Review

Reviewed Work(s): Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible
Citizens to Visible Subjects by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber
Review by: Amy Aisen Elouafi
Source: The Arab Studies Journal , Spring 2009, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 154-157
Published by: Arab Studies Institute

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27934066

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 BOOK REVIEW BOOK REVIEW BOOK REVIEW BOOK REVIEW BOOK REVIEW

Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9111:

From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects

Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008
(xii + 384 pages, works cited, index) $55.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper)

Reviewed by Amy Aisen Elouafi _

T"^ ace and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 is an excellent collection of
# provocative essays questioning the viability of race as a theoretical category
. V. for understanding the experience of Arab Americans. It includes a variety
of case studies emphasizing the diversity of Arab communities in the United States,
their experiences with racism, and the process of identity formation. While the title of
the book posits the attacks of September 11, 2001 as a transition point in the increased
"visibility" of Arab Americans and the questioning of their citizenship, this moment is
contextualized within the longer trajectories of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and
the cultural expressions of political domination through the representation of Arabs,
Muslims, and Arab Americans as different from other Americans.
Nadine Naber's introduction provides a lucid and informative overture to the
history of Arab immigration to the United States. Of primary importance here are the
shifts in racial categories deployed by the Census Bureau, and the determining role
of whiteness as a criterion for naturalization. The importance of whiteness is one of
the central paradoxes of immigration in general and Arab American experiences in
particular: becoming American and accessing the economic, political, and social ben
efits that this entails is often dependent on becoming "white," a category that may or
may not correlate with how immigrants understand their own origins. Arab Americans
are officially defined as Caucasian (a category that insists on including people from
the Middle East and North Africa) and even when a respondent marks "other" and
writes in "Arab," census officials recategorize the individual as white. Naber discusses
related questions explored throughout the volume, such as assimilation, the benefits
of anti-discrimination legislation, and alliances between Arab Americans and people
of color. One of the particular strengths of this chapter, and the collection as a whole,
is the move beyond the insularity of Middle East studies to place discussions of race
and whiteness in the histories of Arab Americans into conversation with recent critical
scholarship from a variety of ethnic studies disciplines.

Amy Aisen Elouafi is Assistant Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Syracuse Uni
versity.

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 Elouafi 155

The chapters by Louise Cainkar, Andrew Shryock, Amaney Jamal, Sawsan Abdul
rahim, Nadine Naber, and Jen'an Ghazal Read build on demographic surveys, ques
tionnaires, participant observation, and interviews to discuss the experiences of Arab
American communities in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and the state of Texas. Each
addresses a host of mutually complementary issues of how and whether discrimination
relates to racial identity, the context of official harassment and U.S. foreign policy,
and the media's often negative portrayal of Arab Americans. Cainkar begins with a
detailed explanation of current government policy and "security" measures such as
racial profiling, and compares them to earlier U.S. policies of racial discrimination.
She uses field research on Chicago's Arab American community to demonstrate the
relevance of race (and whiteness) to representation, identity, conceptions of history,
experiences of discrimination, and the political significance of official census categories
within the Arab American community. Racialization emerges as a complex process
intertwined with questions of identity politics, and influenced by popular culture and
government security initiatives.
Shryock, Abdulrahim, and Jamal focus on Detroit, home of the largest and oldest
Arab American community. Shryock uses information collected in the Detroit Arab
American Study (DAAS) in 2003 to argue that despite the relevance of race as an
analytical tool and potential political strategy, the term "Arab American" homogenizes
the community and elides the multiple ways in which they represent themselves. He
argues that the vagueness of being considered officially white (or "of color," that is
"black," "Asian," or "Latino"), and the absence of a comparably distinct "Arab" racial
category, offers more opportunities for coalition building and a plurality of personal
identities that may challenge American racial hierarchy. Using detailed vignettes about
how two men position themselves along a scale of "whiteness" versus "blackness,"
Abdulrahim considers how Arab immigrants in Detroit and Dearborn shape meanings
of race. She proposes that Arab Americans' ambivalence toward racialized identities
challenges existing racial hierarchies by rejecting the model of immigrant assimila
tion into a white American identity, while framing Arab Americans as a distinct racial
minority in alliance with African Americans.
Jamal also relies on data from the DAAS to demonstrate the extent of support in
the general population for restricting the civil liberties of Arabs and Muslims in the
United States. She argues that people who support limiting these rights hail from across
the political spectrum and share the perception that the September 11, 2001 attacks
represent a clash of civilizations. Although the data in question does not directly iden
tify the impact of the media in spreading this impression, Jamal suggests a correlation
between U.S. military and geostrategic objectives and domestic policies, arguing that
representations of Arabs and Muslims have contributed to widespread support for the
discrimination against Arab Americans.
Naber's chapter discusses the government's Special Registration program, acts
of violence against those perceived to be Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim, and the
quotidian harassment experienced by Arab Americans in San Francisco. She highlights
the gendered nature of violence against Arabs and Muslims, wherein official discourses
of the war on terror combine with popular interpretations of patriotism to represent
middle-class Arab men as the agents of terrorism and middle-class Arab women its

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 156 Arab Studies Journal Spring 2009

passive victims. Read's contribution focuses on the role of religious affiliation in the
construction of racial identities in an Arab community in Texas. While her general point
about the role of religion in identity formation is valid, her presentation of Christian
Arabs as more assimilated and "white" (and that by virtue of being Muslim, Arab
Muslims are racialized) comes off as facile.
Most of the contributions contextualize and destabilize the category of whiteness
by referencing how U.S. immigration procedures shifted the boundaries of whiteness in
relation to the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the successive exclusion
of various immigrant populations. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri's "Strange Fruit?" offers a
thorough exploration of how this process affected Arab Americans. As the only section
entirely focused on historical experiences, this chapter adds an essential component of
depth and detail regarding the specificities of Arab immigration and naturalization. It
offers excellent background for the other contributions and supports Naber's position
that discrimination against Arab Americans began well before September 11, 2001.
Gualtieri tells the story of the lynching of an Arab American (from Syria) in Florida in
1929. She convincingly argues that his case illustrates the "instability of Arab white
ness," (154) which was often based on behavior and depended on specific individual
choices. Yet this story is only legible when placed in the context of white supremacist
violence and the lynching of African Americans.
The edited volume also includes three contributions exclusively focused on the
representations of Arab Americans in literature, television, and newspapers. While the
entirety of the collection under review builds on the insights of Edward Said, Melani
McAlister, and Jack Shaheen, these chapters in particular offer extremely useful
analysis. Michelle Hartman examines recent literary anthologies of writings by Arab
Americans and Arab Canadians and argues that the anthologies end up reiterating
models of cultural essentialism despite attempts to strategically present Arab Americans
in a positive vein. Evelyn Alsultany offers a convincing and fascinating analysis of
the racial representation of Arab Americans as external threats and unequal citizens
in the American TV drama The Practice. By focusing on two episodes aired initially
in December 2001, she demonstrates how Arab American civil liberties are reduced
to the false metaphorical opposition between political correctness and safety, which
allows for the conclusion that racism is an unfortunate but necessary evil. Alsultany
thus deftly illustrates how moments of national crisis can come to be widely understood
as an exceptional state of affairs that justifies the government's scapegoating of Arab
Americans but poses no challenge to American ideals.
Suad Joseph, with Benjamin D'Harlingue and Alvin Ka Hin Wong, analyzes the
language used in the New York Times from 2000 to 2004 to argue that even the sup
posedly liberal media is guilty of representing Arab and Muslim Americans in a way
that "enable[s] racial policing by associating them with terrorism and a demonized,
globalized Islam" (229). The authors offer examples of how journalists subsume national
and ethnic differences in the Middle East and South Asia under the all-encompassing
term, "Arab," deploying Arab as a synonym for Muslim. These evoke an essential
ized representation of Arab Americans as more loyal to their countries of origin than
other Americans and more religious than patriotic; suspicious at best, and potential

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 Elouafi 157

terrorists at worst. The journalistic racialization of Arab/Muslim identity is not only

inaccurate but ultimately colludes with state-sponsored violence against Arab and
Muslim Americans.
This collection of essays underlines the importance of considering the impact of racial
discourses on questions of civil liberties, representation, and identity, in a framework
that brings the discussion of Arab Americans into conversation with ethnic studies as
well as the study of whiteness. The authors interrogate how theoretical understandings
of race contribute to the study of Arab Americans (and, I would argue, to the study of
Arabs in the Middle East as well), raising numerous questions for future research. For
instance, does the idealistic statement by many interviewees that they "discovered"
race only in the United States attest to the absence of racial discrimination in their
countries of origin, or is it a reflection of their position as the majority community in
their "home" country? This is not to presume that race is the only lens through which
to understand difference, but to suggest that Amazighen or Kurds might have different
experiences of the absence or presence of race and racism in Arab countries.
In this respect, this volume offers an insightful and inspiring starting point for
injecting discussions of race into Middle East studies more broadly. It indicates how
discourses of Orientalism are reproduced in the racialization of Arab Americans and
continue to reveal the relationships between power, knowledge, politics, and culture.
Race and Arab Americans includes contributions from disciplines such as anthropol
ogy, history, literature, and sociology. It should be of interest to scholars in these fields
as well as those more broadly tied to American culture, ethnic studies, media studies,
and Middle East studies.

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