Without using Google, can you think of the name of a single Muslim character from a movie you’ve seen? Could be any character from any movie that came out at any point, as long as you can remember their name. If you can’t, that’s perfectly understandable, and if you can, well, you’re probably thinking of either Aladdin, or a terrorist. Sadly, there’s plenty of movies, TV shows and videogames where Muslims are depicted as the enemy, to be heroically shot down by the white American protagonist. “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”, “Iron Man”, “American Sniper”, “24” and even “Back to the Future” – a family-friendly film all about a boy time-travelling and having to deal with his mom falling in love with him – all feature Middle-Eastern terrorists coming about and making life miserable for the white protagonists. It’s, admittedly, a rather depressing state of affairs, one that has been talked to death and that no one seems to really support, and yet one that doesn’t really seem to change. How come?

Well, the thing is that – unlike what some may believe – there isn’t some kind of massive government or media conspiracy to make Muslims a target, even if a certain President would really like to make that happen. Our media is merely a reflection of the times in which we live – a mirror of our culture, and the world in which it was created. Around WWII, American media ostracized Japanese people, and during the Cold War it was the Russians who were the bad guys of every movie. If tomorrow the US and North Korea start a war with the US, God forbid, I can assure you you’ll start seeing a whole lot of Asians pop up as targets in the next “Call of Duty”. But in a post-9/11 world, the acceptable targets have been the Arabs. What I’m trying to say here is that there isn’t some kind of higher authority we can shake up and say “Hey, cut it out with the stereotypes!” It’s an issue that’s a tad more fundamental in nature, and as such it’ll take a lot more work to be fixed.

“But why”, you might be asking. “Why should we fix it? Like you said, the Japanese and Russians went through the same thing, and they’re fine now!” Yeah, but the thing is, they’re fine now, decades after the smear campaign against their races, and during those decades we’ve had numerous positive depictions to outset the damage. In how many movies have you seen a samurai, or a Japanese martial arts expert? Sure, those depictions are also stereotypes, but they’re positive ones and have helped the Western public consciousness become more accepting of people belonging to the Japanese race. In order for Arabs and Arab-Americans to be accepted into Western society, we need something similar – we need to outset the negative media stereotypes with positive ones.

Believe it or not, the media can actually affect people’s perception of others a great deal – many papers have been written on the subject, and most experts on psychology agree that you can use the media to subtly influence the viewer’s perception. After all, that’s exactly how advertisement works! Have you ever seen something on TV (maybe a phone that one of the characters is using, or a car, or perhaps just a cool-looking prop) and said to yourself “Oh, man, I GOTTA have that”? That’s an example of positive reinforcement. The opposite effect can be had with negative reinforcement. Just like how a movie can make an object look really friggin’ cool, that same movie can make an object look really bad… Or a person. It’s very important to note that no, of course TV isn’t going to turn you into a raging racist if you weren’t one already (or at the least had the capacity to become one), nor are you fully helpless against the tricks that advertisers and directors use to manipulate you. You can be absolutely above those things – if you’ve ever watched an infomercial and thought to yourself “Nobody’s stupid enough to buy this”, then that means the tricks failed to work on you… But at the exact same moment, dozens of people are phoning in to purchase that exact same item you thought was ridiculously bad. We’re all differently susceptible to our media, and as such it’s the responsibility of creators to not single out a group of people as their “go-to” bad guys, even if that solution is incredibly easy and convenient in terms of visual shorthand.

There’s so many stories that you can tell featuring a Muslim protagonist – to be perfectly fair, you can tell practically ANY story with a Muslim protagonist, but even when we limit the pool to stories where the character’s faith or ethnicity is a major focal point, there’s still a lot of things you can do that don’t just ultimately boil down to “lol terrorism”. I’ve already spoken about Ms. Marvel, whose undying optimism in a world that despises people like her has been a beacon of hope for American Muslims. We don’t really need another videogame in which the brave, white, American soldier shoots at the evil, brown, brainwashed baddies who want to blow up the world from their desert cave, but we’re in dire deficit of games that feature a Muslim protagonist, or have a Muslim character among their main cast. The first and possibly most important step towards moving away from the negative stereotypes is to build positive ones, and to double down on positive reinforcement. Because while it’s true that there are many Muslims who do terrible things out there in the world, it’s also true that most of them don’t – and showcasing that is important.