Anti-Arab, anti-immigrant tropes pervade Labor's attack on Khamis

Recent campaign mailer hit pieces which targeted Arab-American County Supervisor candidate Johnny Khamis have been roundly criticized by this website and the SJ Merc editorial board as being full of disinformation. More surprising, however, is that the mailers, which are funded by the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, are awash in anti-Arab, anti-immigrant, and nativist tropes. The bigoted nature of the mailers has gone unremarked upon by our local political and media community. Opp Now co-founder Christopher Escher examines the history of the disease/immigrant narrative and unpacks the unique nature of anti-Arab discrimination as revealed in the Labor hit pieces.

The recent Labor-funded hit pieces (see below) on Johnny Khamis are a long way from subtle. The first mailer, delivered three weeks ago, shows a picture of Khamis surrounded by a field of COVID virus, and is accented by a headline that says "Leadership That'll Make You Sick."

A week later, the same group sent a second mailer which claimed that Khamis' political beliefs were foreign, somehow outside community norms. The key headline: "Johnny Khamis Doesn't Share Our Values."

Taken individually or together, the mailers clearly traffic in coded and barely concealed anti-immigrant and anti-Arab tropes and falsehoods, experts say.

"The bias against Arabs can be very subtle, sometimes harder to detect," says Samar Khalaf, president of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). "That's why people call us the 'invisible minority.' It is easy to attack us, and people do it in a low-key way. But the reality is we come from a historically discriminated-against group. And in America, many of us are immigrants."

Khalaf says the Labor mailers use thinly veiled suggestions and associations to demonize, otherize, and marginalize Khamis--and by extension Arab-Americans.

The first trope is the connection of immigrants and communities of color with disease.

A brief history lesson: As the Millbank Institute explains, smearing immigrants as disease carriers has a long and shameful American legacy. In the 1900s, "Foreigners were consistently associated with germs and contagion," Millbank notes. "Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy was often framed by an explicitly medical language. And anti-immigration rhetoric against east European Jews, southern Italians, Asians, and other so-called undesirables were deep-seated metaphors of disease and contagion."

More recently, as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, anti-immigrant and white supremacist organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (the SPLC views them as hate groups) have called for more restrictive immigration policies by falsely claiming that immigrants increased the spread of AIDS, Ebola, Tuberculosis, and--most recently--of COVID.

The Labor hit pieces on Khamis family with the nativists' and hate groups' narratives.

The mailers graphically link Khamis with the COVID disease by surrounding a photo of Khamis with a sea of floating COVID germs. And the mailer associates Khamis with the spread of illness by directly saying his policies will "Make You Sick."

The second trope is the "otherizing" of racial and ethnic groups, particularly immigrants and communities of color, According to academics who study historical bigotry, "otherizing" refers to the processes and techniques in-power groups use to delegitimize and disempower competing interests as foreign, alien, and opposed to the power group's social and ideological norms. The goals of othering are to extend and secure the in-group's power monopoly and to place blame on a shadowy “other” for problems in society.

The second mailer invokes this trope most directly with divisive language which tries to position Khamis as someone who's strange, foreign, a non-member; someone whose "values" are not "ours." The mailer contends that he is "Against Everything We Are For." Note the exclusionary use of "we," as though Khamis is outside of the Labor volk.

Khalaf concurs:

"They discreetly use techniques to make you think these people are different, they are not one of us. So they don't come out and say he's different, but people hear it. It's a dog whistle."

In this regard, the Labor mailers are using code not just to express anti-immigrant and anti-Arab bigotry, but also to express in-group solidarity. Experts in discrimination note that some people and groups can use such tropes unwittingly because they’ve received them through upbringing or culture. But experts stress that, for the most part, it’s an intentional way to communicate group ideology.

Perhaps that explains why no local news organization commented on the discriminatory nature of the mailers. Why local politicians supported by labor had nothing to say. And why local nonprofit social justice and equity organizations quick to organize against perceived bigotry in the public square--have gone completely silent when queried about the mailer. {Editor's note: Opp Now emailed the following organizations, among others, for comments on the Khamis mailer--none replied: Asian Law alliance, Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet, Building Back Better - joint venture, Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, People Acting in Community Together, Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits, Somos Mayfair, Vietnamese American Roundtable.}

How is it that such treatment against Arab-Americans gets ignored in supposedly progressive Silicon Valley?

Perhaps it's just the slightly veiled nature of the bigotry. Khalaf believes that the coded nature of the attacks can obscure its true intent--especially for groups sharing political agendas with Labor. "Sometimes the othering is subtle, subliminal, and hard to notice," he says. "You may not realize right a way that the attacker is using racist and discriminatory tropes, although these Labor pieces are pretty obvious."

According to Ashely Passmore of Texas A&M University, coded bigotries can have a short shelf life, once exposed. She notes that "once people are familiar with the history and the imagery" of these tropes, "and why they were used as propaganda to target minorities and influence politics," most coded messages don't seem so coded anymore.

More info on Arab-American Anti Discrimination Committee can be found here.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity