Rostam Batmanglij Quotes

Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.

I have had strangers come up to me and attempt to mimic the Chinese language in a derogatory manner. I have been told countless times that I speak 'good' English. I have been asked why someone like me would be interested in watching NFL football. On any given day, if I walk around with a camera, I will be mistaken for a tourist from Asia.

The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic.

I think Hollywood makes the mistake of mixing all these identities and cultures, mostly from the Middle East.

It's a funny thing that's happening online. The Middle Easterners want 'Aladdin' to be a Middle Eastern story, and the Indians want 'Aladdin' to be an Indian story. The truth is, it's really a folk tale from the 1800s, and Agrabah is a fictional place that's a culmination of India and Asia and the Middle East.

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.

The way people see Africa is mostly dark.

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

At times one feels that what is being said in the West is that the fact that you are a Muslim predisposes you to this blind, stupid terrorism.

Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.

Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.

The West will never understand Muslims so long as we ... judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves.

Since 9/11, every time there is an incident overseas attributed to Muslims or Arabs, we go on orange alert ourselves …. There are individuals here who are off the wall, who think that every woman who wears a hijab or every man named Muhammad is out to blow things up.

I am totally shocked and find it unacceptable that because there have been caricatures in the West, extremists can burn flags or take fundamentalist or extremist positions which would prove the cartoonists right.

I don't know why, anytime you see a car filled with people, it's either Middle Easterners or Mexicans. It's one of those two. Even for short trips, my dad would be like, 'Okay, everybody in the car.'

I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.

Especially after the Twin Towers, we're so terrified of 'Arabic' people. And talk about stereotypical negative portrayals of people of certain groups, if you look at the portrayal of Arabic people in Hollywood films, it's just appalling. They've always been just the easiest of targets - along with native Africans and what have you.

The common stereotype of the Middle Eastern, Muslim-born terrorist is not just lazy and inaccurate but easy fodder for the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam far right.

I think we have cultural bias and practice some ethnocentrism when it comes to ethnic food in America.

Sometimes in the mainstream movies, a character who is from the South is portrayed by a person who looks like a South Indian but speaks in fake accent.

The Asian woman in Hollywood movies has usually been one of two extremes - totally submissive or totally ruthless. In either case her primary function has been decorative.

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.