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sa7ira:

meiamthefrenchcanadian:

fantasticplaneteer:

bareback-cuntessa:

micdotcom:

19 powerful photos shatter stereotypes of Middle Eastern teenage girls

how does this shatter stereotypes? Because they’re all white?

you can’t not see them as stereotypes if they’re brown? they need to be whitewashed to deserve your empathy and respect??

Pretty sure at least two of those girls were very clearly not white (second to last and the girl wearing the hijab), which is kinda irrelevant anyway cause a lot of middle easterners are paler and potentially “white passing” 

Also if you click the link the photographer, Rania Matar a Lebanese woman, said the point of the photos was to show that, if you didn’t see the captions, you’d think these girls could be from anywhere in the world, that they looked like typical American teenagers. She says the point she was striving for is that these girls are just like any other girls in the world, to break the stereotypes Western society pushes on them as burka clad helpless victims. 

Middle eastern girls having to be visibly brown is a stereotype is it not

Just fyi the girls in the pictures that are in the united states are for the most part NOT “middle eastern” (which, excuse me, what the fuck? since when is middle eastern an identity?) she took pictures of American teenagers (mostly blonde white girls) and then took pictures of girls in lebanon and some pictures are from bethlehem and some are from palestinian refugee camps.

This article is disingenuous as fuck “you can’t tell if a picture is taken in america or not” if you go to her portfolio you can immediately tell when a picture was taken in a refugee camp. I want to point out a couple of things: 1) the majority of the girls in hijab from her two portfolios are Palestinian, 2) the majority of the darker-skinned arab girls are also Palestinian. Just because “a lot of middle easterners are paler and potentially white-passing” doesn’t mean it’s okay whitewash and pretend that we’re majority pale and majority white passing. Even in the Levant, I am pretty sure most people are dark-skinned, some Arabs are even black, pale people just get the most exposure in the media.

And what the fuck is wrong with you people that we can’t be seen as “normal” teenage girls unless we live in environments that look like they could be white suburban home in America. What the fuck is wrong with you people that you can’t see someone as normal unless they “look” just like you??? Are girls unworthy of being seen as human if they actually do wear a burqa? or a niqab? or hijab? or even if they don’t wear any of those things, but still can’t wear shorts or put up posters because their parents don’t let them? Do we have to give up our culture and identities and religion in favor of this globalized “unstereotyped” (read: American passing, I’m coining this term today) person we need to be so we can be seen as human?