celebrities grow in the public eye, how they choose to present and protect themselves, and how they are ultimately consumed by their audiences. There is no room for mistakes when it comes to multi-million dollar pop-star contracts, and any attempt to market Zayn as the dangerous loose canon of the band is a very calculated effort to keep things ‘interesting’ at the cost of feeding into incredibly problematic racist and Islamophobic ideologies.
Cyberbullying And Beyond
Ultimately, it was no casual matter that Zayn deleted his Twitter of 5 million followers a month ago due to the ‘useless opinions and hate’ he’d been receiving from the public. At the time, Zayn sent out two tweets that have since been deleted.
“The reason i don’t tweet as much as i use to, is because I’m sick of all the useless opinions and hate that i get daily goodbye twitter,” he wrote. “My fans that have something nice to say can tweet me on the one direction account.”
Whether or not it was his own decision to reactivate his Twitter account a day later despite the attacks, we may never know. But through it all, I can’t ignore my own experiences of discomfort in seeing how the public regards him–and how it’s reminiscent of how society regards me–and most importantly, I can’t ignore what he himself has now spoken up about.
“You can say whatever you want about me, I’m not really that bothered. But when it starts to upset people I care about, or when I hear about it from my mum, then that’s a problem,” he told Fabulous with regards to racist attacks on Twitter. “My little cousin put up a family picture at Eid [a Muslim festival] because she got a photo with [my girlfriend] Perrie and she was so happy about it. But then everybody just gave it to me double barrel.”
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