Tom Facchine – Why Token Muslim Representation Is Actually A Bad Thing

			A lot of Muslims, they they talk these days about representation, right about how we need
representation in the media, we need representation in politics, we need representation in society.
And this is coming from a good place, right? Because it is true that if a child for example, a
Muslim child sees somebody who's in a position of power and status, that they are able to see
themselves the literal word, the literal meaning of identity, see themselves in that person. And
therefore, that person can become a guiding light for what they're going to be able to eventually
become themselves as opposed to the if the all the people of status and skill and people who are
		

			admired and society, none of them look like you, right, and none of them sort of represent you, you
can't identify with any of them, then you're kind of unmoored, you don't necessarily have an anchor
or a sort of guiding light to model yourself after. So that's true. And we have to pay attention to
that. But there's a huge mistake that a lot of Muslims are are making. And that is to assume that
the quality of representation doesn't matter. Rather, it's just about quantity of representation. We
shouldn't be chasing percentages of people in movies or TV or anything that call themselves Muslim,
or have a certain color skin or have this identity or that identity, right. What we want is quality
		

			representation. We want people who actually embody our beliefs, because if we don't, if we're not
paying attention to the quality of the representation, then it really is a vehicle for the
indoctrination of Muslims and abandoning what makes us special and abandoning our faith and
abandoning what we believe we're going to have caricatures. tokenization. Right, people who are
supposedly representing us, they look like us, they claim to be us, they might have a few tokens
sort of similarities with us, but down deep their entire paradigm, their entire worldview is
completely not only on Islamic, but anti Islamic. And so now it's actually hurting the Muslim
		

			community, this type of representation rather than helping it. So we need to turn away from just
being very excited about representation for representations sake, and we should be concerned with
the quality of the representation that's going on. And we should worry about the sort of ways in
which our beliefs and our values can manifest and actually contribute to society and not just people
who claim the same identity as us.