The Disturbing White Supremacy in Visuals of Arab Suffering

When Activism Upholds Anti-Arab Racism: The Bias in Circulated Victim Photos.

Two typical Arab women. On the left with features commonly ascribed to Semitic people, on the right with typical ‘Eurocentric’ features.

Content Warning: This article discusses the disturbing trend of whitewashing visuals used to depict victims of Israeli violence against Palestinians and Lebanese. Out of immense respect for their suffering, no actual photographs of victims will be included. The aim is to raise awareness about this insidious issue in a sensitive manner without replicating potential harms.

When Tragedy Wears a White Mask: Dehumanizing Arab Victims

In the digital ecosystem of social media activism, visuals have an unparalleled power to render human experiences visceral or invisible. The curation of which images get amplified can either uphold deeply entrenched racist hierarchies or challenge them.

It is with a heavy heart that a disturbing trend must be reckoned with - the whitewashing of visuals depicting Palestinian and Lebanese civilian victims of Israeli military strikes and violence. Across social media platforms, solidarity posts overwhelmingly circulate photographs of the lightest-skinned children impacted, effectively suppressing and excluding representations of darker Arab victims.

This is not merely an oversight but symptomatic of internalized white supremacist ideologies perceiving white, Eurocentric-looking individuals as more worthy of empathy and grievance. It perpetuates the racist myth that victims with features more commonly ascribed to Semites - curly hair, brown eyes, brown skin, prominent nose - are somehow less innocent, less human. Their pain is obscured and rendered invisible.

It Unwittingly Supports the Current Violence Against Arabs.

At its core, by not humanizing Arabs with semitic features, this practice upholds the same racist biases that enable violence against Palestinians and Lebanese in the first place. By defaulting to visuals privileging whiteness, a perverse logic is reinforced - that fairness equates to virtue while darker semblances signal foreigner, threat, other.

These stereotypes have long been weaponized as pretexts to devalue and destroy Arab life and land. Israel's ability to perpetrate violence against Arab civilians with impunity is precisely enabled by the deep-seated dehumanization and stereotyping of Arabs as unworthy of rights and dignity.

People circulating predominantly "white-looking" images of victims in hopes of garnering Western solidarity may be unconscious of the systemic harm they inflict. However, their optical choices are rooted in the same discrimination that marks Arab civilians as sub-human and expendable in war. Untold darker victims are rendered invisible sacrifices.

If we are to transcend conflicts driven by racist ideologies, we must resist their internalized manifestations everywhere - including our representations of tragedy. Otherwise, we become complicit upholders of the very injustices we purport to resist.

- Karim