Kharmine
New member
Tarik, I think you're right that there is at least some residual racism inherent in an attitude that ignores culture and history and prefers to perpetuate stereotypes.
And a lot of it is poor education (how many schools teach about world history and culture in a holistic way, especially before the college level?), as well as plain ol' laziness. I find many people in the U.S. alone don't seem to remember what happened in the last administration and can't come up with simple, well-known historical facts.
That's why we need to respond pretty briskly when we seem something like bad journalism. I've been a newspaper copy editor; there's no excuse for allowing sloppy reporting.
The news media does pay attention to public clamour, however, so it would help if when we see something crappy and false about belly dancing sneaking into print, offline or on, we could alert topic forums and friends and bombard those publications with letters or email.
RB, you have my opinion to reprint whatever I've said. I've got magazine articles out that I can't reuse elsewhere for awhile because of copyright but nothing I've said here falls under that.
However, I think those of us who are able to contribute would probably like to see what kind of context you put our comments in before it goes online -- just so there is no misunderstanding on what we said. That would give us a chance, too, to make corrections or necessary clarifications.
And a lot of it is poor education (how many schools teach about world history and culture in a holistic way, especially before the college level?), as well as plain ol' laziness. I find many people in the U.S. alone don't seem to remember what happened in the last administration and can't come up with simple, well-known historical facts.
That's why we need to respond pretty briskly when we seem something like bad journalism. I've been a newspaper copy editor; there's no excuse for allowing sloppy reporting.
The news media does pay attention to public clamour, however, so it would help if when we see something crappy and false about belly dancing sneaking into print, offline or on, we could alert topic forums and friends and bombard those publications with letters or email.
RB, you have my opinion to reprint whatever I've said. I've got magazine articles out that I can't reuse elsewhere for awhile because of copyright but nothing I've said here falls under that.
However, I think those of us who are able to contribute would probably like to see what kind of context you put our comments in before it goes online -- just so there is no misunderstanding on what we said. That would give us a chance, too, to make corrections or necessary clarifications.
