American Degrees

By Amel Ahmed

It's politics man and they are playing games and they are spinning it. They are out there spinning for the cameras. ...The government is feeding the people a line of bull.

All of a sudden I am to take with credibility the media's newfound sense of empathy when just weeks ago Black victims were being labeled as nothing more than looting refugees. It seems that only in moments of national crisis, is the degree of everyone’s citizenship revealed. Whether it be in the era of Japanese internment, McCarthyism, or the PATRIOT Act, when the country is forced to reorder its priorities everyone soon discovers exactly where they fit in and what their place is.

After 9-11 it was repeated ad-nauseam that we are all Americans. As if to help corroborate the lie, flags suddenly came out of hibernation and took over nearly every street block in America. But the process of separating real Americans from the convenient ones soon began, and Muslims discovered to their dismay that the mantra we were being fed by both pundits and media betrayed how we were actually treated. Just how American we really are was revealed when Congress passed into law a bill that made every Muslim suspect and anointed it with the words "A Patriot Act," a title as disingenuous as many of the flags that waived from corner to corner.

We discovered just how American we are when national security stipulated that we no longer had any rights and government agents were given permission to infiltrate our mosques, tap our phone lines, barge into our homes and separate us from our loved ones. Muslims were left languishing in prisons for months without being told why they were being held, but knowing that being Muslim had something if not largely to do with it. How could the government explain its ugly behavior with any justifiable words other than masking it with the label, "A Patriot Act"?

When hurricane Katrina hit, the media in a moment of weakness admitted that the African-"American" was nothing more than a refugee in this country. He was labeled a looter and in the President's view, his tragedy nothing more than a "temporary disturbance." Soon it was realized that continuing to treat it as a temporary disturbance was no longer politically feasible and the media quickly did an about face. It became complicated when the “refugees” began pouring into neighboring states; when in a fit of tearful rage the Mayor of New Orleans demanded over public airwaves that the feds "get their asses moving"; when he wondered aloud how a nation that that could immediately allocate its resources for war after 9-11, was fumbling to allocate adequate resources now; when the rage that was engulfing the hearts of many African Americans and other genuine citizens threatened to burst and destroy the national unity that the government and it’s fourth branch have been working so hard to convince us of post 9-11.

The media now tries to portray the disaster as a product of mishandling, a tragic error that could have just as well occurred in any other part of the country- choosing to sideline the issue of race and instead blaming the reaction of this country on clumsy bureaucrats and FEMA’s Mike Brown. Now the public can sympathize with the tragedy right on media cue and go to sleep content that what happened was due to one man’s negligence-- rather than the theme of racism that has been the hallmark of this country’s torrid history with itself and the world.

Amel Ahmed ia a Journalism and Middle Eastern major at New York University