Another Black Face

This week in class we viewed two documentaries focused on eastern people from the western perspective. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Reel Bad Arabs dealt specifically with media in the United States.
Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, was written to give a voice to the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As an American I am often told by the American media to relinquish any doubts about Israel’s guilt. Because of this denial, many questions remained. I understood the origins of the conflict, but was misinformed about the reason for its continuation into the last century. While the film used an overly-biased to tone to compensate for the onslaught of Pro-Israel news stories, it was thought-provoking. This films aim to break down American Pro-Israel propaganda, instead became a propaganda piece for Palestine. And while I didn’t leave the classroom with a better understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I was given the tools to ask better questions.
The latter film Reel Bad Arabs inspired my title for this post. Black face in the early 20th century was cartoonish, demeaning, and over-simplified caricature of the black American used in films and plays. Black Americans were simplified into three characters; the brute, the hypersexual mulatto, and the mammy. This century and the seventy years leading up to it brought in another caricature; that of the Oriental. The oriental or Middle-Easterner is simplified into three characters; the terrorist, the seductive woman, and the greedy Arab. Reel Bad Arabs used a collection of scenes from popular American films featuring Middle-Eastern characters. Beloved American films, children’s classics, and American classics were filled with hateful derogatory images. Stereotypical Arabs were awkwardly placed in films such as Father of the Bride 2, simply for a humorous effect. If this were any other American ethnic group, there would have been an uproar of protest, not laughter.