Cultural Fear

        In the country we live in today there is a profound amount of cultural fear built into the very fabric of our society, and in the book Zeitoun we are shown this many times.  Zeitoun by Dave Eggers tells the story of a Muslim families experience of life after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  In one particular passage it talks about the moment Zeitoun and his friends were captured by FEMA hired agents who found them in Zeitoun's apartment building after a mandatory evacuation was put into place.  They were asking the soldiers why they had been taken into custody, and one of the soldiers tells them that they are al Qaeda.  Eggers continues to write showing us an idea of how society's discrimination in America has brought about a cultural fear when he writes "Zeitoun had long feared this day would come"(212). In this quote it shows something that Zeitoun had always feared while living in the USA after 9/11, which is being branded a terrorist unjustly.  This idea of cultural fear, which is the idea that you would be treated a certain way based off of your culture, or even the fear of a particular cultures practices is prevalent in this quote and throughout the book.  Another portion of the book that shows us that cultural fear is alive and well is in a passage that talks about Kathy, Zeitoun's wife, getting ready to go the grocery store.  As she prepares herself to go to the grocery store she fixes her hijab and is thinking that there was a chance for her to be treated poorly when Eggers writes "but any trip to the grocery store or the mall presented the possibility she would encounter some kind of ugliness"(45).  This is a another example of cultural fear present in this book.  Kathy fears that her wearing a hijab because she's Muslim would somehow provoke an unjust act towards her because of how Muslims are portrayed in this country by the media and some people's prejudice based off actions of a select few.  This is an important idea because it shows on both ends how people are afraid of Muslims without even knowing them, and how Muslims are afraid on what seems like a daily basis just to be themselves.  Furthermore this shows how the country will take advantage of a horrible situation to carry out hidden agendas based of this cultural fear that they have established for Muslims.