How Does It Feel to Be A Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (2008)

In Bayoumi’s Preface to Does It Feel To Be A Problem, he speaks with Sade, a young man in his twenties who learned that one of his close friends was actually an undercover police detective sent to spy on him simply because he is of Arabic descent. Sade quips, “We’re the new blacks” (2), suggesting that Arab-Americans now deal with the kind of systemic suspicion and mistreatment African-Americans have historically faced. Akram’s cousin, Thayer, echoes this sentiment, telling Bayoumi that Arab-Americans are “the new abeed,” which Bayoumi translates as “the new niggers” (135). 

At a family gathering, Omar’s cousin expands upon this comparison between African-Americans and Arab-Americans, explaining that the discrimination they currently face reflects a kind of immigrant hierarchy, wherein each “new” group successively becomes a scapegoat for social issues. He says, “Before, they went after the Jews, the Italians, the Irish. And now it’s our turn. Everybody gets their turn. Now it’s just the Muslims” (214).  

With its title (taken from the words of African-American intellectual W.E.B DuBois) and the poems quoted at the beginning of each section (all by renowned African-American poets), Bayoumi encourages readers to consider each Arab-American story as part of a broader historic continuum of racial experience in the United States. Their stories examine the lived experience of being “a problem” in America: a “feeling” that is based in race (discrimination against skin color and appearance) even as its transcends race (encompassing both the realities of being African-American and Arab-American). 

All of the narratives in How Does It Feel To Be A Problem revolve around young Arab-Americans’ attempts to pursue their goals and forge better lives for themselves. All seven subjects pursue college education in preparation for future careers, even if they must make their way through the gauntlet of military experience (as Sami does) or work full-time jobs (as Akram does) in order to actualize their goals. 

As Omar’s narrative confirms, however, post-collegiate career opportunities are often unevenly dispersed and rewarded on a discriminatory basis. Even after undergoing an internship with a prestigious Arab news outlet—Al Jazeera—Omar realizes that his Arab name and work experience may be working against him on his resume. The prevailing message of How Does It Feel To Be A Problem is that young immigrants struggle—and sometimes succeed—through great adversity to obtain many of the opportunities that American-born citizens take for granted.

Bayoumi specifically chooses to examine the lives of Arab-American youth in Brooklyn, New York because in addition to housing the largest Arab-American population in the nation (8), Brooklyn is an ethnic melting pot filled with immigrants from every nation in the world. In Brooklyn, the Arab-American immigrant experience intersects and interacts with a wide range of fellow immigrant experiences.

Akram’s family’s store is a prime example of the cross-section of different immigrant experiences in Brooklyn. Here, he caters to families from the Middle East, numerous African countries, and the Caribbean, speaking to them in various languages of their unique perspectives and interests. As Bayoumi writes, Akram has learned “all the countries of the Caribbean, their politics, their foods, and their vernaculars,” joking “with an older Grenadian woman that he went to school with Maurice Bishop’s son” and cursing “the Haitians in Jamaican patois and the Jamaicans in Haitian Creole” (121). Akram thus absorbs characteristics of all the different immigrant groups around him, and his family’s store serves as a hub for these diverse interactions. 

Bayoumi illustrates that many Arab-Americans also carry a diversity of immigrant legacies within themselves, as with Yasmin’s Filipina-Egyptian background, Omar’s mixed Chilean-Arab heritage, and Sami’s Egyptian-Palestinian and Christian-Arab identity. Growing up Arab-American thus entails a process of coming to terms with this blend of internal identities and influences. For Omar, this takes the form of identifying more strongly with his Arab heritage after the 9/11 attacks. For Sami, this takes the form of a tattoo wherein all the major aspects of his personhood visually combine: lights spelling “NYC,” Arabic text spelling, “Always remembered, never forgotten,” and a moon vaguely printed with the logo of the Marines.