Tonight starts a new series highlighting the representation and (mis)representation of Arabs in Western cinema, specifically in the US. We’re going to be breaking down the film Reel Bad Arabs, talking about the destructive stereotypes that writer and lecturer, the late Jack Shaheen, talks about both in the film and in the book of the same title, and about what authentic representation looks like. For so long our government has fed us these stereotypes repeatedly in movies manufacturing consent for global atrocities, so we’re going to dive into what to look for and how to advocate for the kind of representation that paints them as the multifaceted, complex human beings that they are.

You can watch Reel Bad Arabs for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPxak6lFd-I

We’re joined by Amira Ferjani, who’s going to be devoting this episode to defining the SWANA region, identifying anti-SWANA and anti-Arab discrimination, and differentiating between those terms and others we want to keep in mind throughout this series.

Amira Ferjani is a Tunisian American and Marketing and Communications Specialist with a keen eye for detail and a passion for creative problem-solving. She brings a unique perspective to conversations about representation, using her platform to educate others on anti-SWANA discrimination and the often-erased diversity of the South West Asia and North Africa region. She draws on her lived experience and cultural heritage to challenge the erasure and misrepresentation of SWANA peoples in media, policy, and everyday language. Amira centers clarity, accountability, and the belief that education is the first step towards solidarity and, ultimately, liberation for all.

Amira can be found on most social media platforms @amiraoutloud, but she is primarily on threads @amiraoutloud2026. Her Substack also has several blogs detailing anti-SWANA racism and breaking down why she uses the term SWANA.

As promised, here are resources to check out:

Books:

Orientalism by Edward Said

Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Shaheen

Articles:

MENA vs. SWANA and where Arab fits in

Standing ovations but no distribution: Films about Palestinians meet a divided Hollywood by Rebecca Keegan | Oct. 23, 2025 | Source | Archive

Missing & Maligned: The Reality of Muslims in Popular Global Movies by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative | June 2021 | PDF

Hollywood’s problem with Arab representation (or a lack thereof) by Mina Tobya | Michigan Daily | Mar. 28, 2024 | Source | Archive

Khalas!: Institutionalized SWANA Erasure, Resilience, and Resistance In Higher Education by Journal of Leadership, Equity, and Research | Vol. 8 No. 1 | April 2022 | Source

Erased or Extremists: The Stereotypical View of Muslims in Popular Episodic Series by USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative | September 2022 | PDF

The novel ‘Dune’ had deep Islamic influences. The movie erases them by Haris A. Durrani | The Washington Post | Oct. 28, 2021 | Source | Archive

Sonic Orientalism in the Dune Film Scores: Challenging Harmful Depictions of SWANA Culture by Amy Maatouk | Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology Vol. 21 No. 1 | PDF

Hollywood's Bad Arabs by Jack G. Shaheen | The Cairo Review of Global Affairs | Source | Archive

Dune: An accomplished escape into the realm of cinematic Arab appropriation by Hanna Flint | The New Arab | Oct. 1, 2021 | Source | Archive

Dune 2 and Hollywood's commodification of Muslimness by Nadeine Asbali | The New Arab | Feb. 27, 2024 | Source | Archive

‘Dune 2’ is set thousands of years in the future — so why does it feel like a parable about Gaza? By Mira Fox | Forward | Mar. 4, 2024 | Source | Archive

Hind Rajab director refuses Berlin film festival award over Gaza war by The New Arab Staff | The New Arab | Feb. 18, 2026 | Source | Archive

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Visit ourvoicesproject.com and sign up for our newsletter for more information about what we do. In our next episodes, we’re going to break down the misrepresentation of Arabs in Hollywood, Hollywood’s ties to US government, navigating the film industry as an Arab actor, and what authentic representation actually looks like. Until then, we highly recommend that you go watch Reel Bad Arabs now available for FREE (this education is FREE, y’all!) on YouTube.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

12:05 - Understanding Identity in the SWANA Region

18:01 - Orientalism

24:28 - The Importance of Representation in Education and Media

33:42 – Intro to the rest of our Arab American Heritage Month Podcast Series

Mentioned in this episode:

Our Voices Project - Land Acknowledgement

Joe Bean Roasters

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Hello POD and Happy Arab American Heritage Month.

I'm your host Jackie McGriff and if this is your first time listening and or watching welcome to Representation in Cinema.

We talk about the films that center Black Brown Indigenous voices as well as on the film industry itself.

I'm not only your host, but also the founder, director and co producer of Our Voices Project, a production company that shares the stories and lived experiences of Black Brown Indigenous peoples through visual storytelling and truth telling.

We're community engaged filmmakers who firmly believe that you cannot center these communities without also being in community and in solidarity with them.

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If you like today's episode, please rate us five stars and leave a comment letting us know all the things that you enjoyed about this episode.

Tonight starts a new series highlighting the representation and misrepresentation of Arabs in Western cinema, more specifically the US we're going to be breaking down the film Real Bad Arabs, talking about the destructive stereotypes that writer and lecturer the late Jack Shaheen talks about both in the film and in the book of the same title, and about what authentic representation actually looks like.

For so long, our government has fed us these stereotypes repeatedly in movies, manufacturing consent to commit global atrocities.

So we're going to be diving into what to look for and how to advocate for the kind of representation that paints Arabs as the multifaceted, complex human beings that they are.

Before we get into all of that, I'm joined by Amirah Farjani, who's going to be devoting this episode to defining the Swana region, identifying anti Swana and anti Arab discrimination, and differentiating between those terms and others we want to keep in mind moving forward throughout this series.

Amira, do you want to tell the people all about yourself?

Yes Hi everyone, I'm Amira.

You can find me as Amira outloud on most platforms.

I work in marketing and communications.

I have a keen eye for detail and creative problem solving and I use that experience, as well as my experience as a Tunisian American to bring my unique perspective specifically around educating about the Southwest Asian and North African American region and the discrimination that we face as peoples from that region as well as the often erased diversity of that region, which is what we see in a lot of American cinema where we're flattened into either all being Arab, all being Muslim, all being this vague omnipresent threat, basically to America.

So I'm really excited to join this podcast and dive into that and dive into why it's so important to have these conversations because unfortunately they're not really being had.

Yeah, thank you so much for joining us and for being like, I guess, my co host, co pilot, co conspirator.

Actually, I'm more the co conspirator here because it's Arab American.

So I'm.

The coke is very good.

So I've dragged you into our plan.

Oh my gosh.

You know what?

And I'm here for it, by the way, for our listeners and our viewers for the rest of the series.

If you haven't already seen Real Bad Arabs, that's R E E L Real Bad Arabs.

We highly recommend that you watch.

It is free 99 on YouTube right now.

It's less than an hour.

We highly recommend that you go and check that out.

And with that, Amira, can you take us through the terms that our audience needs to know?

Let's start with the.

The term swan.

I think you had already started to define it there, but do you want to explain, you know, that term as opposed to using a phrase like Middle East?

Yes, absolutely.

Middle east is a term that we've all heard and that we're all most familiar with.

And it's still a largely used term.

But partly why we are changing to Sanswana, which stands for Southwest Asian and North African, is because even the term Middle east, it has roots in colonial history.

It implies Middle east of Europe, which is seen as the center of the world.

And it's become synonymous with what very Eurocentric and Western projections onto the region.

So like I said, it often entails a idea that we're all Muslim, that we're all Arab, and that we need to be represented in this way by people usually outside of the region.

They are known as Orientalists, they're known as Arabists, but these are usually white men who are literally studying our region a lot of times, so simply for military and colonial interests in order to figure out how to manage and control our region.

So simply changing our language to Swana is the first step in not only educating people about this deep colonial history, which has basically plagued the entire west versus east interactions, and being able to take that language back and name it for ourselves to remind people of how diverse the region is.

And I have a personal connection to it because as a North African, I've always taken issue with being called a Middle Eastern.

I've always been like, not from the Middle East.

I'm from North Africa.

So it's just one step, even for me personally, to be able to recognize how broad the region is.

But when you think of Middle east, when you think of a Middle Easterner, a certain image does come to mind.

And so it kind of starts to challenge that, to remind people of how diverse the region is.

And, and that we shouldn't let these very Oriental viewpoints define us.

So.

And we'll.

We'll get back to Orientalism, you know, momentarily here.

But I also wanted to address, because a lot of times, and what I've seen, at least online as, as folks are in these conversations, if you can call them conversations online, because of course, everything online is discourse.

Be that as it may.

Be that as it may, from the conversations that I do see, you know, there is this, you know, there's, there's constant, especially when we're talking about a Arab American Heritage Month, you know, and Arabs within the region as well as across the diaspora here in the U.S. you know, I think there's like also a conflation between.

Or is there a conflation between Swan using the term Swana versus using the term Arab?

Or is Swana sort of like this encompassing thing?

Especially when we're talking, is it.

Does it act like this umbrella that that Arab just is underneath?

Like, can you go more into detail about that?

So I would say it absolutely does have.

Swana is supposed to be more of the umbrella term because unfortunately, in addition to being called the Middle east, it's also been referred to as the Islamic world and the Arab world, which are both very reductive terms.

I actually was just today having this conversation on thread who said Hassan Piker is Arab, and I had to tell them he's Turkish, that they actually don't consider themselves Arab, same as Iranians are.

They mainly identify as Persian.

There are other groups, such as the Kurds.

I'm personally Amazigh, I'm indigenous to North Africa.

A lot of them also don't like being called Arab because a lot of these people went through what we call Arabization, where they were introduced to the culture, introduced to Islam, and it proliferated, proliferated because of the Ottoman Empire into a lot of these cultures.

But they're still very distinct ethnic groups.

So being able to differentiate with Swana when we're referring to the whole region helps not flatten those groups into Arab or Islam.

And yeah, I think that that example from today was the perfect example of that.

Hassan definitely faces a lot of the same racism that Arabs do because of the flattening of this region, just like a lot of Americans also think all Iranians are Arab.

So, so starting with this bigger term, kind of stepping back from those very narrow viewpoints helps us be more inclusive when we're talking about this region instead of kind of instantly bending the knee to these racist caricatures that have been put out.

Yeah, so I've also heard, because you've mentioned, especially with like, you know, again, Swano kind of being like this all encompassing thing where not everyone who is from a region, from, you know, somewhere from the Swana region, like, they don't want to necessarily be defined.

Right.

Or categorized or what have you labeled as, as Arab.

So what would you say as far as.

Because of course, like, countries are made up of all sorts of different people.

So I don't want to say, oh, which countries are those?

But like, I guess when we're talking about Arabs, in which countries would you say would be?

Or I guess I'm not sure how to actually ask this question because, because it's, because it's, because it's interesting, like the way in which you're talking about Aswana region.

And so to label, you know, to label people in Arab or just because you're specifically from a country doesn't necessarily mean that you are Arab.

So I guess when, when we're thinking about Arab, is there, is there a way or are there regions or are there countries that define themselves as Arabs?

There definitely are.

What I'd like to first say is that a big part of my work and the purpose of all this is to ask that person, you know, what they feel that they identify with.

Because that is where I have really, on my personal journey.

I used to exclusively talk about anti Arab discrimination because that's just what I felt fit best.

And I would of course also include anti Muslim discrimination.

But it was in my conversations in advocating for that that I would have people come to me and say, hey, you were talking about Palestine.

But not all Palestinians identify as Arab.

Some of them consider themselves Levantine.

Even my fellow North Africans, a lot of them, like I said, don't like being called Arab because they feel they were Arabis.

They prefer calling themselves Amazigh or Berber or the multitudes of North African indigenous groups that there are.

And so a big part of that is listening to the people and hearing what they identify with, how they define their cultures.

But there are absolutely, like the United Arab Emirates that consider themselves very Arab and Arabic also being a language.

There are a lot of these countries, such as Palestine, that speak Predominantly Arabic.

And so a lot of those people do consider themselves Arab, but it's not something that I would say from within these countries is fully agreed upon.

It's definitely an outsider label from a lot of times countries that don't always understand the diversity.

So I would say listening to that person and what they identify as, I think because Arab is also so conflated with Islam, that's a big reason for it.

Where, you know, there are Druze people and Christians and Maronites throughout Lebanon, Syria, and all of this that I think tend to distance themselves from the Arab label for that reason as well, because they don't want to instantly be assumed as Muslim.

I mean, I know that was a large part of why I would specifically talk about Arab and make that distinction, because I'm not Muslim either.

And so that becomes like an assumption as soon as you say, like I'm from an Arabic speaking country.

People would start posing me questions about Islam and stuff.

And so it was always something that I distanced myself from because of that.

So I can see why a lot of people also have as well.

So wrap that all up.

I would say ask the person that you're speaking about.

But to be safe, that's why saying Swana is just so much easier.

Or of course, if you're referring to a specific country, just refer to that specific country.

Right, okay.

Yeah, good to know.

Thank you so much for that.

Yeah, there's, there's always, I mean, especially with, you know, us as Americans and especially like the, the, the many negative lights that those regions have been put into for so long, not just through movies, which is of course, what we'll be getting into later on in our series, but also in our news media.

The, the things that we get as Americans are definitely not the things that other countries are getting just as far as, like what's going on in that region.

Which is why so many of us, and especially during, you know, the, the Palestinian genocide right now, we turned to independent journalists, you know, on the ground who were experiencing.

Right.

I mean, who are experiencing things that are happening on the ground.

So, so, and I think in American media especially, there's a big erasure of that history.

I mean, this is the oldest part of the world, really, especially places like Palestine that have, almost every religion has a claim to, it has history there.

And so when we're flattening all this into just Arabs or the Ottoman Empire or whatever it is that we're referencing, we are forgetting how evolved and how diverse it is.

You know, it's Similar to how Asia is a broad umbrella term, but Japanese people are separate from Chinese people because these are just such cultures with such a deep history that they've like Tunisian Arabic completely different from Palestinian Arabic.

And most people wouldn't know that.

I just learned that Tunisian Arabic is actually closer to Maltese than other forms of modern Arabic because of how old Tunisia is, because of the cultures that grew up there.

So.

Oh my God, you know, I'm learning so many things today.

So many other things as well.

No, thank you for that.

Okay, so before you had mentioned about Orientalism and you've also.

Yes, so you've been referencing that, that book.

Can you.

So just for, again, for our audience and everything.

Yeah.

Explaining the premise of the book and maybe also getting into like the, the points, especially when we're again, we're pointing to anti swana discrimination, you know, and you know what Edward Said talks about, right.

Like with Orientalism and you know, it's destructive like ideology.

So.

Yeah, if you want to, if you want to get into some of the takeaways that you've had from reading that.

Yeah, and I have.

I literally keep it on my desk because, like, I reference it so much.

But Edward Said is a Palestinian American.

He lived in exile after his family was removed from Palestine from the Nakba.

And so his perspective is really key.

But he kind of was the grandfather of this idea of finally giving us a voice against Orientalists, which are people who, in addition to Middle east, what they actually used to call the Middle east was the Orient and the people there were known as Orientals.

And so it became a caricature.

And something that I think is especially relevant to today's conversation talking about Hollywood representation is that he would say the Orient is the stage on which the whole east is confined.

And so it became this way for Europeans, imperialists, colonialists, to represent a vast millions of people populated land to Westerners to help them understand.

And like I was saying earlier, really that understanding was to help them figure out how to colonize us, how to manage us, how to put us into a box that not only justified the colonization because we were often represented as backwards, as uncivilized, as savage, as barbaric, but also how then to take advantage of that.

And so things like Zionism are born from Orientalism, are born from these colonialist ideals because they, you know, like they say, oh, they're the only democracy in the Middle East.

And so they use that as justification for occupation, as justification for the billions of dollars that get poured into them for defense.

Because apparently they're supposed to be the last line of civilized defense against this.

Like I was just saying, centuries old region that is really born of civilization in many ways.

I mean, you can thank Arabic numerals for our entire math system.

But instead it's been erased and our impact has been erased.

Our culture has been reduced to Islam.

Like, there are so many names I can list off that Orientalists would call us.

Like, instead of saying Muslim, they would call you a Muhammad man because they have so many ideas about the Prophet Muhammad.

Yeah.

And so there's really, it's a very reductionist worldview of the orientation, but understood as from a Western point of view, not something that we got to represent ourselves in.

And that's something that Edward Said also talks a lot about, especially with Palestine, something he calls the permission to narrate.

Because Palestinians at all of these peace deals, they never get to represent themselves.

It's Egypt and America and Israel, the UAE that are for some reason at the table.

I mean, even with, like, is it called the New Gaza, the Jared Kushner plan?

I'm.

I don't think a single Palestinian was part of that.

In fact, I recently heard they did have a Muslim woman on the board.

I don't know how she got there, but she left already.

So, like, it's this idea that we simply are not the narrators right now in the Western world of our own story.

And so if you look up Edward Said, you will find a lot of white Orientalist, very mad about it, trying to discuss how no, they, they love the Arab culture and that's why they reduce us all to something that they can, you know, write a book about.

It's something called especially with like missionaries and stuff and travelers.

Those were kind of the first Orientalists because they would go like Lane, he has this book on Egypt where he goes and just writes all of these hallucinations, projections on the world, on people that, you know, he doesn't speak the language of, that he can't communicate with.

And he just kind of makes up these stories for them.

And a lot of these.

Lane was very foundational into what Napoleon thought and why Napoleon thought he could just waltz into this world of people, you know, wearing towels on their heads and who don't understand civilization and like, wow us and just take over.

And, you know, Napoleon didn't fare too well in that endeavor.

So I think it just really shows how a lot of the experts, so called experts, aren't really experts within these cultures.

And that's what we see now today in The US and what I've kind of localized into anti Swano racism is that we have all these Middle east experts.

Every time I'm watching the nightly news, it's some white man, usually ex military, telling us about how Iran is going to respond, how Palestine, how Lebanon is going to respond, instead of actually talking to people from these regions.

And then the way the media does frame talking to people from these regions.

I remember watching them interview an Iranian official and NBC asked him, why are you attacking other Muslim countries during Ramadan?

And it was.

But no question to Israel in the US of course.

Of course not, you know, who are also attacking Muslim countries during Ramadan.

Iran is a Muslim country, you know.

Yeah.

So that's.

Orientalism is something that is.

And he really.

Anything that I could say, Edward said has said first and rest in peace.

But I know he would just be saying I told you so and continuing his work.

So.

For real.

Oh, my gosh.

But it's.

It's interesting just.

And of course, like, there's always.

There's always an elder, like, you know, you can look to.

To like, talk about all these things, you know, it's.

It's very interesting number.

Well, a few things I'll say because I'm gonna keep saying it's interesting just because, like, as I'm like, hearing you talk through all of these things, there's several things that are coming up.

One is, of course, like, you know, to paint a.

An entire region of people as like, one thing, of course, is like, by design.

See that?

Right?

With.

I mean, I can only speak to my personal experience, you know, as a black person living in America, like, to paint us with this broad brush so that it's easier to dehumanize us and it's easier to.

Right.

To.

To commit atrocity after atrocity.

And so when I'm hearing you, like, say that, it's just like.

I mean, although I cannot understand, like, every.

Although I haven't been through, like, every experience that's unique to someone from that region.

I can understand as a black person living in America.

Right.

To have to know what it's like to be dehumanized and to have seen that throughout our history as well.

So.

So, gosh, like, number one, I just want to say this is like, there needs to be more conversation because clearly, clearly the way in which our government works.

Right.

We're Seeing.

Well, now we're seeing like, the dismantling of the Department of Education.

But even before then, like, this was not.

Like, these are not things that are brought up, you know, in, in our.

In our global history.

Right.

We, at least for me, and I don't know what it was like for you, but we were taught, as far as global history goes, it was Western Europe, specifically Western Europe.

Like, like nothing about Eastern Europe.

Okay.

There might have been Russia that they.

Maybe they.

They covered Russia.

They would talk about, like, the Soviet Union, basically.

Yeah.

So the reunion and then.

And then, like, was it like.

Yeah, Japan and China and that was pretty much it.

And then Africa as a whole as just one.

Like, what are we.

Okay, so nothing.

Nothing about that.

Any sort of depiction that we get got of folks from the Swano region was always impoverished.

Not to say.

And this is not to say that, you know, there aren't regions where that is very much the case.

But at the same time, it's like, you're only showing, like, one small piece.

It's.

Every time you're depicting people, it's that they are impoverished, that they're less intelligent.

When we're finding out every single day.

And of course, like, we're finding out every single day, especially when we're talking about what's going on in Iran.

These are a highly intelligent people.

Like, the, the education, right, that they get is insane for us to be talking about anybody's IQ when you look.

When you look at.

Or anybody's education, when you look at, you know, other regions and the amount of education that they're getting.

Like, so anyway, to go back to, you know what I was saying again, on how it's easier to, like, dehumanize the people, but also the importance of talking to folks from that region, talking about their experiences, learning the history from people from those regions, right.

Asking them how they identify.

I think that's all very important because of course, our schools are not going to do it.

Our news media is not going to do it.

Our movies, right, as.

As far as the ones that are more mainstream, those are not going to do it.

I mean, we're seeing so much, you know, as far as, like, you know, the efforts to decolonize the lens, if you will, especially with.

With companies like Watermelon Pictures, also the Arab Film Institute, you know, who will highlight films that are very much painting the narrative that is, you know, the experiences of those people in a multifaceted light, right?

Experiences of a people and many people with many different backgrounds and, and, and and, and cultures and you know, all the, in ideologies and faith systems and everything.

I think it's more important now more than ever to like, again continue to have these conversations, but then also making sure that we are having, not only having conversations, but also making sure that we have refer to, you know, elders before us, elders who are still here, people who are experts not only in just their lived experiences, but then also in the history and the culture, you know, the history of colonization.

Because I'm even hearing you talk about, you know, how folks, especially in North Africa, many of them don't want to identify or don't identify as being Arab because of the colonization that's happened even there or being Arabized is all very interesting.

And it's a, again, it's a.

These are, this is a massive region that we're talking about and we've only been, we haven't really been shown or taught a lot.

So yeah, all of this like to.

Touch on when you're talking about black people especially.

Part of another reason I say Swana is because people have this separation between black people and Arab people or Swanning people.

And there are black Palestinians, black swan and people throughout the region.

And I especially use Swana in the sense that also includes Somalia and Sudan because while they have a very unique experience being predominantly black, we see like, with people like Rep. Ilhan Omar, a lot of the same rhetoric being used against Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is a Palestinian American, being used against Rep. Ilhan Omar for being a hijabi wearing black woman.

And, and we're seeing that hateful rhetoric get spun into violence.

Like you said, with the dehumanization, a lot of black liberation fighters have been called terrorists in the same vein that Arab freedom fighters are called.

So while we have unique experiences like with how, you know, ICE may be more wielded against Swani people because we're seen as foreign.

There's still a lot of overlap because Somali people go through some of the same stuff.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Is there anything else that you, as far as like takeaways go from Edward Said's book that, you know, you really want our audience to know?

And especially like I'm going to, I mean, we're going to be putting, you know, the title and the author's name, of course, in the show notes, but you know, for people to go and check out.

But is there any, any other takeaways that you would, you know, like to address?

Yeah, I'll just read a quote because he says it so much more succinctly than I do, but especially for this conversation that we're having.

One quote that I really liked by him is one aspect of the electronic postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed.

Television, the films and all the media's resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds.

The Arab is always shown in large numbers.

No individuality, no personal characteristics.

Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery or irrational, hence hopeful, hopelessly eccentric gestures.

Lurking behind all these images is the menace of jihad consequence, a fear that the Muslim or Arabs will take over the world.

And yeah, I'm sure as we get into especially real bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen shows example after example of that threat that we've been reduced to, whether they're Iranian or Palestinian.

It's really flattened us into just kind of this thing to fear instead of humans that are trying their best.

And especially what you were talking about with how we're always shown as impoverished and oppressed.

It's what I wanted to say is that, like, what's always missing is how we got there.

The rubble in Gaza was buildings, was skyscrapers, was people's homes, was architecture that was thousands of years old, especially with like, the Dome of the Rock and some of the baroque historical sites there.

Yet we're only seeing the aftermath.

And if there ever is blame placed, which usually there's not for some reason.

It's always just this, like, this is how these people live, apparently, with their homes blown to bits.

It's usually put on Hamas or put on our terroristic tendencies instead of on the colonialist, which, you know, spoiler alert.

That's who it is.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah.

We're going to be getting, of course, into all of that within these next few episodes as a part of this series.

Definitely wanted to get into this just because having.

Having seen Real Bad Arabs again, which is free 99 free.

Okay, our f r e e free on YouTube right now.

It's less than an hour, but, like, there was so much.

And of course we're going to be getting to this, but there was so much in there that I. I think, like in the back of your head, like, you're.

You're not surprised, right?

But it's just.

It's kind of like something you haven't seen before.

Like, it's just so normalized.

It's just background noise until you're like, wait, yeah, why do they.

Why is it always someone.

Yeah.

Dressed like that in a keffiyeh, yelling, usually gibberish Arabic.

Because they're.

You're usually not even an Arab person and they can't even speak Arabic.

Why.

Why is that happening?

Right.

Exactly.

And there's.

Yeah, there is so much to cover within these episodes, these next upcoming episodes that I am very interested in getting to talk to you and other folks with these, these lived experiences.

I'm so excited to be talking about all of that before we wrap up.

Amira.

Where can folks find you and how can they support you?

Yes, I'm on substack Amira out loud.

I have a lot of this kind of foundational conversations that we've been having about like why I say Swano, why I think it's more important to use inclusive language.

That was my most recent blog post.

And also discussing anti Swano racism.

Always, always referencing Edward Said all over my sub stack.

But just search Amira out Loud on your preferred social media.

You'll probably find me.

And yeah, thank you so much.

I'm so excited to see the rest of the series as well.

Yes, absolutely.

I'll be putting together a list of first of all, y', all, Amira got.

She has so many references for us.

When we're going through the notes, I'm like, I've got homework to do.

Which is totally fine.

Which is totally fine because of course we're at our voices project.

We're all about, you know, education, especially when we're talking about films and looking at films critically, especially with the decolonized lens.

So I will be putting links to quite a few of those sources as well as, of course, where you can find Amira and support her and read up on so many of the things that she's consistently talking about, especially when it comes to anti Swana discrimination.

And with that, I'd like to thank you, Amira for joining us tonight.

I'm like you said, I am also so excited to have you on for the rest of the series to talk about all of this and more listeners.

Like I said, we'll have information about where you can follow and support her in our show notes or in the description below.

Of course, if you're watching on YouTube, wherever you're listening from, hit that subscribe button.

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In our next episodes, we're going to be breaking down the misrepresentation of Arabs in Hollywood, Hollywood's ties to the US Government, navigating the film's industry as an Arab actor and what authentic representation actually looks like.

Until then, we highly recommend, and I can't say it enough to go and watch Real that's R E E L Bad Arabs now available for free.

This is this education is for free, y'.

All.

Okay.

On YouTube, this has been Jack McGriff, your host for this episode of Representation in Cinema.

As always, thank you for listening.