Politics | The ‘View Hosts’ on Iran

‘White’ On Paper Syrian Woman: America Is Better Than Iran Because I Get To Show My Hair & Arms

The realities of selective freedoms in America

Photo Credit: The View

There’s a viral clip going around of the ‘View’ hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Alyssa Farah Griffin — a ‘white’ on the US Census Arab woman of Lebanese and Syrian descent — having a rather non-nuanced exchange about whether America was better than Iran for all groups of people which is neither here nor there quite frankly.

What piqued my interest in the debate, however, were the examples Ms Farah throws out to demonstrate this fact; something about the gays, and a variation of ‘check out my outfit!’ / ‘I get to show my hair and arms in public!’ which made me think about the nature of American exceptionalism in the context of ‘selective freedoms’, especially, which ones are perceived as important by various demographics.

The United States has long championed itself as the ‘land of Peace and liberty’, where rights were practically God Given, to aggressively obscure the fact that women more than any other demographic have had to practically fight for every basic human right they now enjoy, which came at a high and brutal personal cost to our forebearers.