One of Donald Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order to limit Muslim immigration to the United States, a step toward the “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” he had campaigned on. This extraordinary act of Islamophobia provoked unprecedented opposition: Hollywood movies and mainstream television shows began to feature more Muslim characters in contexts other than terrorism; universities and private businesses included Muslims in their diversity initiatives; and the criminal justice system took hate crimes against Muslims more seriously. Yet in Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion, Professor Evelyn Alsultany argues that, even amid this challenge to institutionalized Islamophobia, diversity initiatives fail on their promise by only focusing on crisis moments. 

In this talk, Alsultany will focus on two cases in which violence against Muslims became headline news, yet law enforcement refused to classify these murder cases as “hate crimes”: the 2015 murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and the 2017 murder of Nabra Hassanen in Reston, Virginia. What made these cases newsworthy and what are the implications of law enforcement refusing a hate crime designation? Highlighting a moment of media visibility regarding anti-Muslim racism, Alsultany illustrates how greater public attention regarding violence against Muslims does not necessarily result in greater national inclusion of Muslims, a decrease in anti-Muslim racism, or restorative justice.  

Evelyn Alsultany is professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC’s Dornsife College and a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media and on forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. Alsultany is the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion (2022) which was listed as one of the 10 best scholarly books of 2022 by The Chronicle of Higher Education; was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ Prose Award; and received Honorable Mention for the Arab American National Museum book award. She is also the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012). Alsultany has served as an educator and consultant for Hollywood studios (Netflix, Amazon, NBC Universal) and co-authored criteria, the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. She has published op-eds in The Hollywood Reporter, Time, and Newsweek.   

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