xenophobia

"If you see something, say something" has been the slogan for buses, trains, and airports since 9/11. It's been used to justify increased surveillance and targeting of Muslims and people from the Middle East. After the Boston bombing, we've seen it used to mislabel the suspected Boston bomber as a "dark-skinned male" and later to misidentify Sunil Tripathi by Reddit users.

Kat Zhang's What's Left of Me takes the mass suspicion, xenophobia, and hysteria that's become normalized since 9/11 and sets it in an alternate United States where people are born with two personalities inside one body.

Now that word’s spread about the assault she endured, Logan is being re-victimized by those who say that an attractive white woman with blonde hair should’ve known better than to make her way through a mob of brown, Muslim men. Why didn’t Logan realize that all Arab men are misogynistic beasts who haven’t the slightest respect for their own women, let alone Western women—all of whom they regard as whores? Yeah, that about sums up the message on sites from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times to Salon.

The French government is considering proposing legislation that would ban Muslim women from wearing burqas or full-face veils, the Washington Post reports.

After the parliamentary commission presents formal recommendations for legislation Jan. 26, France will likely begin the process of banning burqas and veils in public facilities or even streets such as the famed Champs Elysees. One French lawmaker has already formally proposed that women be banned from wearing veils anywhere in public.

Although women’s groups and more than 200 members of Parliament support the proposed bans, young Muslim women in France say they wear the veil to adhere to the teachings of fundamentalist Islam, not because of male oppression. French Defense Minister Herve Morin has already predicted that such a sweeping ban would be unconstitutional.