A new study shows that Muslims make up less than 2 percent of speaking characters in movies.
Two years ago, actor and activist Riz Ahmed approached Dr. Stacy L. Smith — the founder of USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative — about conducting a study of Muslim representation in Hollywood. They both knew the numbers would be grim. But Smith, well-known for producing damning data sets that hold the entertainment industry’s collective feet to the fire, was intrigued.
“The representation of Muslims on screen feeds the policies that get enacted, the people that get killed, the countries that get invaded,” said Ahmed in a statement accompanying the study. “The data doesn’t lie. This study shows us the scale of the problem in popular film, and its cost is measured in lost potential and lost lives.”
At that moment, America’s TV screens were filled with images of the hijackers, awakening a scourge of Islamophobia that has pervaded popular entertainment for two decades. So pervasive was the prejudice that several years after 9/11, “Muslim” was blithely employed as a pejorative to smear Obama during the 2008 presidential campaigns. Al-Baab Kahn, one of the authors of the Annenberg study, immigrated to America from Pakistan in the months after 9/11. She was five years old at the time.
For Smith and Khan, the erasure of Muslim characters in animation is particularly notable and it mirrors research Smith has done around 9/11, when she found that children who were exposed to news coverage of 9/11 had heightened safety concerns even a year after the attacks. The new study found not one animated movie featured a Muslim character and only seven Muslim characters were children.
Ramy Youssef’s Hulu comedy “Ramy,” about a first-generation Egyptian-American Muslim Millennial growing up in New Jersey, is an example of the kind of pipeline building the industry will need to commit to if it is to begin to correct the problem. Youssef, who took home a comedy actor Golden Globe in 2020, has stocked his writers’ room with Muslim Americans, including Sahar Ansani.
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