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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Discrimination, and Foreign Policy
Arab American Identities
Faith, Tradition, and Islam
Growing Up and Self-Discovery
Justice, Activism, and the Future of American Democracy
Summary
Analysis
Talking and smoking with his friends at a hookah café in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 24-year-old Palestinian-American Sade is distraught to have learned that someone he considered a friend was actually an undercover detective, spying on Muslim Americans to investigate terrorism. This is increasingly common; trust is hard to come by for people like Sade, who works at a technology company full of immigrants after losing his job on Wall Street. There, other employees had been vocal about their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings. Sade says that Arabs are “the new blacks” in America.
Bayoumi opens with this anecdote to emphasize the human dimensions and implications of 21st-century America’s pervasive anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, which affects Sade in every domain of his life: through the formal government channels of legal surveillance; at work, where his employer fires him without cause (which he later argues relates to his identity); and informally, in his coworkers’ off-color remarks.
Active
Themes
Speaking of the African-American experience under the system of Jim Crow segregation more than a century ago, the black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Throughout American history, groups from Native Americans to Catholic immigrants to Jewish, Asian, and Hispanic Americans have been treated as threatening outsiders. Arabs and Muslims are the new “problem,” despite the pervasive American belief that people should not be judged by race, gender, religion, or country of origin. Hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims have risen precipitously since the September 11 attacks and many Americans—39 percent, according to one poll—openly admit their prejudices against Muslims.
Bayoumi’s provocative comparison between contemporary Arab and Muslim Americans and African-Americans after the Civil War suggests that Arabs and Muslims have become something of a racial underclass, an exception to the supposed inclusivity and tolerance that remains so central to the United States’ self-image. But he notes that this internally contradictory core value—the belief in equality, but only for some—is a historically consistent feature of American life with historically measurable (and currently palpable) effects.
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Themes
The government has also relentlessly tracked and arrested Muslims since September 11—George W. Bush even made Arabs and Muslims the only legal exception to his ban on racial profiling. A profile, by definition, is an incomplete view, an outsider’s perspective devoid of detail. And profiling now affects Arabs and Muslims in all realms of American society, treating them as either “the exceptional assimilated immigrant or the violent fundamentalist, with very little room in between.” Although stereotypes and images of them are everywhere, they almost never get a chance to speak in public. When they are asked to speak, Arabs and Muslims are mostly forced to answer for others’ crimes and affirm their loyalty to the United States. Otherwise, they speak in the private spaces that will accept them; “the human dimensions” of their lives are still invisible to most.
Bayoumi has written this book to uncover “what it is like […] to be young, Arab, and Muslim in the age of terror.” He includes the stories of seven Arab Americans living in Brooklyn, focusing on the paradox of their youth: their elders expect them to contribute to their communities, yet the national culture feels threatened by them. While Arabs and Muslims are a younger and more affluent demographic than America as a whole, many in Brooklyn are working-class, and the Muslim experience is remarkably diverse—the Arab experience is less so, even though the majority of Arab Americans are Christians. But “Arab American Muslims are at the eye of today’s storms,” and Brooklyn has the largest population of them in the nation. It is one of the most diverse urban areas in the world, with innumerable communities and ways of life coexisting packed densely together.
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Bayoumi begins his research by reaching out to friends and community leaders; he is an Arab American Muslim, but from an elite academic background, unlike most of those who appear in this book. His subjects welcome him with open arms—one imam even tries to marry him off, and he is allowed to attend a private community meeting between Muslim leaders and the FBI, “an example of the failed communication that marks our era.” The FBI tells the leaders they should revere America’s “precious freedoms” and asks them to condemn terrorism. The FBI does nothing to help the community leaders, who ask how to strengthen Muslim charities and avoid the no-fly list.
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After hearing about his project, some people even reach out to Bayoumi. But the author insists that his seven stories do not tell the whole story of Arab American life. The most substantial gap is regarding Arabs who have decided to “pass” as another race “out of either shame or fear or both,” most often as Latinos.
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This book’s “very American stories” concern young Arab Americans who want the same thing as most other people of their age: “opportunity, marriage, happiness, and the chance to fulfill their potential.” They face various burdens that others do not, however, including discrimination, violence, surveillance, cultural misunderstandings, and more. Yet Bayoumi is optimistic, realizing that his subjects have “an enviable maturity” about their situation and need to negotiate multiple identities. They are incredibly knowledgeable about their struggle’s place in American history, and their stories have the potential to reveal the humanity of a profiled people, to help others overcome their prejudice through empathy and recognition.
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