Week 6 Response

In regard to the first reading by Cainkar, I wanted to make two points. First, I thought it was interesting to think about the use of American flags as protection for Arabs or Muslims who felt targeted. I compared the physical presentation of flags to what Mahmood has been saying about wearing the veil. While she argues that women wear the veil to THEN feel modesty, not the other way around, I wonder how this theory could apply to Cainkar's documentation of placing flags outside of houses. Do the Arabs and Muslims do this in order to truly assimilate into American culture, or do they simply go through the actions to protect themselves? Maybe a combination of both? This would have been a great question to ask the interviewees.

Also, although I really enjoyed Cainkar's article, I would have appreciated a larger sample size to back up the claims she made, in addition to a better survey method. Her argument would have carried more weight with me had she talked to people outside of just Chicago. Moreover, although I do believe what her interviewees said, I do want to shed light on the fact that self-reported hate crime incidents COULD be exaggerated or underreported. For example, women often experience events more emotionally and have the tendency to dramatize stories, whereas men may feel embarrassed by hate crimes and feel the need to hide them. I don't know if this necessarily happened with Cainkar, but it could be a potential problem with her methods in dealing with such a sensitive topic. I would have liked her to address this issue.

Finally, I thought it was interesting that all three readings for Monday dealt with a theme we've been talking about for quite some time: namely, that grouping people or an action into one interpretation reduces who they are or what they do into that interpretation only. We saw this in Cainkar's article, where all women in hijab were painted as the "ultimate symbols of foreignness" to facilitate discrimination against them (Cainkar 261). We saw this in Shakhsari's article, where blogs were often simply grouped as "complicities" and "resistances," and not individual works of self expression (Shakhsari 16). Lastly, we saw this in Mahmood's chapter, where she posited that many people see Muslim women "through the lens of resistance" instead of truly examining their individual actions (Mahmood 175). The authors have been trying to emphasize that taking the easy route and categorizing people ignores their vast differences and nuanced opinions, or that it allows hate and stereotypes to be propagated more easily.