44 pages • 1-hour read
How Does It Feel to Be A Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (2008)
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AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Afterword Summary
Bayoumi breaks down the current and historic significance of these Arab-American narratives, connecting their stories to Du Bois’s quote, US foreign and domestic policy, and American cultural perception (and representation) of Arabs. He writes, “Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are to blame for the terrorist attacks, but we are responsible for the kind of society we live in” (270), affirming the great disparity between the “anti-terrorist” paranoia toward Arab-Americans and the reality that not one of the intrusive US anti-terrorist policies—including “Special Registration”—“produced a single terrorism conviction” (267).
The Afterword concludes with a Brooklyn block party, where a wide range of social and ethnic groups interact in harmony. The author offers this block party as an example for America’s potential as a country that can and should embrace its diversity.
Afterword Analysis
In his Afterword, Bayoumi deconstructs the ways American society needs to change its perspective toward—and treatment of—Arab-Americans, explaining that the discriminatory policies affected after 9/11 have not protected Americans and instead damaged the lives of so many Arab refuge-seekers.
Amidst his critiques of discriminatory policies, Bayoumi’s Afterword offers a great deal of optimism, not only providing a visual example of positive diversity in action (through the block party), but examining the many positive community efforts exemplified in these immigrant stories:
What many of the stories in this book illustrate is that the fight to retain standards of fairness and to mine human compassion are themselves acts of resistance, ways of opposing the imperial push in the age of terror […] There are countless other stories like these around the country and in fact across the world today, where people connect to each other on the basis of equality and coexistence and through the universal values of a shared humanity (270).
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