3. Instrumental Staging and Commercialization

Commodity Antiracism

In the backlash that rapidly succeeded the initial accusations, Ahmed was allowed, by way of public recognition and proclamation, to reenter the domain of youthful potential and promise—a zone of permitted experimentation that is too often restricted to white boys (or, as we will see below, may be granted to some nonwhites only if they adhere to the scripts of “model minority”). But support for Ahmed did not come by way of a public reckoning with the racialized and Islamophobic discrimination he had experienced; that discrimination was occluded behind the national celebration of his scientific potential. He was made “like us” through reference to the most cherished of liberal values—rationality and entrepreneurial spirit—characteristics that the dominant U.S. culture rarely recognizes in “irrational” Muslims. Ahmed was renarrativized from “terrorist/bad immigrant” to “good immigrant/future-tech-worker/model minority.”

The benevolence afforded to Ahmed was instrumental and strategic: through symbolic gestures (invitations to visit or apply to a program), capitalist corporations and liberal politicians framed themselves as anti-racist and pro-Muslim, even as they sidestepped responsibility for creating structural changes to counter anti-Muslim racism. When they commended Ahmed’s creativity and his interest in technology, representatives of firms like Facebook and political leaders like Obama were capitalizing on an opportunity to create goodwill for themselves. I view these gestures as a form of commodity antiracism. I fashion this term inspired by the formulation of commodity feminism by Goldman, Heath, and Smith.10 As a practice, commodity antiracism appropriates the ideals of anti-racism (in this case, those ideals also dovetail with pro-youth, pro-technology, and pro-Muslim logics), empties them of their political significance, and then offers them back to the public as a commodity that builds goodwill for the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill de Blasio. Offering this commodified antiracism to a public whose gratitude is assumed, the corporate or political leaders can display their antiracism—and do so without any meaningful commitment to practicing antiracism within their own organizations.

On the receiving end of this performative benevolence, when a Black Muslim boy like Ahmed gains entry to the domain of innocence, that access is tentative, contingent, and non-transferable. Unlike race, which in the case of Brown and Black people is naturalized, the capacity for scientific achievement is not—and on the occasions when it is racialized, it is coded as white or affixed to the model minority paradigm, which perpetuates anti-Blackness. The inclusive gestures toward Ahmed and his “innocence”—not just his guilt or innocence in relation to the bomb-making accusations, but in relation to the more abstract innocence of childhood—were hotly debated on right-wing media platforms, a contestation that recalls our earlier discussion of comparative innocence and criminality. Fox News host Anna Kooiman insisted that Ahmed was “not as innocent as he seems.”11 She cited a minor incident, “[B]lowing soap bubbles in a bathroom,” for which Ahmed was suspended, as evidence of his school disciplinary problems.12 That incident itself reminds us that a seemingly innocuous action can be read as offensive—even deserving of suspension—when it is performed by a Black Muslim boy. The threat-innocence binary was ruthlessly exposed when Ahmed’s teacher said he was “one of those kids that could either be CEO of a company or head of a gang.”13 It is worth noting here that both Ahmed’s adherents and his detractors appear equally comfortable in holding innocence as a gift they can choose to bestow or withhold.

Other efforts to recast Ahmed as a threat more explicitly invoked the proto-terrorist trope. Robert Spencer, director of a popular far-right blog called Jihad Watch, pondered the “ominous implications” of Ahmed Day for New York’s residents and stoked fear by pushing Ahmed’s factually harmless device back toward the bomb that anti-Muslim prejudice preferred to imagine: “Will some enterprising young jihadi take advantage of this favorable new situation, and make a clock that really is a bomb? If that ever happens, will Mayor de Blasio apologize for Ahmed Day? Will Barack Obama apologize for feting the lad at the White House? Of course not.”14 Comments on Spencer’s article invoked language that distanced Ahmed from innocence—insisting that the fourteen-year-old had full knowledge and agency—together with some “terrorism” messaging. Commenting under the name Steve Bryant, one reader focused particularly on knowledge and intent: “The obvious nature and intent of the little asshole is so much so that Mad Magazine could have run it as a satirical lead feature. . . . The boy knew exactly what he was doing (or his handlers did) and they have been successful beyond their wildest dreams” (emphasis added). Another commentator (screen name: jtrollla) called him “Islamobrat” and yet another (screen name: Lilith Wept) proposed a solution: “Hopefully we can just do something like declare that Islam is not a religion, but a socio political system that has as a goal the over thoro [sic] of all non islamic goverments [sic], that Islam is not compatable [sic] with, can simply not co exist with American laws and way of life.” This comment is illuminating in the parallel it draws between the Muslim child’s innocence and his religion: as the child is presumed to exist outside the pale of innocence, so is Islam readily expelled from the realm of religions of God.

Ahmed and his family decided to move to Qatar a month after the incident to avoid ongoing harassment. In 2017, a federal judge dismissed their lawsuit against the Irving Independent School District due to lack of evidence. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay of the Northern District of Texas noted in the ruling that the plaintiff (Ahmed’s father) did not offer any facts to demonstrate that the school district employees had treated Ahmed “differently than other similarly situated students, and that the unequal treatment was based on religion or race.”15 Although the judge allowed the Mohameds to submit additional facts to amend claims that were deemed “factually deficient,” the refiled case was also dismissed in 2018.

Commercialization of Terrorism

In April 2013, twenty-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, together with his older brother, planted pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. Unlike Ahmed, Dzhokhar was, in fact, a bomber.16 Rolling Stone ran a cover story on Dzhokhar in August 2013, just another entry in the magazine’s coverage of popular culture, music, and politics (Figure 2). The cover line—“How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam, and Became a Monster”—carried the now-familiar elements of a dysfunctional family, Islam as an aberration, and Muslims as monstrous. Despite the established storyline—consistent with how Muslim young men and boys are generally presented in Western media—Rolling Stone was widely criticized for the cover. The Mayor of Boston said it “reward[ed] a terrorist with celebrity treatment”; others saw it as “insulting” and “glamorizing the face of terror.”17 Magazine-cover commodification of terrorism is not uncommon and it is rarely so controversial. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly been featured on the covers of TIME and Newsweek; Omar Mateen, Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Charles Manson have also appeared on magazine covers.18 Why then the pushback on a story that labeled its subject a monster?

The problem in Dzhokhar’s case was the photo. Rolling Stone’s words call him a monster, but what we see on that cover is a tousle-haired white youth; with his carefully styled facial hair and T-shirt, he could easily be a young rock star. Indeed, some readers compared the image to Justin Bieber’s 2011 “Super Boy” Rolling Stone cover (Figure 3), and others to an iconic cover photo of 1960s rock star Jim Morrison (Figure 4).19 Rolling Stone came under attack because it disturbed the prevailing “culture of the visual” associated with terrorists and terrorism. Hal Foster theorizes such visual culture in a way that links the physiological mechanism of seeing with socialization.20 The cover photo successfully evaded the racialized frames that readers had long associated with terrorism. It flipped the expectation of Brown assailant and white victim that the wSieci Polish magazine cover catered to; instead, it centered the face and torso of a young, white man whom the magazine invites readers to see as both victim (of radicalization) and perpetrator (of terrorism). Looking at a cover image of an attractive could-be-rock-star youth, readers were robbed of meanings they had already begun to create about Muslims, and Black and Brown boys, including, perhaps, a belief that subjecting Brown-presenting Muslims to rigorous surveillance is all that is needed to identify the “leakage” that is supposed to be both inevitable and visible. Readers were angry because they couldn’t make sense of a cover that belied their certainties, in this case, their certainty in associating terrorism with Muslims, and Muslims with Brownness and menace. As Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple points out, Dzhokhar defied assumptions that terrorists are animalistic: The photo “humanize[d]” him for people who otherwise “want[ed] to see him as an animal from Day One.”21 Wemple goes on to connect the photo to a narrative in which Dzhokhar exists as “our” friend: “The facts are he wasn’t an animal, at least to his peer group, for the longest time. They remember him as a dear friend. That’s a problem, because he was part of our society and he turned on it by all indications, or allegedly.”

Rolling Stone had committed two cultural “sins.” First is a sin of omission—Rolling Stone should have made him look Brown and threatening, which would have reinforced readers’ prior understanding of Muslim boys. And second is a sin of commission—Rolling Stone made him look white and attractive, engaging the reader’s positive emotional or aesthetic response, thus deliberately provoking the reader’s anger at what seems to them like a bait and switch. The cover image entices the viewer to respond emotionally to Dzhokhar as a sympathetic, attractive figure even as the text pulls against identification and sympathy. It makes a connection between whiteness and terrorism that Americans have long resisted in the face of growing evidence. Caroline Corbin has argued that the American public persistently reserves the label of terrorist for Brown Muslims and resists using this label for white people who commit acts of violence.22 Even in recent years as far-right violence has been increasing and as the FBI has developed new naming regimes for domestic crimes, it has steered clear from labeling white violence “terrorism.” Corbin’s work indicates that this reluctance derives not from a narrow law-enforcement bias but from a larger crisis of racial myths that include assumptions about white innocence and white superiority. The FBI’s 2019 “Confronting White Supremacy” statement before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, for instance, uses such terms as “domestic violence,” “lone offenders,” “homegrown violence,” or “hate crimes,” but does not categorize particular trends or offenses as white—even when white individuals are the overwhelming majority of perpetrators in a given category. In a remarkable contrast, the FBI used the phrase “Black Identity Extremists” in a 2017 intelligence assessment to justify surveillance of Black people, including Black activists.23 In 2019, after legislators expressed concern over the phrase and its implications, the FBI introduced a new phrase: “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism.”24 Today the phrase “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism” is used. These new phrases effectively group white supremacists with Black activists, placing Black people and organizations protesting police brutality in the same category as those who insist on the superiority of the white race.

It is against this broader cultural resistance to view white-coded individuals as terrorists that some Rolling Stone readers set out to search for images of Dzhokhar that Rolling Stone could—or “should”—have used instead to convey the “truth.” They tried to move Dzhokhar out of whiteness—or situate him within the familiar Brown and Black visual economy where, in their minds, he belonged. Consider an article on the website of Boston’s NPR news station, WBUR. Its author suggests why an alternate black-and-white image of Dzhokhar would have been more appropriate:

It’s a black-and-white photo in which Tsarnaev, with puffy and narrowed eyes, looks into the camera. He does not look friendly or cute. He looks—or is trying to look—menacing but doesn’t quite pull it off. To me, having read the Rolling Stone story, it looks like a photo of someone in the middle of a transition from “popular, promising student” to “monster.” And a black-and-white photo on the cover of the usually colorful Rolling Stone would have really made a visual statement.25

In the game of racializing, people may be instrumentally staged—whitened or darkened—in the service of a larger ideological project. Rolling Stone wanted to play on Dzhokhar’s white-passing to suggest that someone who is “one of us” could be turned (hinting at the “at risk” narrative), while the readers who pushed back against the cover image wanted to force him into the category of “a risk.”26 They accordingly proposed photos that darkened him to conform with their expectations that a Muslim immigrant should be nonwhite in appearance. From that visual confirmation of racialized Muslimness, the slide into proto-terrorism is easy and predictable.

Instead of trying to better understand the complexity around political violence, media figures who commented on this controversial portrayal of Dzhokhar chose to stay within older frames of fear and xenophobia. CNN journalist S. E. Cupp worried explicitly about innocence: “To me, seems @RollingStone isn’t glamorizing terrorism, but proving that it can look innocent and young and attractive. Important lesson . . . I hope every young @RollingStone reader [who] reads Tsarnaev story, realizes that radical Islam’s here, can even infect a young Jim Morrison.”27 The term “infect” here harkens back to our earlier discussion about purity/impurity; here, the health of a nation is undermined by “radical Islam” (viewed as a disease or pollutant in this case). When Cupp mentions 1960s white rock star Jim Morrison, she reminds her audience of the whiteness that radicalized Muslims now purportedly threaten. Tommy Vietor, former White House national security spokesman, expressed similar concerns: “a disaffected U.S. kid could see this and think terrorists are afforded rock star status.”28

But the presence of Dzhokhar—a boy of Chechnyan decent from Kyrgyzstan—in Cambridge also recalls the complexity of Rezwan’s status as a refugee from a U.S.-driven war in Afghanistan. Dzhokhar’s family had applied for political asylum in the United States following actions by Russia (annexation and ethnic cleansing) in Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan. But after arriving in America, he reportedly became particularly concerned about U.S. imperial wars against Muslims. Might we read Dzhokhar as responding to a broader pattern in which the United States engages in colonizing violence against Muslims, even though his relationship to that experience is indirect?

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana defended the cover as an apt image, belonging to a story about “what an incredibly normal kid [Dzhokhar] seemed like to those who knew him best back in Cambridge [Mass.]”29 But beyond this storyline we might also ask how our aesthetic demands to “see the other” (in this case, terrorists) can influence supply. Dzhokhar’s image is disturbing in the sense that it is meant to titillate and excite but also to extract the viewer’s energy through the dissonance experienced. And Rolling Stone is more comfortable than are many of its readers, with a disruptive image of Dzhokhar on the cover, because the magazine stands to profit from its readers’ discomfort. There is an indisputably economic dimension to this visual exchange. Rolling Stone responds to a public demand to see terrorism, and it makes money whether or not it shows them the picture of terrorism they expect. In fact, the magazine potentially makes more money by showing readers an image that counters their expectations. While a few retailers such as Star Market, CVS, and Tedeschi Food Shops decided not to carry the Rolling Stone issue, sales for the issue were twice the magazine’s average.30 AdWeek ranked the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev cover as the “Hottest Cover of the Year.”31 It may therefore be more helpful to read this cover image (together with more conventional photos of known or accused terrorists) as responding to a public demand to see violence in an economy that philosopher Sayak Valencia has termed as “gore capitalism.”32 Rather than pushing us toward moralistic arguments for or against Rolling Stone, thinking with Valencia directs us toward questions about the commodification of terrorism across a range of contexts—magazine covers, but also books, social media, and television—and how consumer demand to see terror/terrorists shapes this exchange.

The Cunning of Capitalist Benevolence

Why is it that the moments and images discussed in this chapter are not felt more directly as counterexamples prompting logical reevaluation of the “knowledge” so painfully constructed at the expense of Muslim boys? The answer may lie in the fact that these are cases of instrumental staging in the service of capital, and not much more.

When Ahmed is celebrated, it is his inventiveness and scientific acumen that are celebrated and not the individual who possesses these attributes. The possession of these traits—not typically associated with Muslim boys as socially constructed in America—allows Ahmed to step outside the enclosed space assigned to Muslim boyhood and briefly access innocence. Ahmed’s access is incidental; it is not shared with the community of other Muslim boys and hence does not destabilize the dominant constructions of Muslim boyhood. Capitalist benevolence operates through abstraction or exception. Elsewhere I have discussed how such abstractions work in relation to Muslim girls. Analyzing the case of Malala Yousafzai, I have argued that exceptionalizing Malala is a strategy to isolate her and thus sustain the trope of victimized Muslim women.33 In this way, her courage (as a Muslim woman), her pursuit of education, and even her critique of U.S. imperialism are radically disassociated from the category of Muslim women, keeping the latter as politically useful victimized subjects of Muslim men and Islam. In both instances, the instrumental staging after the effect enables politicians and corporations to buy the public’s goodwill and mitigate any simmering backlash.

The instrumental staging in the case of Dzhokhar is more obvious: his rock-star likeness and white-passing elicit backlash that Rolling Stone then proceeds to monetize. There is no real effort to humanize him, to use the dissonance created to destabilize preconceived notions about Islam and Muslims. Instead, the staging reiterates stereotypes of how the nation is at risk of being breached by Islamic “monsters”—foreign, and now domestic as well. Commodity antiracism and commercial terrorism then work in similar ways: Mayor de Blasio gains support for his computer science program and Rolling Stone nearly doubles its sales for the issue. Meanwhile, little is done to reframe Muslim boys in the eyes of those who consume these instrumental stagings.