10.4.12 Links Roundup

Instead of asking whether “illegal immigrant” is “the right” description, the more important question is what is the best description? Most of the commonly used descriptors are imperfect and inherently problematic in one way or another. Aside from “illegal” and “undocumented,” other terms such as “out of status,” “illicit,” and “irregular” are clunky and confusing. Almost all are too capacious. “Unauthorized” may be the best of all the flawed options since, unlike most of the other terms, it describes immigrants’ relation to the state without denigrating them.

• Homeland: Race And Islam In Showtime’s Award-Winning CIA Drama (Global Comment)

The thing is, Homeland has a race problem. Brody is both white and the only sympathetic Muslim on the show. It isn’t lost on him that his al-Qaeda contacts seem motivated by opportunism and greed, while Brody himself is motivated by the killing of a child he loved. Regular Muslims, by contrast, are depicted as people prone to mob violence who can be easily manipulated by their rulers. The site of angry Muslims burning Israeli and American flags outside the U.S. Embassy is one example from last night’s episode – and in light of recent violence against U.S. diplomats in Arab countries, this was not a neutral plot point – not even if it was written before the recent real-life killings of U.S. diplomats in Arab countries.

In the end, the reactions that people like Brody and his daughter, Dana, express in response to Islamophobia in the U.S. are meant to reflect on their basic human goodness, but these conceits do little to trouble stereotypes about Arab- and Persian-American Muslims. It all gets filtered instead through a lens of whiteness.

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