This letter is regarding the front page of the Tuesday, Feb. 7 edition of The Post. The question of whether or not Arab-bashing is newsworthy in today's political climate is only the context of the problems present in the layout of The Post's front page. The choice of the image of anti-Christian violence for the comic strip story demonstrates that your paper is more interested in stereotypical Arab-demonization and the emotional manipulation of the readership through fear than it is in relevant issues.
Perhaps more importantly, however, pairing the Cartoons cause chaos image with the story on Professor Muhammad, Professor embodies
idolizes Malcolm X effectively creates a visual link between Black-History Month (African-Americans by extension), professor Muhammad (and the civil-rights leader he discusses), and anti-Christian (read anti-American) violence.
Let me explain by beginning with the Cartoons cause chaos image. Choosing to show a 8-inch full color image of a violent, masked Arab protester wielding fire in front of a Church in one of Christianity's most sacred cities as a way of covering the comic-strip controversy has clear implications.
The newspaper aims to evoke a fear-based emotional response from its readership: a response that ties violence, Christian-hating and destruction to the Muslim world. The comic strips alluded to in the story are controversial depictions of the prophet Muhammad, and you juxtapose that story (or non-story) to the image of Professor Muhammad, featured below with a title that characterizes him as a religious fanatic of a known Muslim civil rights activist through the use of the term idolizes.
This not only casts Professor Muhammad's work in a religious, irrational, and worship-like light, it also characterizes the whole of black voices and Black History Month as tinged with anti-Christian violence. The Professor Muhammad piece is the first of the Black-History Month series and it is literally and figuratively positioned under the light of violence in the Arab world.
I could go on and analyze how the top story inserts black women in a fog of fear and disease, thus completing the whole racist depiction by including black women, but I will save this for another day.
- Amanda Nolacea Harris is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages.
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