Discriminatory references in the media used to be a fairly common practice, particularly in American cartoons of the early twentieth century. African Americans, Jews, Asians, Arabs were either “the bad guy” or were simply gratuitously made fun of, ridiculed, or misrepresented. Subsequently, many groups and lobbies have made efforts to put an end to such portrayal of racist attitudes, and procedures were put in place to increase sensitivity in the definition of cartoons. This, however, didn’t always apply to the portrayal of Arabs.
That’s all Sheikh is a research paper that looks at the discrepancies in the way producers and distributors of cartoons dealt with discriminatory images of Arabs versus those of other ethnic groups; discrepancies that can be viewed as a diagnosis of deeper issues in Arab-American relations.
