If you're like me, you look forward to every Thursday night so you can watch the holy trinity of Shondaland shows: Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder. I've ever gone so far as to cancel plans on Thursdays because I really can't wait another day to see what happened to Meredith, what Olivia Pope is going to fix next or who killed Wes.
But one day, after tuning in to the newest Scandal episode, I was faced with a jarring and yet sadly not an unusual phenomenon: the show was focusing on some bad guys who were from the "fictitious country of Bandar." Except, they were speaking Farsi, and they were here to negotiate a historic nuclear deal with America, and they just happened to be hiding the fact that they're lying terrorists.
Season 5 episode 8 of Scandal, titled "Rasputin," is unfortunately one of the more recent examples of the popular tendency of casting Muslims, specifically Iranians, as the ambiguous "bad guys" in television, books, video games and more. In this particular instance, the interpreter for the fictitious leader of Bandar was seeking asylum in the United States in exchange for important information about illegal nuclear reactors in his country that his leader was lying about. Like usual, Olivia Pope saves the day, and most people probably didn't even realize the significance of the symmetry, or even realize Shonda Rhimes had chosen to use a known Middle Eastern language to represent her fake terrorists. But for those of us who speak Farsi, we were very disappointed to realize that Shonda Rhimes had intentionally cast Iranians for her fake terrorist country, and implied that they were lying backstabbers in this historic nuclear deal.
For the rational, this means nothing. It was just a TV show, and even if they realized Bandar is actually Iran and the people were actually speaking Farsi, they didn't consider it a reflection of real life. But they aren't my problem. It's the ignorant, the uneducated, the people who have already made up their mind, that they don't trust Iran or its people or this deal that I'm worried about. By seeing a popular TV show representing what they already believe in their heart of hearts, they only feel vindicated and justified in their beliefs. It's like hearing Donald Trump blame immigrants for all our problems; most people rationally know that's not true, but the racists who have hated immigrants all along have finally been justified in their beliefs by a man who is an authority figure.
And this is not the only instance this has happened. From science fiction novels that feature "dark skinned Western Asiatic featured" antagonists on a space station who named their delicious wine "shiraz" and have monopolized the weapons and nuclear bombs market to casting Iranian actors exclusively in roles that show them as villains, as terrorists, as the "bad guys" because they just "look the part," the act of portraying Iranians as bad people is a phenomenon that has gained scary traction in Hollywood, and as a young Iranian-American woman trying to start her career in the Federal government, this phenomenon has scared me witless.
It doesn't matter if the show or book gives a disclaimer that these characters aren't actually based on a real person; when you're fictitious villain speaks Farsi, is Muslim, and is portrayed by an Iranian actor, you're not fooling anyone. You may be fooling the average American, who couldn't be bothered to differentiate between the different Middle Eastern countries, but you're not fooling Middle Easterners, you're not fooling Iranians and you're not fooling me. This harmful representation of my ethnicity in Hollywood is not for public entertainment or consumption. This behavior is dangerous, and it puts my and my family's lives in danger from the people who cannot differentiate between fiction and reality.
And I don't appreciate it.
