How Hate Crime Laws Perpetuate Anti-Muslim Racism
Lecture with Professor Evelyn Alsultany
Location
Online
How Hate Crime Laws Perpetuate Anti-Muslim Racism – Online Event
Date & Time
April 19, 2023, 1:00 pm – 2:15 pm
Description
In this talk, Professor Evelyn Alsultany will present research from her book, Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion. Prof. Alsultany will focus on two cases in which Muslim youth were murdered yet law enforcement refused to classify the murders as hate crimes: the 2015 murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and the 2017 murder of Nabra Hassanen in Reston, Virginia. Hate crime laws are intended to recognize the persistence of racism and other forms of discrimination, so why would law enforcement agencies be reluctant to label these cases of anti-Muslim violence as hate crimes? Alsultany illustrates how the denial of hate crimes contributes to the diminishment and denial of anti-Muslim racism and, as such, should be understood as a form of racial gaslighting—that is, a systematic denial of the persistence and severity of racism. In conversation with those advocating for rethinking the criminal justice system through prison abolition and restorative justice, she argues that seeking state recognition for hate crimes cannot provide justice given that the state is responsible for constructing Muslims as a national security threat.
Professor Alsultany is is a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US. media. She is the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (NYU Press, 2022), which was listed as one of the 10 best scholarly books of 2022 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (NYU Press, 2012). She is the co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Syracuse University Press, 2011), winner of the Arab American National Museum’s Evelyn Shakir Book Award, and Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Alsultany is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College. Prior to her appointment at USC, she co-founded and served as the director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies program at the University of Michigan. Professor Alsultany has served as an educator and consultant for Hollywood studios (Netflix, Amazon, NBC Universal) and co-authored criteria, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. She has published op-eds in The Hollywood Reporter, Time, and Newsweek.
This talk is part of a series on Arab and Muslim Experiences in the US sponsored by the Provost's office and organized by Dr. Mejdulene Shomali.
