“Community” a new half hour sitcom (do they still make those anymore?) about a de-barred attorney returning to school via community college airing on NBC just launched this Fall. Besides being a novelty in the era of celebreality and competition-themed programing, this show has created a buzz of sorts for incorporating an Arab-American character as a permanent member of a motley crew of interesting characters, the ones that tend to compose community college settings.
I do applaud NBC for their new show’s depiction of an Arab American character, a dramatic shift from terrorist and religious contextualizing of Arabness which seems to be the image du jour on the big and silver screens, there is still much amiss with the effort.
As such, let me start by highlighting the positive part, which I earlier describe as a dramatic shit (and it is one!). The character is whole, which is a strong departure from one-dimensional characterizations Arabs and Arab Americans are so use to seeing their ethno-national namesakes take on. In one of the show’s early episodes, Palestinian-American Abed Nasir, played by Danny Pudi, expresses his secret interest in filmmaking. This poses a problem as it goes against his father’s wishes of ultimately taking over the family business-falafeel cart-standing in Denver, Colorado of all places. Stereotypes aside, which I don’t seem to mind, there is a subtlety of misrepresentation that operates below the surface, almost undetectable to the common viewer, which bothers me much more. When Abed’s father gets wind of his son’s controversial career shift, he storms onto campus with an air of lividness and “V”s in places where “W”s would have otherwise lived. As most Arab American children are used to, Nasir senior fulfills the obligatory angry Arab parent role by launching linguistic lacerations to his Palestinian American son in Modern standard Arabic. For those who didn’t catch my facetiousness, you have a Pakistani actor playing the role of a Palestinian father who uses a dialect of Arabic only reserved for newspapers and professional TV news programs. Don’t be mistaken, casting non-Arabs for Arab roles (as Danny Pudi is also not of Arab origin) is not my contestation here. It is the laziness apparent in the media representation of Arabs.
Why is it so hard to fact check? Southern California is not only replete with Arab Americans, it has one of the highest concentration of Arabs in the nation. You think a show producer might ask him or herself, “I want my Palestinian character to speak Arabic, perhaps I should contact a couple of Palestinians to ask for translations of a phrase and compare notes.” Is it that producers and studio heads just don’t know Arabs? If so, why are there no substantial outreach methods used to double check content that will air to national mainstream audience of a couple million??? You telling no one at Krasnoff Foster Entertainment, Harmonious Claptrap, Russo Brothers production, Universal Media Studios production in association with Sony Pictures Television (the producers of the series) had access to an Arab or an Arabic expert?
Once again, I do recognize the remarkable stride made in the representation of Arabs on the small screen-especially Arab characters limited to the terrorist roles written up by such hour long dramas as “24″ and “The Sleeper Cell.” Funny enough, when considering the only other show to portray a whole Arab character, I think of the Iraqi character Sayyid Jarrah on ABC’s “Lost,” one who is played by an Indian-descent Brit Naveen Andrews. But, as this last example also demonstrates, when will Arabs and Arab Americans be given the space or access to be a part of the process of their depiction?
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That actually sounds better than Hollywood has typically done with East Asians. Japanese playing Chinese, Chinese playing Koreans, Koreans playing Chinese… all the same right? And who cares of the "Japanese" characters are speaking Cantonese? It sounds the same as Japanese, right?
Posted by programmer craig | November 3, 2009, 6:21 pmSoCal is FULL of Arabs!!! Re-connecting with some old friends from High School, I was surprised how many of them were Arabs and I had no clue!
Someone once told me that Southern California (mainly Los Angeles and Orange counties) actually have the highest amounts of Arabs in the U.S. whereas Michigan has the highest concentration of Arabs(two separate things).
It's funny that real Arabs wouldn't be contacted or sought to play themselves, given the demographics you know? Maybe this show and the couple that have preceeded (where Arabs aren't extremists of some sort) will eventually open the doors to such actually taking place.
Posted by Los | November 3, 2009, 6:56 pmyeah-los, i've heard that statistic myself, and was in complete disbelieve till i realized what SoCal arabs do-they hide out in the cut! The Muslim variety have set up shop in OC (the ever famous Brookhurst street in Anaheim) and the Christian crew lodges in the Valley. You know, I was mad at the production companies. But its partly the fault of SoCal Arabs for not making the setting up a media monitoring organization in one of the most influential cities in the world a priority. The Muslims even recognized! MPAC has it's Hollywood Bureau and the Producers of PBS's "A Prince Among Slaves" program also established a non-profit organization that functions as a resource center for those who are in the market for expert consultants, research and information on Muslims and the Muslim world, MOST (Muslims on Screen and on Television). Where's ours?
Posted by maytha | November 3, 2009, 8:04 pmThere might be issues about who producers are allowed to hire, aren't there union rules about this type of stuff? I don't really know, but I always thought there was.
Posted by yaman | November 4, 2009, 2:55 amI didn't realize this character was supposed to be Arab. Thought he was Pakistani or maybe Indian. Shows what I know.
Posted by Snarla | November 3, 2009, 11:35 pmI don't know…I think the language issue is way less of a big deal than the fact that they have a Polish-Indian person playing a Palestinian. I realize that people of one race frequently play people of another race, but where do we draw that line, exactly? Why is it okay for Angelina Jolie to play a Black woman (Mariane Pearl) or for a Japanese person to play a Chinese person etc? There are plenty of actors (or aspiring actors) to fill each role, I just don't get why ethnicities can't be represented at least semi-accurately (I say semi because I think there's fair exception when it comes to people of mixed ethnicity playing one of their two or many ethnicities, e.g. Alia Shawkat).
Posted by JillianKF | November 4, 2009, 4:21 amI actually am not too perturbed about the actor’s ethnic authenticity. Although I recognize the frustration over the misrepresentation, at the end of the day, we end riding a slippery slope when we make it all about “ethno-racial street cred.” my main point was, why, why even create an Arab character if you know next to nothing about Arabs and are unwilling to do simple research or outreach to find out? Is this just further testament to the claim that Heeb magazine made a couple of years back, that Arabs are “the new cool”?
Posted by maytha | November 3, 2009, 11:14 pmI agree. I don't care that the actor is not Arab so much as the fact that I honestly didn't even know it was supposed to be an Arab character. If you're going to make only a halfhearted attempt at representing a culture, why bother at all?
Posted by Femme | November 4, 2009, 9:26 amBut May, Arabs ARE the new cool!
Posted by JillianKF | November 6, 2009, 8:18 pmJillian-who said I disputed that? I'm riding this whole post-9/11 James Dean-renegade rebel ethos wave as far as it goes. because by the end, we'll go back to being doctors and engineers with butchered american aphorisms and really bad jokes.
Posted by maytha | November 6, 2009, 9:03 pmI agree there is a long way to go for Arab representation in entertainment. However, I think the industry is on the right track (linguistically) if the father was speaking *almost* the right language. What did that sound like? "2nta 7maroun kabiroun!" I don't think we'll get dialect specific for a while. It only works with movies we make in Morocco, most likely because of their filming resources.
I don't think using actors from other ethnicities is so egregious, but it gets obvious when it affects the project linguistically. That reminds me: can someone tell the Israeli actors that play Arabs to stop gargling their r's ? It's annoying that they insist on portraying Arabs as Pepé Le Pew.
Posted by Kamilia | November 4, 2009, 3:59 pmso on point Kamilia-all you have to do is watch the whole Delta Force series to see the Arab Pepe Le Pew-ness in action!
Posted by maytha | November 4, 2009, 5:41 pmLOL!! That era of film making was a bad time for Arabic accents. That Swiss or German actress playing the Palestinian terrorist in Black Sunday had a pretty thick gargle, too. To the creator's credit, though, they actually tried to explain the Le Pew by saying she had gone to a Swiss boarding school or something.
I guess it's not limited to Israeli actors, but I think they deserve the most credit.
Posted by Kamilia | November 4, 2009, 7:02 pmMaybe that's why it's called "acting". Hello? You don't have to be exactly what you are portraying.
And it's produced for entertainment, that is the ultimate goal – so if you don't like it, don't watch!
Posted by duh | November 7, 2009, 11:22 amConsider that Chinese Americans makes up almost 4% of LA's population, TV shows still make supposedly Mandarin speaking characters speaking Cantonese, it's hardly surprising that nuances of Arabic languages gets by the producers.
Otherwise you probably should get equally up in arms about the misrepresentation of Chinese/Hong Kongese/Japanese/Korean/Singaporean/Taiwanese on TV all the time. Sometimes they don't even bother to get the naming system right. Say, Wu Fat in Hawaii Five-0, or that Wu-Mei Hong-Long character in Community. I mean they obviously had some sources to get it kind of right, but they don't bother to stick to what is actually right, and go for the approximation as long as it serves the plot.
anyway, scenes with Abed and his father in that episode is awesome, even if the language is off.
Posted by 竹板凳 | August 25, 2011, 3:05 amlet me put this in another way, just because Firefly featured horrendous Chinese accents, with no Asian speaking roles to actually speak Chinese, and while its established that all people speaks some Mandarin in that distant future, Serenity's alarm is in Cantonese, doesn't take anything away from that show. It is an awesome show with an awesome premise, and even though when they speak Mandarin I can't understand more than a word, it doesn't stop me from seeing that it is a tribute to the culture and they are trying to tell awesome stories with it.
Kind of like Community, they told a very thoughtful and endearing story with Abed and his father. The two characters are written wonderfully, not at all a typical 2D Arab character. So, I hope you can get past the language thing, and see what they accomplished.
By the way, Siddig El Fadil plays some complex Arabbic characters, even if some of them are terrorists.
Posted by 竹板凳 | August 25, 2011, 3:13 am