Name Calling Oh no, it's happening again. The New York Times article,
25 Rebels Are Killed in Daylong Firefight in Iraq, U.S. Says (nytimes.com, 7/22/04), uses the phrase "the hardline Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi."
Roll that over your tongue a few times. "the hardline Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi." The CITY is hardline? Everyone in the City? The municipal water system is hardline? The schools?
Have you ever heard any city in the U.S. described as "hardline" or "fundamentalist" or "radical?" After the tragic Oklahoma City federal building bombing, no one said that McVeigh was from "the hardline, separatist, militant state of Montana."
No one said that, because here in the U.S., we're all considered to be individuals. No matter how fringe some American like, say, Pat Robertson is, you'll never hear the mainstream press refer to him as "extreme Christian fundamentalist Robertson." (At least, you won't hear that kind of language about
white guys, the dominant minority.) And you won't hear his town described by the same terms.
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We dimly understand here that our cities, towns, states, and regions are populated by individuals. Even if we characterize them broadly ("red" states vs. "blue" states), the labels are general and imprecise.
[Note to non-US readers: in the last presidential election, states were labeled either "red" and "blue" depending on which party won the state's electoral votes in our indirect election system. Many of the states were won by single-digit electoral victories, but the whole state was still presented as having been just one color. We've just let oversimplified graphics dictate our reality in terms of thinking of the people in those states, which have never been purely 'red' or 'blue.']
But foreigners are treated as caricatures. They're all the same. They're good or evil -- there are no shades of gray. They all deserve the same fate. It's RIDICULOUS to think this way. But how else can you characterize the population of a major city in one swoop as "hardline?"
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Not by our hearts
will we allow whole peoples
or countries to be deemed evil.
--Not in Our Name Pledge of Resistance
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Compare your search engine results for "extremist Christian" (972 right now) to "radical Shiite cleric" (12,600 hits).
["Radical Christian" is a brand name and a positive term, so it's not comparable for searching purposes.]
Now matter how extreme we are,
we're okay, and subject to nearly polite treatment in the press, unless our last name is Clinton or we're black and have been convicted of something. But everyone else is open to some very rude characterizations.
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You're thinking,
Yes, but these are special circumstances! The people being rudely characterized are SHOOTING Americans! I remember that rash of school massacres here in the U.S. They all turned out to be perpetrated by suburban white boys, but even in that circumstance the killers were bestowed with individualism. Which is why you didn't read headlines like "Radical Violent Caucasian Males Terrorize Suburban Schools Nationwide." They were still all treated as individuals - and they were killing Americans, mostly KIDS, many of them GIRLS.
Yeah, but that's us killing our own. That's different, you might say.
Not really. All of these things are political. Teenage gun toting killers really shouldn't be treated with so much more respect than foreign rebels who believe they're defending their homes and families. We shouldn't give outrageous labels to foreigners, while coddling our own domestic killers. It gives us a distorted perception of the world.
It's bad enough that I was almost ready to believe that certain rebel leaders in Iraq actually had the official title "radical Shiite cleric." I never heard their names without that phrase. Which is ridiculous.
