How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Omar Summary & Analysis

In 2006, 22-year-old Omar is stuck in his job search. Despite his experience, industry connections, and nearly a thousand applications, Omar only has offers “from shady online marketers.” He needs a job so he can be with Nadine, another Palestinian student at Hunter College, where his parents also met. He wants to have a traditional Palestinian wedding with her: “since we have no country […] the only thing we have is our identity.”

At a Bay Ridge shisha café, Omar tells Bayoumi how the engagement would go: his grandfather would call Nadine’s father to propose the marriage; Nadine’s family would then spend a week or so researching Omar’s, before inviting them over. They would have tea and discuss arrangements, until Nadine would “walk down the stairs like an old-time movie star.” Later, they would make the engagement official by publicly reciting the first chapter of the Qur’an. But if he does not find a job, there is no chance Nadine’s family will approve the engagement. And he is running out of time.

Omar could not have predicted his difficulty on the job market nine months before, when he graduated with a communications degree and an internship at Al Jazeera. Now he wonders, “could it be that American media organizations won’t hire him because they find an Arab American with Al Jazeera credentials too problematical?” Or perhaps the media job market is just difficult—he cannot know.

Omar’s anxiety about hiring discrimination is common among Arab Americans of his age. Sade, the young man from the preface, was a successful “point clerk” on the commodities trading floor, even getting his brother a job there, but faced constant racist harassment and remembered everyone cheering “Kill those Arabs!” while watching news about the Iraq War. One day, management realized Sade’s brother was born in Jerusalem and summarily fired them both. Sade was sickened, unable to sleep well for a year.

Indeed, in the year after September 11, employment discrimination complaints from Arabs and Muslims rose 400 percent; they filed one-fifth of all complaints with the Federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, and in studies of company responses to fictitious resumes, Muslim names were the least likely to get a call. In fact, men of Arab, Afghan, Iranian, and Pakistani descent saw a sharp decline in income between 2000 and 2002—one study found that wages declined between 9 and 11 percent by 2005.

Bayoumi meets Omar at the Arab Club at Hunter college. Omar is dressed in a suit after a job interview, and he talks about his work at Al-Jazeera and aspirations to work at an American media network. He is half-Chilean, half-Palestinian, and speaks fluent Spanish after spending five years in Chile. He looks the part, too; people scarcely recognize him as Arab, even at shisha cafés in Bay Ridge. This makes the discrimination he experiences all the more frustrating. It was also part of why he loved working at Al-Jazeera, which is a sort of credential for his identity.

Omar gets into media in 2003, after a friend brings him to anti-Iraq War protests and he gets an internship at Downtown Community Television. There, the legendary, Emmy-winning director John Alpert assigns Omar to research a documentary for HBO and gives him the opportunity to take video and film production classes. Although the documentary never materializes, Omar reinvests in his “childhood job fantasy of working as a war correspondent,” like Alpert did during the First Gulf War—his coverage of the destruction wreaked by American bombs got him fired from NBC, in fact, because it conflicted with the government’s official narrative.

Omar recounts his family’s tradition of political resistance: after fighting the Israeli occupation and “frequently landing in jail,” Omar’s father brings his family to New York and works his way up to buying a building in Park Slope. His mother is the daughter of a Chilean physician targeted for assassination by the United States-backed dictator Pinochet, and follows her family to New York as well. His parents meet in 1980, marry in 1983, and have Omar in 1984. When Omar is eight, Pinochet is out of power and Omar’s family moves back to Chile—his father is frightened after getting shot in a random attack in his New York gas station, so he hopes to stay in Chile for good. He contacts the large Palestinian community in Santiago but realizes they are mostly Pinochet-supporting merchants. The family moves back to Brooklyn the day before Omar’s twelfth birthday—he barely remembers English or gets along with American kids.

Then, at the age of fourteen, Omar’s parents send him to Palestine, where “everything [is] alien to him.” When he returns to New York, however, he begins identifying strongly with his Arab side, hanging out with other Arab kids and learning Palestinian customs. On September 11, he is shocked when his teacher announces the attacks; he worries about his aunt who lives downstairs and works at the World Trade Center. Fortunately, she makes it home—she was getting coffee during the crash and walked all the way back to Park Slope over the Brooklyn Bridge. As Arab kids feel increasingly threatened, Omar gets even more connected to—or trapped in—his identity. He starts going to a discussion group in Bay Ridge, led by a relatable imam who emphasizes Muslims’ “public relations problem.” This makes Omar all the more excited to work in the media.

In early 2005, Omar interviews for a job with Al Jazeera’s office in the UN. He is immediately impressed by the main correspondent and explains that he wants to work there because it is the closest thing to an objective news source—his father gets a call with the internship offer before Omar returns home. He throws “himself into the work,” researching crises and learning to cover UN press conferences. He is even mistaken for a correspondent and given responsibility to co-produce a documentary about international students’ decreasing enrollment in American colleges and universities. He researches the issue and its implications, then sets up interviews with university administrators and students, which culminates in a trip back to the Hunter College Arab Club. Abderrahim Foukara, Al Jazeera’s main correspondent, even introduces him to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and tells him he has been the network’s best intern ever.

For the next few months, Omar focuses on school and helps a New York Times reporter navigate the Arab American community in Brooklyn. He soon lands a job at a nonprofit housing organization run by a family acquaintance, who tells him that his time at Al Jazeera “could work against [him] in the future.” Soon thereafter, his supervisor calls it “a terrorist channel” and Omar jumps to its defense. Eventually, in his search for a long-term job, he deletes the words “Al Jazeera” from his résumé.

At the shisha café Meena House, Omar and a number of his friends talk with Bayoumi about work and the FBI. One of the young men says the FBI visited his school, al-Noor, the largest Muslim private school in New York. It was not investigating students—it wanted to recruit them. Of course, it was relatively unsuccessful. The FBI’s goal is clearly to get Arabic speakers—translation jobs in law enforcement are growing, especially in New York, and there are barely any Arabic speakers in the FBI. Fewer than 300 out of 12,000 agents have any proficiency, and only six are “fluent enough to appear on Arabic television.” These few officers also face harassment and discrimination; many have filed complaints reporting offensive slurs from their superiors.

In fact, Omar has even applied for a job at the FBI—he is that desperate—and at the DEA, which wants to send him somewhere like Afghanistan or Colombia. All the men insist they would have no qualms about working for the FBI, even though they understand that Arabs face discrimination and persecution. One of them says that “everybody gets their turn” to be the target of racism. The men see the potential for a lucrative career and do not think about changing the FBI’s culture. While Omar knows a law enforcement job would inevitably entail “spying on his own community” and says he would never do so, he is still thinking about pursuing one.

A few weeks later, Omar tells Bayoumi about meeting Nadine at the Arab Club; although they seldom spend time together, they clearly like one another, and Omar’s father has promised that he will agree to pursue the marriage as soon as Omar gets a job. Omar agrees with Bayoumi that his trouble finding work at a major network involves discrimination—not necessarily against his Arab identity, but there is definitely suspicion of Al Jazeera. His friends and cousins with “much more Arabic-sounding names” all have jobs already. Omar’s father, however, just blames the recession. Like many others, Omar is stuck in “a place where you just don’t know how much power to attribute to contemporary prejudice.” He does not know if he is being paranoid; it feels like swatting a mosquito in bed, not knowing if it is even there, and being unable to sleep regardless.