Alyssa Rosenberg writes about the Islamophobia panel at Netroots Nation:
At a Netroots panel I went to on Friday, someone in the audience got up and asked the panel what Muslims in America who want to fight Islamaphobia could learn from the American gay rights movement. Adam Serwer rightly pointed out that one thing the gay community has on its side that Muslims don’t is deep penetration into popular culture. Even if you don’t know gay people in person, it’s almost impossible to watch television or see movies without encountering gay characters, even if only the archetype of the sassy gay best friend. Katie Couric is right that we need a Muslim version of the Cosby show. But more than that, I think we need a positive, plug-and-play archetype for Muslim characters so we can have not just one show that portrays American Muslims, but many.
Obviously, those gay archetypes are problematic: they turn people into stereotypes, they're limited, they arguably elide the most powerful part of gay difference by being sexless, they erase the fact that there's more than one kind of gay person. But as the thinnest edge of the wedge, they're a powerful tool, as long as people stand behind them with a mallet and a lot of creative ideas. And I doubt we're going to immediately get a wide, humanized variety of Muslim characters on television in America without some sort of intermediate step.
I should probably explain what I meant in mentioning the role of pop culture in helping to shift public opinion on LGBT rights. The truth is that the number of people who identify as gay or lesbian is pretty small (around ten percent) so most Americans really don't have close gay friends. What the highly visible presence of gays and lesbians in television and movies did however, was allow Americans to imagine themselves as having gay or lesbian friends, and therefore sympathize with them on matters of equality and justice. Muslims are also a small percentage of the American population as well, but I suspect Americans have a much harder time imagining having a close Muslim friend, and to the extent that pop culture can fill in that gap with an abstract understanding of what that might be like I think it could play a pretty significant role in mitigating the hostility and suspicion that Muslims in America currently face.
