Beleaguered and racially profiled since 9/11, Arab-Americans seem to be taking a road well-traversed by other US minority groups. Amr Shalakany*, in New York, discusses the implications One of the basic critiques of liberalism is how it tends to break down at specifically those moments when it is supposed to protect civil rights and liberties. At times of national crisis such as 9/11, fundamental safeguards on the rule of law, due process, public court proceedings, lawyers' representation, and the chance to challenge secret arrests and detentions before a civil judge, all seemed to be suspended whenever Arabs and Muslims in America were suspected of involvement in the tragic events of that day. More than 1,200 people living in America have been detained since 9/ 11, most of them under charges of violating US immigration laws, while others were detained under the rubric of "material witnesses", "enemy combatants", or other violations of federal and state criminal laws. Some spent over seven months in prison without trial before they were finally released without charges. Recently, federal judges have allowed the government to indefinitely hold two American citizens without charges in military brigs, without contacts to the outside world and without being able to challenge their detentions. All these violations of civil rights were explained away through legalese that effectively suspends the safeguards of liberal legality in a seemingly legal way. Thus instead of protecting marginalised citizens' rights when they are most threatened, liberal legality seems to have built-in mechanisms that provide for its own suspension when the going gets rough. Liberals in America have adopted various strategies in responding to this crisis. The most obvious response is to take the US government to court and challenge the legality of its civil rights violations. Many civil rights lawyers, public defenders, and immigration and criminal lawyers have been doing just that over the past year. Another liberal response, however, is to "mainstream" the minority group whose civil rights are being violated. The term needs some explanation. Main-stream-ing is a somewhat broad term generally used to describe the different processes by which a marginalised and oppressed group is brought into the centrist fold of "mainstream" America. Its aim is typically twofold: cultural integration into the American multicultural pot in order to secure equal rights as those enjoyed by mainstream American citizens. The term thus denotes a strategic choice when fighting racial oppression; it is a strategy historically adopted by many various minority groups in America, such as Blacks, Latinos, and Jews, in order to fight their oppression as a minority. So far, American Jews have been the most successful in pursuing this strategy, many effectively joining the ranks of America's traditional WASP elite through hyper mainstreaming pursuits. What is interesting for our purposes is that Arab- Americans seem to be adopting the same strategy today. In response to the intense pressure experienced by many Arab- Americans following 9/11, the Arab-American elite, in alliance with various American liberal groups, seems set on getting itself mainstreamed. A current exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) is a perfect example of this. Entitled A Community of Many Worlds: Arab- Americans in New York City, the exhibit which should have ended on 1 September was recently extended to the 9/11 anniversary with special events planned around it, including the screening of a documentary entitled Caught in the Crossfire: Arab-Americans in Wartime. Various Arab-Americans living in New York (NY), academics, writers, and public figures, were all involved in the exhibit organisation, making it worth considering in some detail. The choice of materials and narrative on display does not differ from any other exhibit covering any other minority living in NY today. The exhibit goes through the history of Arab-Americans in NY, their numbers, neighbourhoods, food, social and religious events, family life, culture and public work. It includes pictures of writers, professionals, mothers and daughters, all trying to maintain an Arab identity while concurrently fitting in their adopted homeland: America. Walking through the different panels and installations, one could easily erase the term Arab-American and replace it with Latino-, Italian-, Greek-, or Jewish- American. The minority discourse and self- presentation adopted in the exhibit mirrors exactly that of other minority discourses in the city. As it turns out, although every ethnic minority in NY insists on its individuality, those distinctive factors that give it a sense of individual identity happen to be shared by every other minority in the city. As such, NY minorities all end up sounding the same on some fundamental level, and the MCNY exhibit is thus a model exercise in mainstreaming the Arab minority into this canonical discourse of NY minorities in general. Leafing through the New York Times on my way to see the exhibit, the newspaper also seemed to confirm that mainstreaming was on the ascendancy as the liberals' chosen strategic response to the oppressive aftermath of 9/11. Arab- and Muslim-Americans appeared prominently in three articles in that day's newspaper. The first covered the emergence of Arab and Muslim stand- up comedians who "turn fear into funny", capitalising on America's newfound awareness of Islam by joking about terrorism, racial profiling, and international politics. Azhar Usman, one such Muslim comedian, jokes about how the FBI has been following him everywhere since 9/11 for the simple reason that he's "American and Muslim at the same time [who] prays and eats hamburgers!" The Americanisation of ethnic humor, the article tells us, is one of the oldest ways in which minorities in America have sought to fight against oppression. The premise is pure humanism: "the way that you show people that you're really a human being is in many cases to make people relax and laugh with you." As such, Arab and Muslim comedians follow a clear American pattern of mainstreaming, a pattern previously adopted by Jewish-, Black-, and Italian-Americans who fought their oppressive conditions by poking fun at their accents and other difficulties in assimilating. The message is clear: Arabs and Muslims are oppressed, just like any other minority in America, and they fight oppression in much the same way, including jokes and self-deprecating humor. The two other articles focused on equally humanised themes. One article discussed the life of a New York policeman who also happens to be Muslim. A picture next to the article shows him in full police uniform, kneeling on a Muslim prayer rug, and brandishing an NYPD gun by his left pocket. The other article appears in the celebrated Society pages, and chronicles the wedding of a Syrian-American woman. Both her parents successful professionals, herself a student at Harvard Law School, she married an Englishman who converted to Islam. One of the pictures next to the article shows a relative of the bride playing the Arab oud [lute] as a musical accompaniment to the wedding ceremony. Again, the message here is clear: if Greek-Americans continue to break plates on wedding celebrations, and Jewish- Americans continue to step on a glass during the wedding ceremony, well then Arab-Americans are no different: they play the lute while their kids get married. Clearly, "mainstreaming" has both positive and negative implications. On the one hand, it can be lauded as a positive agent of the American melting pot: a process through which different ethnic minorities emerge from a situation of political oppression and cultural alienation to become full American citizens, contributing actively to the multicultural and political hodgepodge that is America. As such, mainstreaming humanises racial minorities perceived as "Other". It shows that although you may be Black, Jewish, Italian, or for that matter Arab, you nonetheless share the same humanist values that underlie American society. By adopting the language of multiculturalism, mainstreaming also opens up the opportunity for upward social mobility within American society as can be seen in the New York Times Society page. The cover of a recent book on the history of Arab-Americans in New York best exemplifies the visual agenda of mainstreaming the Other: under the book's title is the picture of a teenage Arab girl, covering her hair in a "Muslim" scarf, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and nonchalantly roller-blading down some street in New York. On the other hand, mainstreaming could be perceived in a negative light. As the image chosen of the book's cover implies, mainstreaming can mean nothing more than an adoption of American consumerist culture (jeans and roller- blades) at the expense of a more authentic identity. Mainstreaming dangerously flattens one's culturing and identity, making it interchangeable with that of any other minority. A more serious drawback is the class bias associated with mainstreaming. As a strategy, it seems to benefit the rich more than the poor. Most of those arrested after 9/11 were cab drivers, construction workers, pizza-delivery men, and other blue-collar people. Arab-American doctors, lawyers and engineers were far less harassed after 9/11 than their poor compatriots, to a large extent due to their successful mainstreaming into America's liberal professions. This comes at a price: becoming part of the mainstream means giving up on radical projects, languages and agendas in favour of mainstream acceptance. Thus Black-Americans for example, who have made it into liberal professions, are less likely to defend affirmative action or demand reparations for slavery than people still living in the Black ghetto. The MCNY exhibit and New York Times should not mislead us into thinking that all is well with Arab-Americans in New York today. Rather, they are signs of an emerging strategy of dealing with the oppressive aftermath of 9/11 on Arab-Americans' lives. But as an Arab-American response to the violation of their civil rights after 9/11, mainstreaming seems like a good strategy to adopt. The fight for civil rights is not limited to legal battles before court. Equally important is the media's role in constructing popular images of certain minorities. These images feed back into civil rights movements, strengthening them with popular support and providing them with additional allies before court proceedings. By adopting the mainstream presentation of any another American minority, oppressed and demanding its rights, Arab-Americans, and their elite in particular, may be giving up on their earlier goal of just fitting in as ordinary "white" American citizens. Instead, by perceiving themselves as a racially "tinted" minority, they are discovering new allies in their fight for equal protection under US law. Despite its hugely oppressive repercussions, 9/11 may nonetheless prove useful in ushering the Arab-American community into a new mode of civil rights organisation, one they could positively share with the Latino and Black- American minorities alike. * The writer is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and associate professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Law. Related articles: 9/11 Supplement -- 12 - 18 September 2002 9-11 - WAR COVERAGE -- Archives
