Consider the following statements: “Most Negroes, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with “the sweat of their brow,’ (are) loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands.”
“The Negro mind has an all-encompassing preoccupation with sex.”
“In the Negro view of human nature, no person is supposed to be able to maintain incessant, uninterrupted control over himself. Any event that is outside routine everyday occurrence can trigger such a loss of control … Once aroused, Negro hostility will vent itself indiscriminately on all outsiders.”
I hope you agree with me that these sentiments are thoroughly offensive, and reek of racial stereotyping of the worst kind. The opinions embodied in these noxious statements are typical of a bygone era, evident in the racist attitudes of colonial powers, and echoed in spurious scholarship by some American academics during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They belong to the outdated and discredited “national character” school of social studies, in which vast generalizations about ethnic groups are made on the basis of very flimsy evidence, often selected to suit the author’s predetermined biases.
These aren’t actual quotations as written, but you have to change only one word in each sentence to find them in a recently republished book that has been used to teach American forces in Iraq. Substitute “Arab” for “Negro” and you have excerpts from The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai, a book that is, according to Paul Whittaker, reporting in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “the bible on Arab behaviour for the US military.”
Whittaker quotes a professor at an American military college that The Arab Mind is “probably the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military.” It is used as a textbook at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg warfare school.
The Arab Mind was originally published in 1976, and Patai died in 1996, but his book was reprinted in 2002. It includes, to use Whittaker’s words, “an enthusiastic introduction by Norvell “Tex’ De Atkine, a former US army colonel and the head of Middle East studies at Fort Bragg.”
“It is essential reading,” De Atkine wrote. “At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind forms the basis of my cultural instruction.”
Like the British journalist Whittaker, I was unaware of this book until Seymour Hersh mentioned it in his recent article in the New Yorker concerning the endemic strain of cultural brutality in the US military that reaches to the highest ranks. It’s not just the so-called “white trash” working class army low-lifes who think naked, masturbating Iraqis are funny. This book, so beloved by neo-conservative politicians in Washington as well as some military leaders, tells us, on the basis of one flimsy study dating from 1954, that Arabs consider “masturbation is far more shameful than visiting prostitutes,” and that they all view sex “as a taboo vested with shame and repression.” Put these two cultural stereotypes together with a third from the book’s pages — that “the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation” — and you have a clear message in the lessons taught to all ranks of the military. It hardly seems a coincidence that naked masturbating Iraqis appear vividly in the notorious photos from Abu Ghraib prison.
Whittaker points out that in contrast to the adulation of Patai’s book in military and political circles, American academic opinion is “universally scathing.” One academic is quoted as suggesting the “best use for this volume, if any, is as a doorstop.” Another considered the book to be an “old and thoroughly discredited form of scholarship.” None of the academics Whittaker contacted for his article thought the book suitable for serious study although one had assigned it for review as an example “of bad, biased social science.”
But it’s easy to see why the book is so popular with conservatives who view the world in black and white, and soldiers who find themselves in an alien culture, stuck between a rock and a hard place. The book gives a “superficially coherent view of the Arab enemy and their supposed personality defects. It is also readily digestible . . . has lots of juicy quotes (and) a generous helping of sex.”
The fact that military brutality is camouflaged — even justified — by lousy scholarship is bad enough, but what is perhaps most worrying for American culture at home and abroad is the way The Arab Mind revives some of America’s nastiest old prejudices about black people and applies them to modern day Arabs. Just like African Americans before them, Arabs are depicted as “lazy, sex-obsessed, and apt to turn violent over the slightest little thing.”
The Bush regime exports this racism to Iraq at the point of a gun in the name of “democracy” and “freedom.” No wonder much of the world now regards Uncle Sam as a hypocrite and bully.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2004.
