Arab Women are Speaking.

Why is mainstream media ignoring us?

When my book A Woman Is a School was released, it sold 3,000 copies in the first three months—a remarkable feat for an independently published work. Yet, despite its success and the critical conversations it sparked about womanhood, diaspora, and resistance, mainstream media outlets remained largely silent. Not silent, as in the story wasn’t a good fit — silent, as in, writers were excitedly pitching the book to their editors, only for us to experience the same bottleneck every time: these stories would go through a rigorous review, before ultimately being rejected by editors whose hands seemed to be tied.

This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

Arab women in the United States, whether authors, activists, or artists, have long been excluded from the national conversation, particularly when our narratives challenge dominant Western frameworks. Our voices are either ignored or tokenized, erased or exoticized. Rarely are we granted the full complexity, nuance, and visibility afforded to other women of color in the literary and media landscape.

The reality is that Arab women’s stories—our authentic, unfiltered stories—are often perceived as too inconvenient, too political, or too radical for mainstream platforms. When we write about our histories, our struggles, and our liberation, we are met with polite dismissals or outright rejection. We are seen as a risk, with our perspectives too disruptive to neatly fit into pre-approved narratives of diversity and representation. This isn’t new necessarily; we had seen a guilt-driven burst of inclusion during the 2020 movement behind Black Lives Matter. The ongoing erasure of Black, Indigenous and Minority Ethnic women, including Arab women, was just the norm up until that point.

Take the case of my book. A Woman Is a School is an exploration of womanhood through an Arab lens, weaving together personal and collective memory, history, and futurism. It is a book about resilience, about love, about the ways in which women shape the world around them. But it is also a book that refuses to flatten its identity to fit a Western framework. It does not ask for permission to exist. It simply exists. It doesn’t want to be labeled as a victim. It refuses the identity of a subjugated woman needing the Western gaze to be freed, it is liberated from and in fact liberating the West by just existing in its totality. Our identities as Arabs break the Western mindset of Black & White and the over-simplification and flattening of foreign identities into a “good or bad” bucket. Arabs are not a monolith; we are our own culture, but a highly diverse, multi- faith and multicultural group of people who are, imposing by their very existence, an expansion into Western popular consciousness. Ultimately, they’re forcing an expansion of concepts that go beyond the West as the center of the world. By challenging colonial paradigms and demanding justice, they are showing the world as a powerful biodiverse universe.

And that, perhaps, is the problem.

Mainstream media has long dictated which stories about Arab women are acceptable for public consumption, often limiting their appearance as a stereotype of their own culture to justify a white savior’s lens as the eternal occupier of our Lands. We are only allowed visibility when we are victims—when our pain can be used to justify interventionist policies or to reinforce Western narratives of saviorism. We are granted space when we denounce our own cultures, when we serve as proof of the “backwardness” of the places we come from.

But when we speak on our own terms—when we center our agency, our joy, our wisdom, or our defiance—the doors close.

This is not just about me or my book. It is about the larger forces that determine whose voices matter. The media, as a gatekeeper, plays a significant role in shaping public discourse, and its refusal to engage with Arab women’s narratives, contributes to a cycle of erasure.

If we are only visible when we conform to predetermined roles—either as oppressed or as exceptional tokens—then we are never truly seen. And if the publishing and media industries continue to sideline us, then they are complicit in maintaining the structures that silence us.

The irony is that despite this exclusion, Arab women continue to create, to write, to resist. We are speaking. And we have always been speaking.

The question is: when will the media start listening?