How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?

By Virginia Prescott on Tuesday, October 7, 2008.
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At a campaign rally in Ft. Meyers, Fl. this week, County Sheriff Mike Scott took the stage to introduce Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and yelled: "On Nov. 4th, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened!"

His intent was clear: to paint Barack Obama as a Muslim, just like Saddam Hussein and all the other bad guys. That people believe it despite proof to the contrary unserscores cynicism at best, or willful ignorance of facts at the worst. Consider the message to the nation’s six million Muslims: being Muslim is a problem.

"How does it feel to be a problem?," W.E.B. DuBois asked in his classic The Souls of Black Folk just over a century ago. Today, a growing population of Arab and Muslim Americans are the latest "problem." Government surveillance and detentions, workplace discrimination, and threats of vigilante violence are a reality for many Arab Americans, whether Muslim or not. A 2006 poll found that 39 percent of Americans admit to holding prejudice against Muslims and believe that they should carry special IDs.

Moustafa Bayoumi is associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, and the co-editor of The Edward Said Reader. He followed seven young Arab-Americans living in Brooklyn to answer the question, which is also the title of his new book: "How does it feel to be a problem?"

Click here to read an excerpt from How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?

(Photo by Kevin Tyson)

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