By Chris Satullo
Meg Smaker more than did her homework. For more than five years, she prepared herself to do a piece of work.
Then some people who did not even bother to view what she produced gave her a failing grade.
So, now, she’s nearly broke and a pariah in her field. It’s an example of how identity politics, the fraught notion of appropriation, the faddish vocabulary of trauma and harm, and the trend toward punitive righteousness can scramble common sense, erase basic fairness, and impoverish our cultural conversations.
When 9/11 happened, Smaker was a 21-year-old firefighter living in California. As it did many Americans, Al-Qaeda’s day of coordinated attacks on America haunted her. But she did more than brood. She resolved to research and to learn, to try to grasp the American sins and Muslim grievances that led to that day of smoke, surprise, rubble, shock, fire, and anguish.
She learned Arabic, roamed Afghanistan, and moved to Yemen for five years. Earning a degree in filmmaking back Stateside, she returned to the Arabian peninsula for a year, hunkering down at a place called the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh, capital of Saudi Arabia. There, Muslim men suspected by someone of terrorism underwent counseling and rehabilitation (call it re-brainwashing if you insist).
She asked about 150 people living there to do on-camera interviews with her. Most refused. But four agreed, giving her extensive time during the year she spent hanging around the center.
Eventually, she produced a documentary titled Jihad Rehab, that explored the men’s lives, their viewpoints, the paths they took, the allegations against them and their terrible sojourns at the American prison for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo.
Early reviews were positive. The Guardian said, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” The Sundance Film Festival included the documentary on its roster for 2022.
Then the tweets from the guardians of identity politics and the self-appointed proctors of appropriation started flying.
For example, this: “An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men.” (Yep, entirely white, except for the pesky fact that the credits list a Yemeni American executive producer and Saudi co-producer.) And more than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the film, even though what the New York Times called “a majority” of them had never seen it. Amid the storm, Sundance pulled the film from its 2022 festival.
Abigail Disney (yes, of those Disneys) had been executive producer of the film and had originally praised it. But she saw the mob forming and dashed for cover. She threw Smaker under the bus in an over-the-top letter of apology that bristled with woke buzzwords like trauma, harm, pain, tokenism and “carceral state.”
The conversation around appropriation is important, but tricky. It seems to me to be increasingly prone to running off the rails, as it did here.
To me, the now-widespread idea that you must be a member of an ethnic or identity group to write or produce anything valid about the group tosses aside valuable, time-tested core concepts of journalism and novelistic art. It refashions the very idea of imaginative empathy – the single thing our polarized, violent, racist world is most in need of – into a suspicious, oppressive activity.
Granted, members of a marginalized or oppressed people deserve more support in telling their stories and finding audience for them. Actors, directors, writers, and tech crew belonging to a given group certainly should get the chance to work on films or plays that focus on their culture. Not only is that fair, it will make those works richer.
But that’s very different from asserting that only people from that group should ever be able to depict or say anything about that group. That’s stultifying. (And, reductio ad absurdum, how would proponents of that view respond if American white males like me asserted that we were the only people qualified to depict or comment on our own behavior?)
Yes, toxic stereotypes need to be called out when they crop up in art or journalism. But is it really dealing in toxic stereotype, as some critics of Smaker assert, for an American documentarian to try to explore the roots of a massive terrorist attack upon her own country by trying to understand the journeys of some people who perhaps belonged to the group that executed the attack?
Let me harp upon this point: How can you know whether Smaker’s work displayed “tokenism” and “white savior tendencies” and landed like “a truckload of hate” if you never watched it? Is the fact that she’s a white American all you need to know?
Just as with any work on a complex, emotional topic, the choices the film makes can give rise to fair objections. Even some who liked it found the title unfortunately glib. Fair enough. Tough ethical questions always arise when journalists interview the imprisoned. But Abigail Disney’s flat statement in her apology screed that no such interview can ever be considered consensual is just plain wrong – particularly since more than 140 men in the facility did in fact decline to be interviewed.
These issues, and other possible flaws in Smaker’s work, could have been robustly, fairly, and usefully discussed at Sundance, after everyone had bothered do to her the basic justice of actually watching her film. (I acknowledge that some of her vocal critics did watch it.)
Shutting off the conversation as though only one side has anything valid to say – when that is manifestly not the case – is cowardice masquerading as high-mindedness.
By the way, why is no one complaining about Abigail Disney’s description of the House of Saud as “a notoriously violent dictatorship”? Doesn’t that also feed stereotypes of Arabs as violent? Also, Ms. Disney, wouldn’t you agree that 9/11 qualified as a “trauma” for a 21-year-old American firefighter? Why does Smaker have no right to explore the roots of her trauma, while even people who haven’t bothered to view her work somehow are entitled to caterwaul about the supposed “trauma” she inflicted on them merely by attempting a piece of documentary journalism?
Some moments in this dispute hint at the self-dealing game that, unfortunately, sometimes lurks beneath fervent cries about appropriation. The filmmakers’ letter pivots to complaints about what they consider the low percentage of Sundance films touching on Islam or the Arab world that were made primarily by Muslims or Arabs i.e., them. (The figure, by the way, is 35% – which doesn’t strike me as all that low in a nation that is 1.1% Muslim and an Earth that is 24%.)
This reminds me of the bashing of Jeanine Cummins’ splendid novel American Dirt, because she, a white American, had the temerity to imagine the trials and emotions of a Mexican woman fighting to save herself and her son from violent threat. To my ear, at least, many of the broadsides leveled at Cummins sounded like envious pique: “Why does she get to be on Oprah! and not me?”
The Times’ article on this controversy quotes a Lebanese American filmmaker as saying, “When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”
Ah, there it is…problematic, the ever-handy, case-closed!! indictment in the woke vocabulary. A professor friend of mine says he writes that word up on the board on the first day of class each semester. It’s joined by other words like trauma and harm. He tells students they are not allowed to use those words to make a point in class, unless they explain specifically what they mean by them. They can’t just be slammed on the table as a trump card shutting down discussion.
OK, so Smaker’s film is problematic. Fine. How so, exactly? How, in a sense, could it not be? Terrorism, its causes, and persistence…these are problematic. America’s sometimes lawless response to 9/11 was deeply problematic. The Saudi regime that runs this facility is beyond problematic. So, a film about all that will no doubt hit upon touchy problems and raise emotions. Let’s talk about all that – not shut down discussion.
I do get why the Lebanese American filmmaker would be eager to ensure her voice is heard in the debate. In past instances, it might not have been. But being heard is not the same as being heeded to the exclusion of competing points of view.
The experience of living inside a given identity could give one special insight and wisdom. Could, but not necessarily does. Sometimes, depending on the experiences, the person and the ideologies that come into play, it could be narrowing and distorting. Do we think the Russian nationalist identity gives one special, unimpeachable insight into the war in Ukraine?
Identity can foster insight and wisdom. It can also foster views clouded by rage, envy, self-righteousness, and self-interest.
So I discern two possible rules of thumb emerging from the smoke around l’affaire Smaker:
1) Don’t judge a piece of journalism or art by what you see people say about it on Twitter. Experience it yourself.
2) When assessing the work’s merits, the more voices in the conversation, the better – with none of them automatically privileged by their identity to dismiss alternative points of view.
In other words, do your own homework and don’t boycott the class discussion.
—
Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia