Arab-American scholar, activist dies at 81

Jack G. Shaheen, an Arab American scholar, author and activist who devoted his career to challenging venomous stereotypes of Arabs in film and television — usually depicted, he once said, as “billionaires, bombers and belly dancers” — died July 9 at a hospital in Charleston, South Carolina. He was 81.

The cause was cancer, said his daughter, Michele Tasoff.

Shaheen, who spent decades teaching mass communications at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was at the forefront of efforts to expose and question ethnic stereotypes in popular culture.

He was best known for his books “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” (2001), which later became a documentary film; “Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture” (1997); “Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11” (2008); and “The TV Arab” (1984), an eight-year study that examined hundreds of shows.

“Television tends to perpetuate four basic myths about Arabs,” he wrote in “The TV Arab,” the book that initially raised his profile. “They are all fabulously wealthy; they are barbaric and uncultured; they are sex maniacs with a penchant for white slavery; and they revel in acts of terrorism. . . . These notions are as false as the assertions that blacks are lazy, Hispanics are dirty, Jews are greedy and Italians are criminals.”

The son of Lebanese Christian immigrants, Shaheen said he grew up in suburban Pittsburgh largely free of ethnic slurs. Italians, Poles, Jews and others intermingled freely, he remembered, and goodwill seemed to pervade his memories of the sandlot and the schoolyard.