Invisible women: Therese Saliba says Arab and Muslim women are still left out of feminist and racial consciousness. (A New Era).(Brief Article)

In 1995, I attended the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) conference just a few miles from the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. At the keynote address, the white moderator and representatives from the four major ethnic groups--Latinos, Native, Asian and African Americans--condemned the bombing, some called it a racist act, yet no one mentioned Arabs or Muslims against whom a discriminatory campaign was waged in the wake of the bombing. At that time, Arabs and Muslims were still not a part of feminist consciousness when addressing racialized injustice and discrimination.

Since September 11, Arabs and Muslims have catapulted into public consciousness. Our visibility in times of political crisis ebbs and flows with the political tides. June Jordan, African American feminist and longtime activist for the Palestinian cause, has written, "Arab peoples and Arab Americans occupy the lowest, the most reviled spot in the racist mind of America." She was responding to the 1996 Israeli massacre of 100 civilians at the UN camp in Qana, Lebanon, but she might equally be speaking of the post-9/11 hate crimes and U.S. government repression or the current crisis in Israel/Palestine.

As Arab American feminists contend with the intersecting forces of racism, sexism, and neocolonialist policies in the Middle East, we also struggle for visibility within the U.S. feminist movement and in movements for racial equality. The increased racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims and the further erosion of our civil liberties since September 11 have merely exacerbated longstanding racist domestic policies targeted against our communities. Yet within U.S. racial categories, we are rendered racially invisible by our current classification as "white, non-European." Arab and Middle Eastern groups have lobbied unsuccessfully for an alternative category. Still, our racial ambiguity within U.S. society has left us politically disempowered and marginalized.

The image of a veiled woman captioned "The Face of Islam" in a New York Times photo essay (December 31, 2001), epitomizes the Orientalist stereotypes that have resurfaced after 9/11. Despite recent polls reflecting Americans' increasingly positive views of Islam since 9/11, old colonialist stereotypes persist of white military men saving Muslim women from their culture and from their men. Celebratory images of Afghani women removing their burkahs have come to represent the U.S. victory over the Taliban. Yet the media have largely suppressed the mass killing of civilians under the U.S. bombing campaign, which have reportedly exceeded the number of Americans killed in the September 11 attacks. The images and voices of Afghani women activists, such as the Revolutionary Afghani Women's ...