If you are an Arab American, a person who holds an American citizenship, you are an American first and whatever is next. Your homeland is America not somewhere in the Middle East. If you think your homeland is something else while holding the American citizenship, get the fuck out of there and go back to your freaking “homeland” is.

and

This sentence sounds like it was written by someone who honestly wants more to be Arab than American. ‘Total assimilation’ is not a bad thing, at all. Patriotism is not a bad thing either, and it doesn’t demand subordinance. If you are an American, and you do not accept American values, than why not seek another nationality?

Of course I am American. That is why I wrote a post about an issue that is uniquely and specifically an Arab American issue.

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

I don’t “want” to be more Arab than American. I don’t have to want this, or try to do this, because I am both. I was born in the US. I am still Arab. Patriotism in fact does demand subordinance when the country you are supposed to pledge your allegiance to was built on a foundation of white European supremacy. 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; even American mythology (not necessarily practice) says that our nation is great because of all these diverse and beautiful cultural influences.

It bothers me that people who aren’t Arab American, and who have no idea what it is like to be Arab American, feel qualified to spout such hateful rhetoric at me, on a site dedicated to free speech and positive change. Yes, you have your freedom to say hateful things to me, but is this conducive to free speech and positive change?

When I was invited to become a part of this project, it was never mentioned to me that my American citizenship made me not Arab enough to be here.

Middle Eastern people in the US experience discrimination that is directly connected to conquest and wars overseas. I don’t think that we should fight wars against our cousins to benefit a government that continues to oppress us, and I can’t put it any more simply than that.

On September 11th, I was in my high school English classroom, with people who I had known and gone to school with for years. As we watched the planes flying into the towers over and over again, a white boy in my class who came from a military family and was planning on enlisting upon graduation shouted, “We need to blow up the entire Middle East.” I asked him, “Do you know what you’re saying? I AM Arab. You want to blow up my grandmother, my little cousins and my entire family?” His response: “You’re American now.”

Being American is supposed to negate my familial connections? Being American should negate all the influences I grew up with? Being American means not only should I be okay with the slaughter of my family members, but I should enlist to be the one perpetrating it, in the name of patriotism?

We all must participate in the new movement and contribute in whatever way we can. Some will provide expertise, others money, others time, and others will craft and participate in the actions required to advance the new politics of change. We all need to regain the energy we seem to have lost, drop the pessimism that has filled our souls, and get over the individualism and materialism that has eaten so many of us from within. Our participation in this movement is a must. We cannot remain as spectators of the racial game being played before our own eyes in America.

We must do all we can to increase our options for survival beyond total assimilation and acceptance of American patriotic values that demand our subordinance. We are all different, with different values and lifestyle, but one thing I am certain of is that aiding the US government tear our homelands apart will not make any of us free.

I often struggle with finding accurate language in discussions of race and ethnicity, and I’ve heard others say that they desire more sophisticated terms for these discussions. You can take this post as an exploration of options, as well as an attempt to illuminate similarities in experiences, but not as an attempt to quantify or homogenize experience.

While I wrote about Palestinians specifically in Part 1, it was as an Arab American first that some of the ideas explored in the zine resonated most with me.

Upon immigration, Jewish Americans experienced discrimination as a group, but were able to transition into whiteness within one or two generations. In present day, I’ve read writings by Jewish Americans (none of which I can find online now) lamenting their ancestors’ rush to assimilate, often resulting in phantom pains; missing something that one may never have experienced, only heard or read about. Despite the reracialization of European-descended Jews as white, and the visibility and mobilization of Jewish watchdog groups (some of which function less as media justice advocates and more as Zionist thugs bent on crushing all criticism of Israel), there is still active anti-Jewish sentiment in our society spread across diverse demographics. There is also the issue of defining one’s identity according to a cultural tragedy; when reading about the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identity formation, I immediately thought about the impact of all these wars, massacres and genocidal starvation campaigns and their impact on our identity formation. For these reasons, I use this framework to think about how to name and describe this particular experience of being Arab American.

I always felt like we, as so-called members of the “white race” (according to the US Census, on opinion apparently not shared by the US government), could someday find ourselves in this position, assimilated and entirely confused about how we got there. Many members of the early generation of Arab immigrants find themselves in this situation; not visibly recognizable as Arab due to intermarriage and misguided assumptions about what Arabs look like, not recognizable by name due to the anglicizing of many names during the process of immigration, and likely not identifying with Arab culture at all (which isn’t a prerequisite for being Arab). From the American University of Beirut’s June 2004 bulletin, on Alia Malek’s lecture, “The Racialization of Arab-Americans in the Contemporary United States:”

In US history, there have been two main races: whites and blacks, she pointed out, and Arabs visibly fell into the privileged category, at least historically. There was a time when assimilation meant survival. So they assimilated, said Malek. Many changed their difficult-to-pronounce last names. They were mostly Christians, so they were of the “right” religion and celebrated all the same holidays. There was nothing to flag their differences.
But assimilation also meant invisibility, and with it the potential evaporation of power and voice. The Arab-American immigrants of that period were seemingly willing to make those sacrifices.
Several decades later, a new wave of immigrants arrived, “fresh off the boat” with funny names and different religions.

Assimilation was not as easy for this wave of immigrants, nor was it necessarily desirable or vital to survival. Because of the new immigration laws, immigrants could bring the whole family over as long as they had the money to do it. Ethnic enclaves and community support systems emerged. Despite the reluctance to assimilate, these immigrants still operated with a higher level of privilege than other communities of color and were able to benefit from economic opportunities that weren’t/aren’t necessarily available to other communities.

While I was generally unclear about whether or not Arabs where white for most of my life, I’ve come to recognize the “whitening” of Arabs in America as a clear tactic for social control of both us and those less privileged than us. We are pressured by the dominant culture to change our names and forget our culture. We are promised a freedom that never comes. We are put in the position of acting as a buffer between white people and black people, or as an intermediary (similiar to experiences described in the zine I referenced at the beginning of this article). If our skin is light enough, our features ambiguous enough, and our name anglo enough, we can transition into whiteness. Many of us already have.

And yet we are the first people the collective United States looks to when there has been a tragedy. When there is a bombing, we are the first suspects. Mass shooting? Power outage? Fuel shortage? Must have been an Arab.** Despite all our integration into American society, and despite the assimilation of previous generations of Arab Americans, we still become such easy scapegoats for all the problems in American society (a position we unfortunately share with other non-white communities).

After September 11th, Arabs who thought they were white realized they weren’t, precisely because white people don’t receive the same kind of treatment in the media, on the streets, in their homes and business and places of worship, just for being white, that we did/do for being Arab. This is as simply as I can put it. But I strongly disagree with the idea that we were all living happy white people lives before that Tuesday morning. I know I wasn’t. Were you?

As a kid, I loved the movie True Lies, largely due to the fact that while my mom said I was too young to see it, I could watch it at my dad’s house without her knowing about it. My cousins and I crowded around the TV without any understanding of the greater implications of this manner of representation. We didn’t know that we would be equated with the terrorist villians in the film, because we did not consider ourselves terrorists. In other people’s homes, the very same film was a cog in a propaganda machine, teaching them that this is what we are like; we are animalistic and violent terrorists, nothing more. Prior to 9/11, general public perception of Arabs was still negative. We are represented statically in mainstream media in a way that clearly supports US military operations in our home countries and legal discrimination against us on American soil.

Wherever there is an Arab explaining the racism they’ve experienced, there is someone ready with the cliche that “Arabs don’t experience racism because they aren’t a race.” While I agree that our language is vastly inadequate in terms of discussing discrimination and injustice, denying the very real experiences of Arabs is not the way to solve this problem. This abstract for ‘The Social Construction of Difference, the Essential Terrorist, and the Arab Amerian Experience‘ by Louise Cainkar puts it quite well:

Although officially white, Arab Americans appear to have undergone a racializing experience that differs in historical timing and pretext from that of other negatively racialized groups. Since the darkening of Arabs began in earnest after the establishment of “non-white minority” categories, scholars of race have largely overlooked their experiences and dominant theories of ethnic integration don’t fit. The deterioration in Arab American experiences is tied to the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the use of essentialist constructions of human difference, as in the inherently violent Arab, as primary justifications for global political actions. These notions have been corporealized, as if they were about color, because race remains a powerful tool in American society and is something Americans know and understand. After the 9/11 attacks, widespread belief in negative images of Arab Americans facilitated public attribution of collective responsibility and gave rise to hate crimes against them. Theories about race and ethnic integration need to consider the impacts of processes that are more recent and global, and the consequences of discourses that appear acceptable because they hide behind ideas about cultures and civilizations.

Malek argues that racialization can be positive in the way that it allows us to relate to other marginalized groups, but I think it’s important not to confuse this with a positive experience just because it finally gives us the language to speak about our experiences. I also think it is vital that we don’t confuse our particular experience with the experiences of other groups; they are all different and we do a disservice to ourselves and our movements when we fail to acknowledge these very real and potentially divisive differences.

I agree that recognizing and naming what happens to us as racism is important, because it provides us with an understanding of where these anti-Arab attitudes come from as well as providing a framework within which we can better understand the experiences of other communities of color when we have not personally lived those same experiences. I think this is exemplary of a huge pitfall of the use of the term “antisemitism;” it positions itself as something different than racism when I don’t know that it is any different. The same argument is made that “there is no such thing as racism against Jews because Jewish is not a race.” But what about where the sentiment originates, and what about it’s end result? While the experiences can be very different than those experienced by those communities typically considered victims of racism, are the experiences so different that the same single word is not accurate enough to describe them both? Which word gets closer to the truth of the experience? We Arabs*** are in a unique position to consider what it means to be privileged within the oppressed (and I say this with the knowledge that many of you will disagree with me), and without incorrectly conflating our experiences with those of others, in a unique position to build alliances across communities. Or we can complain about how much more oppressed we are than everyone else is while continually aspiring to have, in essence, “what the white man has.” I see strong currents moving in both directions. What do you see?

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*I learned the term “honorary white” from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, but honestly I don’t know that much about sociology.

**This, in large part, includes Muslims, Desis as well, largely due to American cultural literacy where there is little understanding of the differences between these groups.

***Does it go without saying that many of the opportunities for assimilation I speak about aren’t typically open to black Arabs? If not, I’d like to say it now.

And a third note: in most of this article, I am writing from personal experience or knowledge I gained from cultural sources, which is why I make numerous assertions that aren’t backed by a cited source. You are free to disagree with me and offer your opinion in the comments.

i always stay skeptical when people compare palestinian and jewish experiences, because a lot of times i hear really reductionist soundbyting like “the israelis are like nazis!” which fail to get at all the nuances that can NOT be obscured if we want to have a real discussion about it, you know? but there are plenty of actual comparisons to be made, like, hmm, an extremely oppressed group who is denied basic human rights is scapegoated by those who oppress it, accused of being THE primary producer of the things that are wrong with the region, accused of being untrustworthy and conniving because of the group’s position on the outside of the society that oppresses it, and subject to regular attacks for no [good] reason, who does this sound like?

Last week I stumbled upon a great zine entitled “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance To Antisemitism Part of All of Our Movements” (via Josh Russell). It is available for download in both digital and printout formats (I recommend reading it before reading the rest of this post.) This is a must read for EVERYONE. The writers of the pamphlet did a great job breaking down so many issues in a clear, concise and engaging way. They went into the history of Jews in Europe, the history of antisemitism, antisemitism on the left, and the history of American Jews. I recognized so many things paralleled in Palestinian, Arab and Arab American experiences, giving me pause to ask whether discrimination as faced by (non-Jewish) Arabs can be best characterized as antisemitism (I will go further into this line of thinking in Part 2-Arab Americans), especially in a race-based system in which, as a means of invalidating our experiences, we are constantly told “Arab is not a race” (and therefore no one can be “racist” against Arabs).

I often struggle with finding accurate language in discussions of race and ethnicity, and I’ve heard others say that they desire more sophisticated terms for these discussions. You can take this post as an exploration of options, as well as an attempt to illuminate similarities in experiences, but not as an attempt to quantify or homogenize experience.

Antisemitism is typically not an accurate term to describe discrimination against non-Jewish Arabs (or Jewish Arabs being discriminated against for being Arab), as it has it’s origin in hatred of Jews specifically, and not of Semitic peoples as a whole. From “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere:”

From the beginning it was chosen as a chic, new scientific word to show that Jews were an inferior race (not a religion that they could convert out of), and to replace the word Jew-hatred (Judenhass) so that Jewhaters could enjoy sounding more sophisticated.

…

Although Jews didn’t get to choose the term for their oppression -and
oppressed groups rarely do- over years being attacked by it, they have accepted the term to describe the historical experience of being targeted for being Jews.
There isn’t really one oppression that targets all those who were labeled
“Semites” in a similar way.** But there is a larger oppression that both groups experience: Orientalism. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Third Reich to the Red Scare and the War on Terror, the “West” has historically targeted Asians, Arabs and Jews as mysterious, dishonestly and manipulatively intelligent, overly sensual, warlike, and barbarically loyal to their ‘tribe’ instead of to humankind.

Currently Palestinians are in a situation which, at different levels, shares many similiarites with Jewish experiences in Europe prior to World War II. Palestinians in the diaspora have no homeland to return to. Palestinians in Israel, who are a part of Israeli society, are seen as suspect–they are a marginalized community who have been denied full agency and yet are seen as parasitic traitors. Bradley Burston writes in Haaretz:

Too many of us want our Arabs to be traitors. Too many of us see Israeli Arabs, as a group, as hypocrites, parasites, their dual-loyalty a thin disguise for support of terror in the service of Palestine.
There is a quiet sense among many of us, that Israeli Arabs are fleecing the state, even as they grouse about inequality and nurse plans to de-Judaize the national home of the Jewish People.

It is, in many ways, a form of classical anti-Semitism in which the Semites in question happen to be Israeli Arabs.

We complain that they live off the rest of us, that they flaunt our zoning laws and evade the taxes we pay, that they are happy to take our welfare while spurning the notion of defending the country.
It makes us feel somehow more secure in our own identity as Jews in a Jewish state. It makes our dislike of them, our educational, economic, and social discrimination against them, seem more of a reasoned response than what it actually is, which is institutional racism.

Palestinians in refugee camps are being scapegoated as the cause of all the Middle East’s problems, and are being used as capital for any number of political agendas by political leaders who ultimately don’t care how many Palestinians die. Meanwhile, 87% of Palestinians in Gaza live below the poverty level of $2 per day while their food sources are restricted and on any given day they risk being killed by factional militias or Israeli forces, neither of whom value the lives of the people. This situation is very serious, but those with the most political power are unconcerned. This begs the question, what will it take? What will it take for those who have the power and influence to change this? What will it take for the global community to put pressure on our political leaders to change this? How bad does it have to get before someone stops it? This question inadvertently leads to the Holocaust. From “The Past…:”

For centuries, Jewish communities could be expelled from European towns at any time, for any reason and made homeless. Permission to stay lasted only as long as an area’s rulers saw local Jews as “useful.” Ruling classes developed and passed down strategies to make good use of Jews’ vulnerability…all of an area’s Jews were a ruler’s handy target: When the economy or other conditions became unbearable, Jewish homes provided a whole neighborhood where gentile masses could riot and let off steam.

The Holocaust did not happen overnight. It was built on centuries of Jewish oppression, implicating not just Germany, but all of Europe. It was not an anomaly in which all the blame can be placed on one isolated historical figure. It exists in an entire culture of scapegoating, oppression and antisemitism.

It did not happen that long ago. People who experienced it are still alive today, and its memory is still alive in subsequent generations. It is easy to say “Never Again” to something as horrific as genocide, but what about saying “Never Again” to the horrific reality of systematic oppression that preceded it?