Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America, spoke about the subject at the Science Center's Kennedy Auditorium on May 7. Sponsored by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, the History Department, and the Dean of Faculty Office, the Brooklyn College professor spent more than an hour lecturing and answering questions about what he learned interviewing Brooklyn youth and their families about growing up Arab and Muslim American in a post-9/11 world.
Chad Williams, assistant professor of history, introduced Bayoumi by putting the challenges of being the maligned minority into historical context. As laid out by Williams, Bayoumi's question is the modern incarnate of the prophetic question posed by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line." Being a problem means being treated as though you are something to be solved, controlled, feared, and at times viewed with contempt. Being a problem means being objectified and simplified to a point that you can be easily managed, sometimes devaluing your humanity.
Expressing deep gratitude to all who made the event possible and sincerely thanking the audience for attending at the very end of classes, Bayoumi assumed the podium with humor. After reading a few excerpts of very poignant stories from his book, he described the climate in which young Arabs and Muslim-Americans have been growing up.
While Arabs and Muslims are the first new victims of suspicion since the Civil Rights movement, there have been many "problems" before. Native Americans were said to be creatures beyond the reaches of civilization, only capable of comprehending force. Irish Catholic and Protestant alike were accused of holding Papal loyalty over American patriotism. Leaders suspicious of Germans dubbed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage," anti-Semitism abounded during WWI, and the Japanese were incarcerated into internment camps during WWII. Throughout all these years of contemporary prejudice, Arabs and Muslims remained virtually unknown until 9/11.
To Bayoumi, the Civil Rights movement was supposed to mean that all would be judged by the content of their characters rather than their ethno-religious identities or national origins, but the 9/11 attacks and the wars that followed jeopardized that dream for Arabs and Muslims. Biased crimes against Arabs and Muslims have yet to return to pre-9/11 levels, and polls from the Washington Post and CBS News last month indicate that 48 percent of Americans hold negative opinions about Islam, the highest percentage since 2001. Perhaps even more disturbingly, the numbers indicate that the more positively one feels about the US, the more likely they are to harbor anti-Arab feelings. Mass arrests have increased generalized suspicions, and more than 14,000 people have been deported based on very sketchy evidence of connections to terrorism.
According to Bayoumi, a racial profile is a "textbook description of a personality" that "substitutes recognition for detail," like "looking through a windowpane onto someone else's life." Arabs and Muslims are generally seen as belonging to one of two extreme categories, exceptionally assimilated immigrant, or violent fundamentalist. With little recognition of the vast possibilities between these two groups, vague questions about terrorism, women, and assimilation overtake the complex human dimension of Arab-American life, while frightening cliché phrases like "sleeper cells" degrade the language of inquiry.
With Arabs and Muslims themselves are "floating everywhere in the vast American imagination," they are constantly talked about, but never heard from. Representations are too many and all abstractions. Arabs and Muslims are a point of well-meaning concern, shadowy characters on TV, or "puppets for puppet diplomacy."
Bayoumi notes that despite the overall climate of misunderstanding and distrust, many good things have occurred. Japanese-Americans, civil rights lawyers, and normal citizens have tried to stand up for Arab and Muslim legal and civil rights and raised dialogues in church basements, mosques, and Jewish community centers. Unfortunately, such events have been "drowned out by the ideology of our age." The varieties of their religious experiences, their day to day rhythms, the passions of their sorrow, and the struggles of their souls has been completely absent from any public understanding.
Aiming to portray the human dimensions and political truth of our age with stories that could be long and richly told, Bayoumi decided to work with Brooklyn's youth in early 2005. He wanted to humanize a part of the population that was being increasingly dehumanized, and made the main character of his book youth itself. From Bayoumi's perspective, Arab and Muslim-American youth are "living in a paradox," the older generations looks hopefully to them, while culture at large increasingly spies with fear and occasionally outright hostility. It is uncomfortable between such expectations, and Bayoumi believes their anxieties reveal much about tensions in contemporary American society.
Bayoumi chose Brooklyn for several reasons. Home to the largest Arab-American population in the nation, Brooklyn is the third largest urban area in the United States, and has a short history of human escape. Continually repopulating itself with exiles and émigrés, Brooklyn "brims with the pageantry of 21st century America."
Telling of encountering FBI agents while visiting with local Imams, Bayoumi described feeling as though community leaders and the agents were speaking "two different languages," despite everyone being very polite and well-meaning. While FBI agents demanded excessive condemnations of terrorism that were easily provided, community leaders wanted to talk about local crises that had resulted from new unclear restrictions on charity giving, how surveillance was scaring people away, or how to get off the no-fly list. Outside of these polite but fruitless interactions, Bayoumi heard various stories of the disconnect. In one memorable example, a Palestinian-American firefighter decided to purchase a cheaper study book from an outside vendor, only to be investigated by two agents who wanted to know why a young Arab-American was interested in a book about fires. Because he was Arab-American, they didn't bother to find out that he was a firefighter.
Meeting in community centers, smoky hookah cafes, and hectic diners, Bayoumi got to know the stories of countless Arab Americans who had changed their names or tried to pass as Latinos in high school. He got to know children of classic American dream story business owners who felt frustrated and alienated to the point of wanting to move to Dubai, in what Bayoumi referred to this as the "Arab-American Dream."
ust like any American youth, Bayoumi found Arab and Muslim-American youths reacting to their tribulations in an endless variety of ways. A Syrian-American girl with a family who had been inexplicably detained in one of the post-9/11 sweeps dreams of working in human rights, while a young Palestinian-American boy who had been quite secular finds Islam in the wake of his father's unfounded arrest. A Hijab-wearing student government secretary stripped of her post for not attending a school dance and watching various exceptions for other religions ensue sued, won, and ran for class president victoriously her senior year.
With the ends of all these stories leading in different directions, "repression and inclusion may be happening at the same time." Bayoumi observes that in a time of heightened political tension, civil society continues to function relatively well. In the balance of trying to figure out what to think of their own predicament, many Arab and Muslim-Americans are struggling to figure out how much power to attribute to contemporary prejudice, and the not knowing is maddening.
While Arab and Muslim civil rights have been threatened by federal law enforcement since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Bayoumi clarified an important difference between that period and today. Where the singling-out, spying, and deportation used to be focused on a handful of immigrant activists, today, according to Bayoumi, everyone is vulnerable as group membership or national origin alone has become grounds for broad suspicion. In fact, he noted, stereotypes of Muslims resemble "the stereotypical Jew of classical anti-Semitism": the "destroyer of our society" and the "embodiment of all that is counter to our values."
Bayoumi points to a hope that Obama will put aside some of the Bush policies that have been used to target Arab and Muslim Americans. After African-Americans, Muslim Americans were the demographic group that supported Obama in the greatest proportion, and many have been pleased with Obama's concrete early steps of banning torture and closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. On a symbolic level, Bayoumi was pleased with Obama's clear statement in Turkey that the US is not at war with Islam but in fact needs Muslims as critical partners against extremists, as well as his decision to interview with Al-Aribiya (even if Al-Jazeera might have been better). On the other hand, the Justice Dept. continues to quash uncomfortable lawsuits, and detained suspects that might have otherwise been held at Guantanamo in the Middle East.
Bayoumi ended with a general plea for understanding that we are dependent on each other for answers to the problems that face us all, and that we are really not so different from each other. "Great opportunity lies in our shared global condition," he said.
-- by Mariam Ballout '10
Chad Williams, assistant professor of history, introduced Bayoumi by putting the challenges of being the maligned minority into historical context. As laid out by Williams, Bayoumi's question is the modern incarnate of the prophetic question posed by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line." Being a problem means being treated as though you are something to be solved, controlled, feared, and at times viewed with contempt. Being a problem means being objectified and simplified to a point that you can be easily managed, sometimes devaluing your humanity.
Expressing deep gratitude to all who made the event possible and sincerely thanking the audience for attending at the very end of classes, Bayoumi assumed the podium with humor. After reading a few excerpts of very poignant stories from his book, he described the climate in which young Arabs and Muslim-Americans have been growing up.
While Arabs and Muslims are the first new victims of suspicion since the Civil Rights movement, there have been many "problems" before. Native Americans were said to be creatures beyond the reaches of civilization, only capable of comprehending force. Irish Catholic and Protestant alike were accused of holding Papal loyalty over American patriotism. Leaders suspicious of Germans dubbed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage," anti-Semitism abounded during WWI, and the Japanese were incarcerated into internment camps during WWII. Throughout all these years of contemporary prejudice, Arabs and Muslims remained virtually unknown until 9/11.
To Bayoumi, the Civil Rights movement was supposed to mean that all would be judged by the content of their characters rather than their ethno-religious identities or national origins, but the 9/11 attacks and the wars that followed jeopardized that dream for Arabs and Muslims. Biased crimes against Arabs and Muslims have yet to return to pre-9/11 levels, and polls from the Washington Post and CBS News last month indicate that 48 percent of Americans hold negative opinions about Islam, the highest percentage since 2001. Perhaps even more disturbingly, the numbers indicate that the more positively one feels about the US, the more likely they are to harbor anti-Arab feelings. Mass arrests have increased generalized suspicions, and more than 14,000 people have been deported based on very sketchy evidence of connections to terrorism.
According to Bayoumi, a racial profile is a "textbook description of a personality" that "substitutes recognition for detail," like "looking through a windowpane onto someone else's life." Arabs and Muslims are generally seen as belonging to one of two extreme categories, exceptionally assimilated immigrant, or violent fundamentalist. With little recognition of the vast possibilities between these two groups, vague questions about terrorism, women, and assimilation overtake the complex human dimension of Arab-American life, while frightening cliché phrases like "sleeper cells" degrade the language of inquiry.
With Arabs and Muslims themselves are "floating everywhere in the vast American imagination," they are constantly talked about, but never heard from. Representations are too many and all abstractions. Arabs and Muslims are a point of well-meaning concern, shadowy characters on TV, or "puppets for puppet diplomacy."
Bayoumi notes that despite the overall climate of misunderstanding and distrust, many good things have occurred. Japanese-Americans, civil rights lawyers, and normal citizens have tried to stand up for Arab and Muslim legal and civil rights and raised dialogues in church basements, mosques, and Jewish community centers. Unfortunately, such events have been "drowned out by the ideology of our age." The varieties of their religious experiences, their day to day rhythms, the passions of their sorrow, and the struggles of their souls has been completely absent from any public understanding.
Aiming to portray the human dimensions and political truth of our age with stories that could be long and richly told, Bayoumi decided to work with Brooklyn's youth in early 2005. He wanted to humanize a part of the population that was being increasingly dehumanized, and made the main character of his book youth itself. From Bayoumi's perspective, Arab and Muslim-American youth are "living in a paradox," the older generations looks hopefully to them, while culture at large increasingly spies with fear and occasionally outright hostility. It is uncomfortable between such expectations, and Bayoumi believes their anxieties reveal much about tensions in contemporary American society.
Bayoumi chose Brooklyn for several reasons. Home to the largest Arab-American population in the nation, Brooklyn is the third largest urban area in the United States, and has a short history of human escape. Continually repopulating itself with exiles and émigrés, Brooklyn "brims with the pageantry of 21st century America."
Telling of encountering FBI agents while visiting with local Imams, Bayoumi described feeling as though community leaders and the agents were speaking "two different languages," despite everyone being very polite and well-meaning. While FBI agents demanded excessive condemnations of terrorism that were easily provided, community leaders wanted to talk about local crises that had resulted from new unclear restrictions on charity giving, how surveillance was scaring people away, or how to get off the no-fly list. Outside of these polite but fruitless interactions, Bayoumi heard various stories of the disconnect. In one memorable example, a Palestinian-American firefighter decided to purchase a cheaper study book from an outside vendor, only to be investigated by two agents who wanted to know why a young Arab-American was interested in a book about fires. Because he was Arab-American, they didn't bother to find out that he was a firefighter.
Meeting in community centers, smoky hookah cafes, and hectic diners, Bayoumi got to know the stories of countless Arab Americans who had changed their names or tried to pass as Latinos in high school. He got to know children of classic American dream story business owners who felt frustrated and alienated to the point of wanting to move to Dubai, in what Bayoumi referred to this as the "Arab-American Dream."
ust like any American youth, Bayoumi found Arab and Muslim-American youths reacting to their tribulations in an endless variety of ways. A Syrian-American girl with a family who had been inexplicably detained in one of the post-9/11 sweeps dreams of working in human rights, while a young Palestinian-American boy who had been quite secular finds Islam in the wake of his father's unfounded arrest. A Hijab-wearing student government secretary stripped of her post for not attending a school dance and watching various exceptions for other religions ensue sued, won, and ran for class president victoriously her senior year.
With the ends of all these stories leading in different directions, "repression and inclusion may be happening at the same time." Bayoumi observes that in a time of heightened political tension, civil society continues to function relatively well. In the balance of trying to figure out what to think of their own predicament, many Arab and Muslim-Americans are struggling to figure out how much power to attribute to contemporary prejudice, and the not knowing is maddening.
While Arab and Muslim civil rights have been threatened by federal law enforcement since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Bayoumi clarified an important difference between that period and today. Where the singling-out, spying, and deportation used to be focused on a handful of immigrant activists, today, according to Bayoumi, everyone is vulnerable as group membership or national origin alone has become grounds for broad suspicion. In fact, he noted, stereotypes of Muslims resemble "the stereotypical Jew of classical anti-Semitism": the "destroyer of our society" and the "embodiment of all that is counter to our values."
Bayoumi points to a hope that Obama will put aside some of the Bush policies that have been used to target Arab and Muslim Americans. After African-Americans, Muslim Americans were the demographic group that supported Obama in the greatest proportion, and many have been pleased with Obama's concrete early steps of banning torture and closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. On a symbolic level, Bayoumi was pleased with Obama's clear statement in Turkey that the US is not at war with Islam but in fact needs Muslims as critical partners against extremists, as well as his decision to interview with Al-Aribiya (even if Al-Jazeera might have been better). On the other hand, the Justice Dept. continues to quash uncomfortable lawsuits, and detained suspects that might have otherwise been held at Guantanamo in the Middle East.
Bayoumi ended with a general plea for understanding that we are dependent on each other for answers to the problems that face us all, and that we are really not so different from each other. "Great opportunity lies in our shared global condition," he said.
-- by Mariam Ballout '10
