You are right, no one who is not Arab-American can know what it feels like to be so. I always feel that no matter what I do, I’m not American enough or Arab enough. I try to stay in touch with my Arab culture, but that’s hard to todo when everyone around you is Americanized. I am proud to be an American, but a lot of times I find myself feeling outcasted, because I don’t like to do the same things as some Americans. Probably because I am Muslim & Arab. At school it just feels like you’re so different.

I know and can speak Arabic, but not like the natives…this is where I feel like a failure caught between 2 worlds. Arabs in Lebanon are intimitaded because I grew up in America, and Americans are intimidated because I’m Arab.

No one has the right to tell you to get the fcuk out of here if you don’t want to be completely Americanized. I feel the same way.

http://dailysalty.blogspot.com/2007/08/immigrants-and-participation-in-host.html

Think how America could be made better. That’s what matters. Making America better.

Anyone can make it in America. But immigrants aren’t allowed to help, or to even suggest, that America could be better.

I don’t know why we keep having to point out the obvious here. All countries have multinational roots and mini-cities. Even in the Gulf you find a lot of cultural practices from all over South Asia, from India to Nepal to Indonesia. We oppress the hell out of these people even though their cultures have made a huge presence in ours.

Look at Germany and its Turkish immigrants. Look at London and its Pakistani immigrants. Look at Bahrain and its Indian population.

Yeah, but Nadia said:

Acceptance in American society has always depended on full assimilation at the expense of immigrants and resulting in the loss of culture.

This is not true. And that is the point I was making, not whether discrimination exists in the USA.

What do you call it when someone does the morally correct thing even though it works against their own self-interest? Like offering safety to victims of political or religious persecution even though they’re never going to assimilate and will add to the problems of diversity rather than contribute to the benefits of diversity?

“…all of these stories do reflect my own opinion about America…” “..these things, they do represent America in one way or another…” Wait a second. If I form an “opinion” about a ME country based on its government’s actions like repression of free speech, public floggings, etc., if I claim a ME country is “represented” by its people rioting and murdering over a perceived insult, then I get called a racist. How many times have you yourself told me I’m wrong to consider Islam violent and dangerous because its violent and dangerous leaders don’t represent “true Islam”? Well, Gitmo and Bush and discrimination don’t represent true democracy, either.

Horatio: “The gap between democratic reality and democratic rhetoric in the U.S. is so huge…” You are right. Now name me a country where the gap is less than that in the US, please. Here’s a hint: think about countries where an organization such as CAIR not only exists, but is a powerful political force.

Look at Germany and its Turkish immigrants. Look at London and its Pakistani immigrants. Look at Bahrain and its Indian population. Does it mean we don’t oppress these people? Hell no. They just practice their culture and beliefs anyways, it’s HARDLY unique to the USA. We have many villages that are practically Indian now, you go there you won’t for a second consider yourself in an Arab country. Yet we oppress them, silence them, abuse them on a daily basis. Over and over again. What you said hardly refutes Nadia’s arguments.

Acceptance in American society has always depended on full assimilation at the expense of immigrants and resulting in the loss of culture. I’m confused as to why the loss of culture and so many of the things that make people special and different could be seen as a good thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth than what you say here. It seems to me that you either totally made that up or have based your account on an extreme lack of information. Have you ever been to Chinatown in San Francisco? The street signs are in Chinese. Come to L.A. and read the public billboards in Spanish and Korean. Take your driver’s test in a variety of languages. Our federal institutions accommodate many different cultural norms specifically for American citizens.

Do you live in a large urban center, Nadia? If you do, you’ll notice that people practice their cultures, speak their languages, and openly identify themselves ethnically throughout the USA without questions of their patriotism. In L.A. we have:
Chinatown
Little Tokyo
Koreatown
Little Armenia
and plenty of other officially identified ethnic communities, not to mention areas that are generally known for their ethnic/cultural aspects:
Pico-Fairfax is largely Jewish
Pico-Union is largely El Salvadoran
Pacoima is largely Mexican
Gardena is the equivalent of Little Vietnam
Beverly Hills is 25% Persian and just elected a mayor originally from Iran.

NONE of these are population centers that are considered un-American because they have communities that have not been totally assimilated.

Do you have any idea how many of our politicians speak with accents? Perhaps you should meet someone named Ferial Masry — a Saudi Arabian-American woman who recently ran for California State Assembly on the Democratic ticket. The way you lecture, you make it sound like she’d have to run as an independent, rather than as a member of an established party, if she were to be accepted as (a not-fully-assimilated) Arab-American, according to your definition, by the political establishment. Yet, once you hear her speak, you’d know how wrong you are.

In L.A. we have the largest populations of:
Pakistanis
Cambodians
Iranians
Armenians
Belizeans
Bulgarians
Ethiopians
Filipinos
Guatemalans
Hungarians
Koreans
Israelis
Mexicans
Nicaraguans
Salvadorans
Thais
Indians
and Pacific Islanders outside their homelands.

Is it really your contention that they come here and feel hard pressed to fully assimilate, at the expense and loss of their culture, in order to be accepted as Americans? If so, why can people choose to vote in a variety of languages other than English?

It bothers me that Jina, someone affiliated with this project, would tell me to “get the fuck out of [America] and go back to your freaking “homeland” is.”

You are so cute, did I address this to you or the person I quoted before when I wrote what I wrote?

This is the same thing that racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Americans write to me on the daily.

Learn to differentiate the difference between a racist telling you to get out because you are of a certain ethnicity and a person telling you to get out because you refuse to show your loyalty to the country you hold your citizenship.

And let me be clear; these people who hate Arabs and Muslims don’t differentiate between those of us who are American and those of us who are not.They don’t even differentiate between Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Desi, “Arab-looking,” etc.

If you want to live for them, then so be it, you are falling into their bullshit, and you are doign exactly what they want you to do. By doing this, you justify their reasonings regarding Arab-Americans.

Work to fix the system, rather then complain or play blame games like you are doing right now. American constitution, you have to fight for that, because it’s truly a marvelous piece of writing that deserves defense. But you don’t want to do that, you want to fight the extremeists who doesn’t value this peice of writing by rejecting what America stands for.

If Bush or the racist American’s are twisting it’s meanings, kind of like how the Usama is twisting the meaning of the Quran, you defend for what it really stands for, not what these corrupt bastards want it to stand for.

Stop being the tools of these assholes.

PS: I am no longer part of this meh…

First, it is impossible not to talk both about oppression and prejudice in the U.S., but we have to recognize that they occur in different ways and at different levels, and not necessarily consistently. One one hand, you might have the FBI busting down your door and raiding your home or office because they think you are involved in some illegal activity, or have ties to some “terrorist” organizations, or at least fund them, as has happened recently in Dearborn, Michigan with the Goodwill Charitable Organization and Al-Mabarrat Charitable Organization. While I wouldn’t consider this a clear case of political oppression, it’s very close, and is definitely a form of targeted discrimination. But you also have cases of people in the U.S. disappearing or being tortured, either via the fed. government (Gitmo, CIA secret jails) or local law enforcement, and that is most definitely oppression. There are thousands of examples like this, of people of various races, religions and creeds, even including native born “whites,” who are discriminated against or face some form of prejudice for their beliefs or actions from other people or the state.

Just because the U.S. claims to be a democracy in practice does not mean anything in reality.The gap between democratic reality and democratic rhetoric in the U.S. is so huge in this country it’s amazing and profoundly frightening. That’s one of the reasons that all of this talk about nationalism bothers me, or frustrates me, depending on the context. Nadia’s comments really raise this issue, where she is wrestling with identifying as Arab and American. My question is why do we need to identify with a nation at all, much less promote ideas like patriotism or nationalism, as other have suggested in their comments?

I believe in real and direct political participation and liberation, so I don’t believe that governments should exist at all, at least not in the form they exist currently. If Nadia and others didn’t have to contend with an imagined community called the U.S. or Palestine or X, I am convinced there would not be the same dynamics of discrimination on a daily basis simply because she did not fit into the ideal of what is a “real” citizen. Imagine what the current political dynamics might be like if there was no Palestine or Israel or Lebanon or USA or Britain to fight for geographic and ideological control of land?

I think this gets particularly complex in dealing with something like Arab American identity. America is both a massive continent and an artificially constructed identity of one nation-state. Arab is both (at least originally) a geographic region (Arabia) as well as an artificially constructed identity, just like American. So what happens when they try to fit together? We end up having two imagined identities which are vying for power or hegemony within our own minds, as well as of others, (i.e., Benedict Anderson’s thesis). I think that’s where some of the comments to Nadia about going back to her homeland or being more Arab or American have their theoretical roots. They only make sense if you are defending a predefined notion of what is or is not X or Y.

I’ve been looking at this phenomenon for the last 2 years while finishing my master’s thesis, but focusing on Mexican immigrants (rather than Arab immigrants) in the U.S., for the last two years, and in that case, there’s basically 3 different main identity forms, which function more like a gradient than an absolute scale:

1. Immigrate to the U.S. and adopt the culture, values, etc there – i.e. assimilation
2. Immigrate to the U.S. and adopt some of the culture, values, etc but reject others -i.e hybridization or acculturation
3. Immigrate to the U.S. and reject the host culture largely or completely in favor of your native culture – i.e isolation or rejection

The problem is that not all host country people (“Americans” or wherever) accept #2 or #3. In fact, many see these as fundamental challenges to the very foundations of U.S./western civilization and therefore immigrants–in my studies especially the Mexican immigrant–then becomes a threat, both physically and existentially, and must be fought to protect the nation or culture of a country. All of this goes back to an ideological struggle over identity construction and definitions of who is or is not a “real” member of a community. Anyone deemed as a threat to that imagined community, be they a race traitor, a religious exile or an immigrant, is then treated with contempt and seen as a threat. It’s this mentality that calls for bombing the ME back to the stone age and supported locking up Japanese during WWII.

It seems to me that our real challenge, regardless of where we live, is to work to forge stronger bonds of solidarity between people–not institutions–to work for radical change and control by the people–not administrative bureaucrats–in shaping our world and our future…or what Paulo Freire calls conscientizaçao, the development of the awakening of critical awareness in the people. My worry is that discussions about our identity as American, or Arab American or any nation-ality only serves to block this process and keeps us divided…

H

But these things, they do represent America in one way or another, and it hurts. Why do you forget stories like these?

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, thousands of Arab American men were rounded up, arrested, deported, or otherwise disappeared. Ironically, the women gradually became more visible, as mainstream American culture sought to “liberate” them from their oppressors.

&

The silencing of Arab and Arab American men—through ostracization, intimidation, imprisonment, or deportation—has led to Arab American women becoming more vocal. Suddenly, we are in demand, as our male partners are disappeared.

(Source)

I don’t know about you, but that spells “oppression” to me.