The Rules of Forced Engagement Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San...

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2006 18: 235Cultural DynamicsNadine Naber

among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear

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Naber: The Rules of Forced Engagement 235

T H E RU L E S O F F O R C E D E N G AG E M E N T

Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11

NADINE NABER

University of Michigan, USA

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic research on the impact of the aftermath of 11 September 2001 on Arab immigrant communities in San Francisco, this essay explores the ways that the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ has taken on local form in everyday life. I argue that the post-9/11 backlash is not a historical anomaly, but represents a recurring process of the construction of the Other within liberal polities in which long-term trends of racial exclusion become intensifi ed within moments of crisis within the body politic. I further argue that class, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship simultaneously operated intersectionally to produce a variety of engagements with anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism. Finally, I argue that, together, state policies and everyday forms of harassment have produced an ‘internment of the psyche’, or an emotive form of internment that engenders multiple forms of power and control in the realm of the psyche.

Key Words 11 September Arab Americans immigration Muslim Americans racism

In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ took on local form on the streets, subjecting persons whose bodies, names, dress, or other markers signifi ed an Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim identity to increased threats of harassment, violence, and intimidation. Until now, most research on the impact of the aftermath of 11 September on persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ has focused on US state policies towards foreign nationals, the numbers of people who have been detained, or the number of hate crimes enacted. Based on ethnographic research among Arab immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area between September 2002 and August 2003, this essay shifts the state of the research from a focus on policies, laws, and numbers to a focus on

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236 Cultural Dynamics 18(3)

the ways that state policies and media representations take on local form within lived experiences—in the workplace, on the bus, in the taxi, and on the street.1

Situating my analysis within the context of US histories of racial exclu-sion, I argue that the post-9/11 backlash is not a historical anomaly, but represents a recurring process of the construction of the Other within liberal polities in which long-term trends of racial exclusion become intensifi ed within moments of crisis within the body politic. Within the post-9/11 moment of crisis, the racialization of an ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ Other has been constituted by a dual process of cultural racism and the racialization of national origin.2 While anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism has permeated dominant US national discourses for decades,3 it became increasingly pronounced in the aftermath of 11 September. This solidifi ed the racial category ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ enemy and rendered persons associated with this category as embodying a ‘culture’ and/or ‘religion’ that is inherently different and inferior to ‘American’ ‘culture’ and/or ‘religion’.4 As in previous histories of racialization, such as Japanese internment, in which immigrant communities are targeted when the US state goes to war in their homelands, the signifi cance of this process is that it legitimizes the distinction between ‘Americans’ and a constructed enemy Other/enemy of the nation. In this sense, the racial category ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ has come to signify not only a moral, cultural, and civilizational threat to the ‘American’ nation, but also a security threat. This racial project5 has been critical in generating support for US nationalist arguments that claim that going to war ‘over there’ and enacting racism and immigrant exclusion ‘over here’ are essential components to the project of protecting national security.

I further argue for a situated analysis of the post-9/11 backlash that takes the intersections between multiple axes of power seriously. Focusing on the multiplicity of positions from which my research participants have been forced to engage with the war on terror, this article demonstrates that class, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship simultaneously determinedone’s perceived relationship to the ‘enemy of the nation’ (or ‘the terrorists’) and operated intersectionally to produce a variety of engagements with anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism.

Finally, I argue that together, state policies and everyday forms of har-assment at school, at work, on the bus, and on the streets, have intensifi ed the sentiments of fear, apprehension, and intimidation that have circumscribed Arab/Arab American communities for decades and produced what I refer to as ‘internment of the psyche’, an emotive form of internment that engenders multiple forms of power and control in the realm of the psyche. My research thus suggests a connection between state policies, everyday acts of violence on the streets and the realm of the psyche or the emotive.




Research Methods

Between September 2002 and September 2003, I conducted ethnographic research on the impact of the aftermath of 9/11 on Arab immigrant com-munities in the San Francisco Bay Area.6 Most of the research took place among two Arab/Arab American community networks, one that includes recent Arab Muslim immigrants and refugees from Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and North Africa living in poverty, and the other, comprising middle and upper class professionals who are predominantly fi rst and second generation and include Muslims and Christians from the Levant. The research entailed intensive interviews and participant observation among 30 board members representing eight religious, civil rights, and community-based organizations that serve Arabs/Arab Americans among their constituencies.7 I conducted intensive interviews with six lawyers8 whose work was vital to community-based efforts in response to the anti-Arab/South Asian/Muslim backlash in the San Francisco Bay Area in the aftermath of 9/11 and 50 community members from various class, generational, and religious backgrounds and various countries of origin in the Arab world. This article will focus primarily on research conducted among those who were most vulnerable to the post-9/11 backlash, including refugees and working class immigrant women who wear hijab.

Ethnography and Accountability: Anthropology in a State of Fear

I view ethnography as an emancipatory project that is civically or publicly responsible, speaks to central issues in society,9 and foregrounds resistance and social transformation. As an Arab American anthropologist and comm-unity activist, I was concerned with a similar set of issues concerning power and domination affecting many of the persons who participated in my research. During the post-9/11 moment of communal crisis, community leaders and activists, nationally and locally, deployed the strategies of fi rst person narrative, testimony and witnessing, as a method for documenting and calling attention to incidents of hate-based violence and the impact of gov-ernment policies on communities targeted by the post-9/11 backlash.

In San Francisco, activists established a hate-crime hotline where sur-vivors could document their stories, and created a system for monitoring the experiences of persons detained by the INS. They organized public hearings where persons who were targeted by anti-Arab/anti-Muslim state policies and harassment on the streets could make their stories public and hold government offi cials accountable. Locally and nationally, organizations published reports that sought to bring public attention to these stories and make them matters of public concern (American Civil Liberties Union, 2002;




Council on American Islamic Relations, 2004; Hate Free Zone, 2002; Human Rights Watch, 2002). Such reports documented the stories of survivors who were willing to share their stories on a case-by-case basis, represented the survivors in their humanity, and exposed the human cost of the backlash, as opposed to relying primarily on numbers or statistics as data for under-standing the phenomenon. This approach was used to inspire a human connection between the reader and the survivor in an effort to convince the reader that no one should be deprived of human rights or due process protections and to inspire public action against the backlash.

My research adopted a similar approach by deploying ethnography as a site for sharing stories, deepening understandings, promoting discussion about social issues, and provoking social transformations that speak to is-sues that the individuals and communities who participated in the research considered timely and urgent. Yet the post-9/11 environment set limits upon the possibilities for conducting ethnography by inciting a sense of fear among Arab immigrant communities of speaking about one’s engagement with the backlash and producing resistance to participating in academic research on this topic. A few months after this project began, I reconnected with Nada,10 a family friend and a long-time community activist who was specifi cally hired by the city of San Francisco to serve the mental health needs of recent Arab immigrants in the aftermath of 9/11. Nada worked as a mental health therapist at the Tenderloin Mental Health Clinic in the Tenderloin neighborhood where the majority of Arab Muslim immigrants living in poverty reside. Yet as the only Arabic-speaking social service provider in the city of San Francisco at the time, her job came to extend beyond the realm of mental health therapy into the realm of social services. Within months following her appointment, her offi ce became the primary site in the city of San Francisco for recent Arab immigrants seeking assistance in translating government documents; completing immigration or citizenship forms; obtaining a bus pass; searching for food, employment, or housing. Offi ce staff also accompanied individuals or families to employment training programs, government housing offi ces, and other social service agencies and drove clients to offi cial appointments, work or community events. During the summer of 2003, I volunteered at the Tenderloin Mental Health Clinic as Nada’s offi cial assistant. I worked with her in a variety of social service-based areas. Working with this community, I developed relationships with individuals and families in the neighborhood, attended community-based events and gatherings, visited people’s homes, and maintained regular contact with community members by telephone and through visits at Nada’s offi ce.

The Tenderloin, where over 70 percent of the residents live in low-income households, is one of San Francisco’s most impoverished neighborhoods. It is an urban inner-city, densely inhabited, low income neighborhood with many homeless people and single resident occupancy (SRO) hotels. Within San Francisco, the Tenderloin is where the greatest incidence of homicides,




aggravated assaults, and drug use takes place. Despite these statistics, over 25,000 people live in the Tenderloin, including immigrant and refugee com-munities from South East Asia, North Africa, and West Asia, as well as white Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinas/os. Most Arab Muslims living in the Tenderloin came to the US from Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Yemen. Iraqi refugees who opposed Saddam Hussein and were displaced to refugee camps in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War were the fi rst group of Arab Muslims to move to the Tenderloin in signifi cant numbers. In 1994, President Clinton admitted approximately 5,000 of these Iraqi refugees to the US and provided them with housing in the Tenderloin neighborhood in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. Over the past fi ve years, many Iraqi refugees received Section 8 Housing Vouchers from the state through which they have leased or purchased housing in various parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. Receiving Section 8 housing led most Iraqi refugees to leave the Tenderloin neighborhood. Throughout the 1990s, alongside the displacement of Iraqi refugees, single North African males from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco moved to the Tenderloin upon immigration to the US and worked as taxi drivers or service workers. Yemenis tended to move to the Tenderloin from the Central Valley of California where many had lived and worked as farm workers for over 20 years. While Yemeni families tended to move from the Central Valley to the Tenderloin or to Oakland, California, with the hope of eventually owning their own convenience pop store, most Yemeni men who live in the Tenderloin currently work as janitors. Yemeni men also tend to work as parking lot attendants, security guards, and dishwashers. While no research exists on the number of Arab Muslims in the Tenderloin neighborhood, community activists agree that there are approximately 100 Yemeni families and over 1,500 Yemeni men who have citizenship or a green card and are in the US supporting their parents, siblings, wives and/or children who live in Yemen. The majority of Arab Muslims in the Tenderloin are single men who share studio apartments with approximately two to four other single men.11

While I immersed myself within the Tenderloin’s Arab community, working within a context of fear meant that my research would be limited to persons with whom I already had developed long-standing relationships through my research and activism among Arab immigrant communities preceding the events of 9/11, those I developed relationships with through my work with Nada, and recent acquaintances who were willing to speak about the impact of the aftermath on their lives. Since this meant that I would not easily gain a broad understanding of the impact of the backlash on these communities, I equally relied upon the retelling of their experiences by community leaders, social workers, and activists who worked closely with Arab immigrant com-munities directly after 9/11. Conducting research within a culture of fear also meant that the position of the anthropologist as an ‘unreliable narrator’




(Visweswaran, 1994) was exacerbated, in that there were moments where it was diffi cult for those vulnerable to association with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism to distinguish between ‘real’ situations that one should ‘really’ be afraid of and those that were not related to the backlash or did not have the potential to lead to an experience of violence or discrimination.

Immigrant rights lawyer Khalid elucidated this dilemma as follows:

A few weeks after September 11, a guy tried to get into a dance club south of Market. The bouncer ended up getting into a fi ght with him. It turned out the bouncer himself was Arabic. The victim is Arabic. But he had called me and he told me that this was an incident of anti-Arab hate crime. I said, ‘I have a hard time buying it as an Arab on Arab hate crime.’ There was initially a sense of hyper sensitivity amongst the community, that if anybody so much as looked at me wrong, it had to be stemming from some sort of anti-Arab, anti-Middle Eastern sentiment.

Alternatively, there were many incidents that community members and leaders considered to be hate crimes that local police refused to document because they claimed that they did not have enough evidence. The syste-matic increase in anti-Arab/anti-Muslim state policies and everyday acts of violence on the streets12 produced a context in which fear operated to circumscribe emotions, identities, and behaviors, whether the incident was documented as a hate crime or not and whether an individually ‘really’ experienced a 9/11 related act of violence or hate or not. I use the term ‘culture of fear’ to capture this context and I use the term ‘internment of the psyche’ to explore the ways that the culture of fear produced a sense of internal incarceration that was emotive and manifested in terms of the sense that, at any moment, one may be picked up, locked up, or disappeared. I do not approach my research participants’ narratives as mirrors of ‘reality’ or the ‘external world’. My objective is not to determine whether an incident was ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, but to explore narrations as incomplete anthropological knowledges13 through which Arab immigrant communities remembered the aftermath of 9/11.

Part 1: The Post-9/11 Backlash in a Historical Context

While an overview of racial exclusion is beyond the scope of this essay, a brief summary of dominant state and media logics that have helped to sustain the relationship between culture, racism, and access to citizenship within US histories of immigrant exclusion is useful for contextualizing the post-9/11 backlash against persons perceived to be Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1917, for example, illustrate moments in which state and media dis-courses have deployed notions of cultural inferiority, as in the assumption that particular immigrant cultures are inherently backwards and inferior




to ‘American’ culture, in justifying immigrant exclusion and racialization. While the meaning systems underpinning US racial formations have been malleable and shifting, cultural racism, or the idea that the ‘culture’ of a par-ticular group, which is considered natural or inherent to all members of that particular group, is inferior to and incompatible with western modernity and ‘American’ values (as in arguments that blame poverty among African Americans on inherent cultural characteristics) has facilitated racism based on phenotype. The extent to which arguments about cultural inferiority or phenotypical difference have determined the non-white status of a particular group and their access to citizenship has varied, depending on the historical context. Yet a liberal politics of progress, legitimated by cultural racism, has repeatedly naturalized the distinctions between self and Other, tradition and modernity, barbarism and civilization, and has been critical to the structures of power through which the politics of racial exclusion, the exclusion of immigrants from the national body, and the denial of access to citizenship have functioned.

The racialization of immigrants who have been rendered non-white has often relied upon the notion that ‘they’ are foreign and embody a potentiality for criminality and/or immorality. Such arguments have been critical in supporting the exclusion of particular immigrants from citizenship. Mai Ngai argues that the 1924 Johnson–Reed Act, for example, which ‘excluded from immigration Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians on grounds that they were racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship’, and ‘the 1920s actual and imagined association of Mexicans with illegal immigration’ were similarly based on a ‘legal racialization of these ethnic groups’ national origin that cast them as permanently foreign and unassimilable to the nation’ (2004: 7– 8). Within this logic, while the immigrant who is rendered non-white is laden with backwardness and is in constant need of civilization/assimilation, the ‘true’ citizen is associated with an assimilated, unmarked category. As Ngai puts it, ‘unlike Euro-Americans, whose ethnic and racial identities became uncoupled during the 1920s’, thus facilitating their Americanization, ‘Asians’ and Mexicans’ ethnic and racial identities remained conjoined’ (2004: 7– 8). In these ways, the imagined ‘culture’ and ‘national origin’ of immigrants who have been marked as non-white have been critical to the process by which they have been distinguished, as non-citizens, from citizens, or potential citizens.

Gender and class have permeated immigrant exclusion in that immigra-tion law, coupled with state and media discourses, has positioned women and men, workers and professionals, differently vis-à-vis struggles over citizenship. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from immigrating for ten years and only offi cials, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers were allowed to enter. Moreover, as Nayan Shah contends, the distinction between citizens and aliens within Chinese




immigration history was drawn along the lines of gender and family. Chinese American families based on ‘demonstrations of respectable domesticity, economic stability, and proper conduct’ were rendered citizen-subjects while ‘those who do not fi t the model of Chinese family society—namely, Chinese bachelors and female prostitutes—are represented as threats and alien to the American social order’ (Shah, 2001: 16).

During moments of national crisis or war, immigrant exclusion has tended to intensify, particularly for immigrants from the countries the US is invading. Cultural racism, or the logic where ‘culture can [also] function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin’ (Balibar, 1991: 22), has helped to legitimize representations of ‘racialized immigrants and the cultures and geographies from which they come as fundamentally foreign and antipathetic to modern American soc-iety and cultures’ (Lowe, 1996: 5). It has thus facilitated the construction of the distinction between us and them, citizen and alien, patriot and enemy, particularly during moments of crisis in the body politic, when racial exclusion and anti-immigrant sentiment become increasingly pronounced.

The racial logic underlying Japanese internment and the targeting of persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ post-9/11 have been shaped by a similar process by which particular immigrants have been rendered different than and inferior to whites and enemies of the nation. In the context of the Second World War, for example, dominant nationalist discourses that marked Japanese ‘culture’ in terms of an inherent barbarism and trickery, and therefore incompatible with ‘American culture’, were intensifi ed and operated to legitimize arguments about ‘the Japanese’ as disloyal enemies of the nation. Likewise, the racialization of the ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ has entailed a mapping of cultural racism onto the racialization of the enemy of the nation. While this process did not begin on 11 September 2001, it substantially expanded in scope and became increasingly institutionalized and systematic after that date, within the context of a nation in crisis.

Cultural racism has permeated representations of ‘Arabs’ in the US since the early period of Arab immigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, even though the US government’s racial classifi cation of Arab Americans has shifted between the categories, ‘white’, ‘white, but not quite’, and ‘non-white’.14 Within several cases in the early 1900s, for example, public offi cials deployed a racial logic that defi ned whiteness in terms of a group’s potential for cultural assimilation and participation in US capitalism and constructed the notion that the lifestyle of early immigrants who lived as sojourners, working to save the money they earned in the US in order to live a better life after their imagined return to their homeland, represented their inherent tendency to be ‘clannish and alien’. In such cases, terms such as clannish and alien rendered Arab immigrants naturally ‘culturally unassimilable’, and




therefore, ‘non-white’ (Suleiman, 1999: 6). Intersecting with state discourses, Orientalist representations of Arabs in popular culture, coupled with anti-Semitism, have translated European ideas about the Orient into the context of US racial structures since the early days of Hollywood. While representing the ‘Arab Other’ in terms of a particular phenotype (olive skin, hook nose, etc.), Orientalist representations have also deployed defi nitions of race that relied on non-biological characteristics, such as culture and religion, as ‘essentialized markers of inferiority and non-white status’ (Lowe, 1996: 10). Early Hollywood fi lms, for example, such as The Sheik (1921) and The Thief of Baghdad (1924), reinforced the notion that Arabs are culturally backwards, excessively promiscuous, and inherently violent, particularly towards women (Shohat and Stam, 1994).

Post-Second World War, while the US census offi cially classifi ed Arabs as ‘white’, state and media discourses have tended to increasingly represent ‘the Arab’ as different from and inferior to whites. This shift in racialization took place in the context of increasing US economic and military intervention in the Arab world and entailed a dual process by which arguments about ‘the Arab’s’ cultural backwardness intersected with representations of ‘the Arab’ as enemy of the nation.15 The aftermath of 1967 signifi ed a shift in US representations of ‘Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners’ from dis-courses that represented the Arab exotic and sexually mysterious16 to discourses that increasingly confl ated the categories Arab and Muslim and represented persons associated with these categories as culturally foreign and as enemies of the US nation. Post-1967 representations have ranged from images of rich oil sheikhs and their belly-dancing harem girls (who present a threat to the capitalist market) to images of terrorist men and their exceptionally oppressed wives or sisters (who present a threat not only to the capitalist market, but also to modern American values and American national security). Since 1967, alongside expanding US geopolitical interests in the Arab region and the rise of Islamic movements as sites for resisting western domination, the US state and corporate media have increasingly represented Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims as a monolith, as culturally backwards, and as one of the pre-eminent enemies of the West.17

While representations of the ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ Other have permeated dominant US national discourses for decades post-9/11. Yet, the government and media’s production of fear and impending doom, coupled with calls for increased protection of national borders have solidifi ed the notion that persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ embody a permanent cultural and national Otherness. The rise in the propagation of images of ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ cultural backwardness signifi ed by repeated representations of oppressed Arab and Muslim women in need of western liberation, for example, has been coupled with heightened representations of ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ men as inherently




violent potential terrorists or enemies of the nation in need of western intervention.18 Ono and Sloop argue that the post-cold war period has witnessed a proliferation of the notion of the enemy of the nation and that discourse is constituted by the idea that ‘enemies threaten the moral, cultural, and political fabric of the nation state and must be evicted, eliminated, or controlled . . . The production and proliferation of new enemies to blame, to oppose, and to conquer is part of a distinct contemporary culture’ (2002: 35). The Bush administration’s rhetoric vis-à-vis the war on terror indicates that, post-9/11, one of the ways through which dominant state and media discourses have refashioned post-cold war nationalist binaries has been to shift the binary of patriot vs enemy to those who are with us vs those who are with the terrorists.19

The signifi cance of these discourses is that they have legitimated war ‘over there’ and racism against persons perceived to be Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim in the diaspora, ‘over here’. For example, the Bush administration has used the term ‘terrorism’ so broadly that it has rendered anyone and everyone who resists US or US-backed Israeli war and occupation as not only an enemy Other, but a potential ‘terrorist’, who is on the side of evil. Moreover, the idea of saving the world from ‘the terrorists’ has become a justifi cation for waging war on Afghanistan and Iraq and supporting intensifi ed Israeli military aggression against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.20 The discourse of terrorism has taken on local form ‘over here’ in the racial exclusion of persons perceived to be Arab. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has used detention, deportation, and delays in immigration processes against Arab immigrants (as well as Iranian and South Asian immigrants) under the guise of protecting national security from potential terrorists—regardless of whether or not they have ever committed a crime (Cainkar, 2003).

In continuity with histories of immigrant exclusion in the US that become intensifi ed within moments of national crisis, policies targeting the ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ after 9/11 deploy an all too familiar rhetoric which argues that anti-immigrant policies are the ‘proper mechanism to set the tide of criminality intrinsic to them’ (Ono and Sloop, 2002: 33). Such discourses and policies have been repeatedly supported throughout histories of immigrant exclusion in the US by the idea that citizens should be protected against ‘others’ who are ‘potentially or already criminal’ (Ono and Sloop, 2002: 33), or in this case, terrorists. By historically situating the racialization of the ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ within histories of immigrant exclusion, I intend to suggest that the anti-Arab/anti-Muslim backlash does not constitute a historical anomaly, but is in continuity with long-standing patterns within US social life in which racism is coupled with distinctions between us vs them/patriot vs enemy that become more apparent within particular moments of national crisis.




Part 2: The War on Terror in Everyday Life: Multiple Positions and Engagements

Why Class Matters

While state and media discourses have homogenized the category ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’, my research participants’ day-to-day engagements with racism and immigrant exclusion within the fi rst few years following 9/11 illustrate that the backlash took on various forms, depending on one’s relationship to the intersecting co-ordinates of class, gender, religion, citi-zenship, and nation. Socioeconomic class signifi cantly shaped day-to-day engagements with racism and immigrant exclusion among my research participants. The reproduction of state policies and media discourses in local contexts were more violent and life threatening in working class urban spaces than among upper–middle class research participants. While working class immigrant research participants tended to speak about themes such as racial discrimination in the process of seeking employment or housing, fear of FBI investigations, detention, or deportation, middle and upper class constituencies less frequently raised these concerns. Middle–upper class individuals were more protected by legal aid and socialization within white middle class cultural norms (such as dress and speech) than their working class counterparts. In cases where they were targeted, speaking Arabic was the primary signifi er that associated them with ‘the enemy’ who deserves to be targeted and the harassment they experienced tended to take the form of verbal threats or epithets.

The following incident, which occurred a few months after the attacks of 9/11, illustrates the kind of harassment most common among middle–upper class research participants. In this case, two Arab women from professional backgrounds were speaking Arabic at a coffee shop and a man interrupted them and said: ‘We need to be bombing Iraq because he’s just like Hitler.’ When the man discovered they were Palestinian he said: ‘I wish Palestinians would be removed from the face of the earth.’ Reports from working class research participants tended to be much more severe and tended to produce substantial shifts in the survivor’s everyday life. For example, youth living in poverty were more vulnerable to backlash within schools than youth who lived in middle–upper class neighborhoods because they did not have the same access to resources for reporting incidents of hate or addressing them to authorities. Furthermore, the risks that accompanied challenging authority were greater for working class recent immigrants since the potential of detention or deportation was greater. This gave authorities, such as police, teachers, and employers, more power over working class immigrants than those who were middle–upper class. Authorities tended to be held more accountable for their actions against middle–upper class Arabs/Arab Americans than they were when their actions targeted working class Arab immigrants.




The street and the bus were key stages upon which many cases of har-assment were enacted. Those who took the bus tended to explain that, on the bus, they would be referred to with terms such as, ‘camel jockey, terrorist, terrorists are taking our money’, etc. Yasmine, a Lebanese immigrant woman who took the bus daily, narrated:

I was harassed on the bus. I was going to a meeting. Some guy came up to me. He was this huge white dude. I was on the L train. I was wearing all black and a lot of kohl. Maybe that threw him off. ‘We should have f *ing blew up your country you goddam terrorist. You f *ing Afghan. You fucking Muslim.’ He goes, ‘Maybe I should f *ing kill you right now.’ He was yelling this right in my face. He was about 300 pounds and nobody on the bus did anything. They all just watched. I just shut up. Stayed very calm. I got off the bus and I was almost sure he was going to follow me, but he didn’t, thank God.

One’s visibility within public spaces, such as the bus or the street, was con-nected to one’s class positionality as well as the potentiality for harassment that circumscribed their daily activities. Since most upper–middle class re-search participants seldom walked or took the bus to work, they tended to be more protected from the name-calling and verbal threats that were directed at working class research participants on a daily basis. A working class positionality tended to entail increased public visibility and therefore an increased risk of harassment. Those who worked at night and tended to ride the bus beyond midnight, such as janitors, were exceptionally unprotected without the daytime crowds that might have otherwise mediated between the janitors and a perpetrator of a hate crime.

Often forgotten within discourses on multiculturalism and diversity post-9/11 were the assaults against immigrant workers within seemingly safe and/or protected places such as the workplace. In the eight months following 9/11, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 488 charges of backlash discrimination stemming from 9/11. California had the second highest number of cases after Texas (LION, 2002). Interviews I conducted with labor organizers who worked closely with Arab immigrant workers in the aftermath of 9/11 from the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) Local 18 and the Arab American Union Members Council revealed that, while workplace discrimination against Arabs and Muslims existed before 9/11, it had substantially intensifi ed in terms of the number of incidents and the level of violence enacted post-9/11. This view mirrors the fi ndings of regional and national studies that indicate that in the months following 9/11, anti-Arab/anti-Muslim hate crimes increased between 35–50 times their pre-attack levels (see ADC, 2002; ACLU, 2002). Throughout my research, I learned of countless cases in which immigrants perceived to be Arab or Muslim were targets of hateful assaults and epithets from employers.

A common complaint among male workers in particular was that FBI offi cers would show up at the workplace and ask them questions. This often




created concerns among their co-workers or employers, since FBI visits tended to render the worker suspicious of association with terrorism. In several cases, employers fi red workers shortly after an FBI visit. A general sentiment among the Arab immigrants and Arab Americans with whom I worked was that in the post-9/11 environment, it became increasingly diffi cult to fi nd a job or keep one’s job. As Mohammad, an unemployed Arab Muslim male immigrant explained in 2003, ‘Imagine—you look and speak like me . . . you say your name is Mohammed and you are Muslim and you are looking for a job. Who is going to hire you?’ Throughout the Tenderloin neighborhood, I regularly heard stories about Arab immigrant workers who were laid off as a consequence of the post-9/11 backlash or workers who left their jobs after experiencing ongoing related harassment at the workplace that eventually became emotionally and psychologically unbearable. In the cases I learned of, employers as well as co-workers participated in forms of harassment that would associate persons with ‘the terrorist’ or the ‘enemy of the nation’. One janitor explained that his co-workers would bring pictures of Osama Bin Laden to work and would repeatedly state, ‘This picture looks like you.’

As one community activist explained,

Lots of men—janitors, taxi drivers, parking lot guards and so on . . . they were really harassed. They were called names like ‘Bin Laden’ or told to ‘Go home.’ Some of them couldn’t take the stress. They fell apart and ended up losing their jobs as a result.

For Arab Muslim masculinities, the workplace emerged as a perilous site where class inequality was exacerbated by a nationalist logic that associated persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ with the enemy of the nation. Some employers deployed the war on terror as a strategy for forcing Arab and Muslim workers (who tended to be male) to comply with their abuses of authority or face the threat that they would report them to the FBI or immigration authorities. In these cases, employers deployed the post-9/11 environment as a way to control, police, or repress their employees. They would be quick to call in the FBI or INS to fi re workers for minor incidents or would make threats such as, ‘I will report you to the INS or FBI if you complain about your wages or refuse to do what I say.’ The structures of race, gender, and sexuality operated to produce different kinds of experiences with abuses of authority. In a case that Samya, a volunteer with the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, narrated to me, a white American male employer ordered his Arab Muslim immigrant male employee to perform a sexual act or lose his job. In another case, she provided the following account, whose basic outlines have been repeated in many Arab and Muslim community accounts of ex-girlfriends and ex-spouses ‘reporting’ Arab and/or Muslim men to state authorities. Unlike the situation outlined here, whose target appears to have legal residency or citizenship, many of these have involved non-residents and have resulted in detention and/or deportation:




Ayman was a janitor for many years at this company, and the woman who was the manager—this is all before 9/11 now—was harassing him and coming on to him sexually, and basically wanting him to . . . you know, she said, ‘I’ll give you the raise if you come with me’ and constantly hitting on him. She invited him to her house and said, ‘I want my baby to look like you.’ So this happened in December 2000. So he fi led a complaint with the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunities Commission] over some period of time, like in March, and then he was fi red right around the end of July. She fi red him because she thinks that, you know, she’s kind of playing these games with him. And then, shortly after September 11, because then he was going through with all the EEOC stuff, she started . . . well . . . the FBI came to see him because this woman said to them, ‘You better question him about Osama.’ So she kind of set up the police to call the FBI on this guy. So he was interviewed by the FBI on October 1, and then he basically said ‘Hey, let me explain this story,’ and he showed them all the papers of the EEOC, and then he said that the FBI let him go.

In this story, institutionalized race and class inequalities granted the white woman manager the power to sexually harass the Arab Muslim man and, later, to fi re him. Throughout my fi eld sites, race and gender permeated the process by which workers were targeted and, of course, experiences of racism were also impacted by residency status (or non-status), or the citizenship and national identity of the men involved. The women who reported (or threatened to report) the men to the FBI or immigration offi cials in the midst of relationship disputes tended to be white, demonstrating the manner in which racial/national power can ‘trump’ patriarchal power, or at least, in moments such as this, operate intersectionally to produce a range of outcomes.

Arab Muslim Masculinities and the Racialization of Islam

Hegemonic state and media discourses on Islamic fundamentalism con-tributed to the process by which persons were associated with difference, Otherness, or the enemy of the nation throughout my fi eld sites. According to Moallem, ‘the idea that a cultural or religious system can be intrinsic has its roots in European race relations and, in particular, in the discourse of anti-Semitism’ (2005: 41). ‘For Europeans,’ Moallem explains, ‘Islam repre-sents a homogenous doctrine that is essentialized as a force that limits the mental capacities of its adherents’ (2005: 41). Within the context of the war on terror, in continuity with histories of anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism in the US, dominant state and media discourses have increasingly deployed Islam as a signifi er of inferiority, backwardness, and an incompatibility with modernity and American-ness. Gendered representations of Islam have reinforced Orientalist notions of a violent Arab Muslim masculinity and a silent, oppressed femininity. Moallem argues, ‘Islamic fundamentalism has become a generic signifi er used relentlessly to single out the Muslim other in its irrational, morally inferior and barbaric masculinity and its passive, victimized, and submissive femininity’ (2005: 8).




Discourses on Islamic fundamentalism took on local form throughout my fi eld sites in that markers of Muslim identity (such as name or dress) intersected with markers of class, gender, and nation, rendering working class Arab Muslim immigrants in closest proximity to the terrorist enemy within the dominant American national imaginary—while positioning women and men differently vis-à-vis the enemy of the nation.2 1 Following 9/11, the harassment of cab drivers by their passengers was a key site where discourses on Islamic fundamentalism translated Arab Muslim immigrant men into associations with difference, Otherness, and terrorism. For cab drivers, the aftermath consolidated the process by which names such as ‘Mohammed’, limited English skills, a dark complexion, and an immigrant, working-class positionality came to signify ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and the association between ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and a potentiality for violence. One cab driver told a story of his passenger’s reaction to him after they read that his name was Mohammed: ‘Once, a woman got in my car. She looked at me, then read my name, then asked me if I was Muslim. When I said “yes” she replied, “how many girls have you killed today?”’ Here, representations of Arab Muslim men as intrinsically connected to misogynist savagery take on local form in relationships between cab drivers and their clients. This, in turn, facilitates any abuse or ‘defense’ against them. Moreover, in these discourses, ‘Mohammed’, like the ‘Osama’ or ‘Saddam’ references, becomes monstrously subversive, a metonymic source of sedition and danger within the nation, as well as to US ‘interests’ and to ‘American’ bodies, white and non-white. The fi ctional confl ation of Muslim masculinity and terrorism was a dominant theme that hailed multiple subject positions into engagements with racism. Shortly after 9/11, a series of misidentifi cations that had drastic consequences, such as the cases in which Sikhs have been misidentifi ed as Muslims and killed (ACLU, 2002), reifi ed the absurd generalizations underlying hegemonic constructions of ‘Muslim’ masculinity.

The ‘Queery-ing’ of Arab–Muslim Subjectivities

On the street, sexualized tropes often permeated Muslim men’s enga-gements with racism, producing what Eman Desouky (2000) refers to as the ‘queery-ing’ of Arab–Muslim subjectivities. Puar and Rai’s argument that ‘sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism’ (2002: 117) is useful for conceptualizing the intersection between homo-phobia and racism within the post-9/11 environment. They write:

Posters that appeared in midtown Manhattan only days after the attacks show a turbaned caricature of bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building. The legend beneath reads, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ or ‘So you like skyscrapers, huh, bitch?’ Or think of the Web site where, with a series of weapons at your disposal, you can torture Osama bin Laden to death, the last torture being sodomy . . . What these representations show, we believe, is that queerness as sexual deviancy is tied to the monstrous fi gure




of the terrorist as a way to otherize and quarantine subjects classifi ed as ‘terrorists,’ but also to normalize and discipline a population through these very monstrous fi gures. (2002: 126)

My research affi rms Puar and Rai’s argument that the US is being dep-icted as feminist and gay-safe through its comparison with Afghanistan, and yet ‘the U.S. state, having experienced a castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity, offers up narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden, brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans’. Throughout San Francisco, several incidents illustrated the ways that the image of ‘terrorist–monster–fag’ (Puar and Rai, 2002) was reproduced within the process of subjecting persons perceived to be Arab or Muslim to physical and/or epistemic violence. As one community activist recalls:

A guy from Afghanistan called into the hate-crime hot-line. He had gone to help his friend whose car had broken down when he was doing some off-roading a couple of miles away from his house—which is also near a military base in Dublin. By the time his friend got out there to help him, there were two tow trucks out there. The tow truck drivers called the police because the men had beards so the drivers thought they were terrorists. They were near a reservoir and the tow truck drivers were saying things like, ‘Oh, okay . . . they’re tapping the water.’ So they took them to the military base to interrogate them. Fifteen to twenty cops came. They all thought they were trying to contaminate the water. One of the guys had prayer beads with him and offi cers said quotes like, ‘your faggot beads. We’re going to f* you up; we’re going to give you oral sex.’ The offi cers were intimidating them.

In this narrative, the tow truck drivers transform the Afghan men into terrorists via assumptions that confl ate ‘the beard’, ‘Muslim masculinity’, and ‘terrorism’. Inscribing hegemonic discourses that ‘they’ are trying to kill/penetrate ‘us’ on the Afghan men’s bodies, the tow truck drivers transform them into terrorist threats/enemies within. Here, the process of emasculation entails marking Islam—represented by the prayer beads—as ‘faggot’, or not quite the right/straight kind of masculinity. The police’s speech implicitly positions heterosexuality on the side of good and queerness on the side of evil. Moreover, as the police punish Muslim masculinities (read terrorist) with the threat of sodomy, a logic of militarized patriotism intensifi es the normativity of heterosexuality. In this narrative, as in the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal, homophobia and racism intersect in a process that confl ates Arab Muslim masculinities with the fi gure of the ‘monster–terrorist–fag’ in the process of taking power over them and rationalizing violence against them.

Feminizing the War on Terror

While Arab Muslim masculinities were produced as the subjects of discourses that construct their primary and stable identity as violent agents of terrorism and/or misogyny, or the ‘true’ enemy of the nation, Arab Muslim femininities were articulated as extensions of those practices, or ‘abject beings . . . “not




yet subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’ (Butler, 1993: 3).22 Throughout my fi eld sites, hegemonic discourses represented the act or gesture of veiling in particular to parameters of iden-tifi cation that transformed them into daughters or sisters of terrorists in general, or Osama or Saddam in particular, as opposed to agents of terrorism, thus reproducing discourses on Arab women’s passivity vis-à-vis Arab male violence and misogyny. In one incident, a working class research participant recalled, ‘We were walking down the street to a meeting and one guy started yelling “. . . are you Osama bin Laden’s wife? Come here, I want to rape you.” This is really scary stuff that happens on almost a daily basis.’ Throughout my fi eld sites, veiled women were among those who were most targeted by the backlash due to the visibility of the hijab as a signifi er of a Muslim identity.23

Lamia, a community activist, summarized what she witnessed through her work among Arab Muslim youth in the Tenderloin: ‘After September 11, girls who wear hijab received lots of harassment on the bus, at school and on the street. People would try and pull their hijab off.’

The following excerpt from a group interview with Iraqi youth elucidates Lamia’s point:

Maha: My sister was coming home from school one day and people were calling her ‘Osama’s daughter’.

Salma: At school, kids take off their shirts and put them on their heads and say, ‘We look like Osama’s daughter now. We look like you now.’ Some kids would come up to us and say, ‘Why don’t you take it off? Are you still representing Osama?’

In this narrative, young Arab Muslim girls are constructed as though pat-riarchal kinship ties are the sole determinants of their identities. Reduced to ‘daughters of Osama’, they are transformed into the ‘property’, ‘the har-monious extension’ (Shohat and Stam, 1994) of terrorists, or symbols that connect others to the ‘real actors’ or ‘terrorists’ but who do not stand on their own (lack agency). Interweaving colonial and patriarchal discourses, the ‘daughter of a terrorist’ metaphor reinforces hegemonic US state and media notions of Arab Muslim femininity as inferior vis-à-vis Arab/Muslim masculinity.

As Arab Muslim femininities were fi gured as extensions of Arab Muslim masculinities, they were simultaneously ‘condemned for veiling’.24 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, in their critique of colonialist Hollywood fi lms, write: ‘The orient is . . . sexualized through the recurrent fi gure of the veiled woman, whose mysterious inaccessibility, mirroring that of the orient itself, requires Western unveiling to be understood’ (1994: 149). Reproducing a colonialist logic, Salma’s peer not only asks her to ‘unveil’ but also reduces her realm of possibilities to either ‘taking off her veil’ or ‘representing Osama’. For Salma’s peer, either she is unveiled/with us, or she is with terrorism.




Another dominant media trope that took on local form on the streets is what Shohat and Stam refer to as the ‘colonialist rape and rescue fantasy’ (1994: 156), which is signifi ed by a masculinist colonialist threat of rape. Amaney, a law student, remembered an incident when she was sitting in a restaurant outside with a group of friends, all of them veiled women:

A guy was sitting on the other side of the railing three feet away from us playing the guitar and singing . . . he started singing about Muslim women and how they are so oppressed over there and how they get sexually abused by their men and how they get raped all the time and that they loved to be raped by their husbands and the reason that they don’t say anything is because Muslim women are weak. He said, ‘if they like it over there, we can give it to them over here . . .’ and he went on and on about how they should come to this country to see what real men are like.

In Amaney’s narrative, cultural essentialist or civilizational representations of the Muslim as Other were reinforced through a series of imagined hier-archies between Muslim men and Muslim women and American men and Muslim men. Reproducing dominant state and media representations, the guitar player represented ‘American’ men as sexually superior to ‘Muslim’ men vis-à-vis their seemingly ‘superior’ relationship to Arab Muslim women. As stories such as Amaney’s indicate, race, gender, and sexuality positioned my research participants within a variety of relationships to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism. The multiple ways that my research participants engaged with the post-9/11 backlash thus illustrate that grand generalizations about anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism that fail to account for the multiple axes of power within which ‘race’ operates are limiting in explaining the impact of the backlash on persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’. Alternatively, an approach that takes the simultaneity of oppressions seri-ously is useful for not only understanding the impact of the backlash on Arab immigrant communities, but opening up spaces within immigrant rights, and racial justice movements for addressing multiple oppressions so that individuals are not forced to choose between immigrant rights or women’s rights; racial justice or gender justice.

Part 3: Internment of the Psyche

Intensifying the fear of being targeted on the bus, at work, at school, or on the streets was the fear of being monitored by the state. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, government policies targeted Arab immigrant communities through FBI investigations and spying, INS police raids, and interrogations of community organizations and activists. The INS primarily targeted non-citizens from Muslim majority countries as well as some indi-viduals from Muslim majority countries who were naturalized. These tactics were part of a national governmental implementation of a ‘wide range of domestic, legislative, administrative, and judicial measures in the name




of national security and the war on terrorism’ (Cainkar, 2003: 1). Cainkar argues:

These measures have included mass arrests, secret and indefi nite detentions, prolonged detention of ‘material witnesses,’ closed hearing and use of secret evidence . . . FBI home and work visits, seizures of property, removals of aliens with technical visa violations and mandatory special registration. At least 100,000 Arabs and Muslims living in the United States have personally experienced one of these measures. Indeed, of thirty-seven known U.S. government security initiatives implemented since the September 11 attacks, twenty-fi ve either explicitly or implicitly target Arabs and Muslims in the United States. (Cainkar, 2003: 1)

The FBI targeted citizens and non-citizens as well as naturalized immi-grants and US-born citizens. The primary targets of such policies were men, particularly working class men, although women were not completely excluded from policies such as surveillance, detention and deportation. In the fi rst few months following 9/11, 7000 men had been detained, yet no accurate records exist in terms of how many of these men have been deported or are in deportation proceedings. Moreover, the FBI had interviewed 5000 Arab and Muslim men in the US, most of them Arab. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the FBI would either stop by a person’s house without previous warning or arrange for a phone interview. As one immigrant rights lawyer explained, ‘some people have received six or seven consecutive phone calls. They don’t explain the interviews are voluntary and they don’t have a warrant. In the Tenderloin, they were going from building to building.’

A general sentiment among community activists was that a form of intern-ment was gradually under way yet, they argued, it was less noticeable than if it had taken the form of a mass round-up. For example, fi rst, the Bush administration passed the Patriot Act, then thousands of people were placed on a list; then came the random calls from the FBI to people’s homes, followed by missing people who were picked up, often without charges and held indefi nitely. Later came deportations and, in many cases, family and friends were denied information regarding whereabouts of detainees or deportees. December 2002 marked a new phase in the backlash with the beginning of special registration—the most egregious period where thousands of men were locked up even though many had valid visas. In a March 2003 interview, Homa, an immigrant rights lawyer, explained: ‘Many people had been living on edge, not knowing what their future holds, and even though most people were released, they were put into deportation proceedings and have yet to fi nd out whether they will be deported.’ Recent immigrants and those who were poor and had less access to legal and fi nancial resources and the privilege to ‘pass’ as white or as ‘American’ were disproportionately affected by these policies, particularly in terms of the intensifi cation of an internalized sense of fear. As one Moroccan cab driver put it, ‘Fear is about the guy on the street who’s ignorant. Normal, regular people. It’s not a specifi c person we can point our fi nger on. It’s a fear of




a person who we don’t even know what he looks like and we don’t know anything about him. It’s fear of the unknown.’

While working at the Tenderloin mental health clinic, I learned that in the months following 9/11, most Arab Muslim immigrant men in the Tenderloin sensed that the FBI was after them all. Many of them ended up in psychological services at San Francisco General Hospital as a consequence of stress, anxiety, and depression. Mental health therapist Nada explained:

. . . many men developed compulsive forms of paranoia, which made it diffi cult for them to continue working. One man ended up homeless. He was endlessly harassed at work until it became unbearable. He left his job and took on another job—where he was knifed. Now he is homeless and constantly thinks someone is after him—trying to kill him. This guy is still around, but many of the others have disappeared. Either deported or just ran away. We just don’t see them anymore. As time goes by, the more searches, the more they disappear.

Nada’s narration of the environment in the Tenderloin aftermath of 9/11 speaks to the ways that the interpellation of subjects through racialized notions of the ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ produced disciplinary effects in them. I use the term ‘internment of the psyche’ to name the process by which the state and media’s branding of Arab, South Asian, and/or Muslim masculinities as ‘terrorists’ brings into play dualistic mechanisms of exclusion (either you are with us or you are against us), inducing within individuals ‘a state of consciousness that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1979: 201). Building on Foucault’s notion of ‘panopticism’ (1979: 209) or the disciplinary mechanism of generalized surveillance, the term ‘internment of the psyche’ refers to the covert and unspoken medium that linked sociopolitical institutions and the individual psyche together, ‘making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements’ (Foucault, 1979) of everyday life. Throughout my fi eld sites, community leaders and mental health practitioners who participated in my research repeated over and over that for Arab and Muslim communities post-9/11 the intensifi ed sense that one is always under the scrutiny of others—strangers, hidden cameras, wire-taps, and other surveillance of the security state—and the assumed existence of a hypothetical audience that polices the legality and normality of behavior and renders individuals vulnerable to the ‘truths’ contrived by the state have become increasingly normative patterns of functioning.

During the period of my research, I came across several cases in which Arab Muslim individuals underwent what Fanon refers to as ‘experiencing their being through others’ (1967: 109). One working class immigrant man reported to a community activist that he and his wife were going on a drive one day and ran out of gas. They then assumed that their landlord, who had repeatedly harassed them, had siphoned the gas from their gas tank. Yet there was no way they could prove it. Another participant, a working class veiled




woman who was about to travel on an airplane, told a community activist that she went to Macy’s to buy socks. When she returned home, she found a razor in her bag of socks. She then assumed that the woman at Macy’s was setting her up before her fl ight. In such instances, persons came to believe that they were the subject of a racist act but could not confi rm whether they were or not. Here, power functions as a technology or a disciplinary instrument in that ‘one is totally seen without ever seeing’ (Foucault, 1979: 202). In the aftermath of 9/11, for persons associated with the enemy of the nation or the ‘terrorist’, ‘internment of the psyche’ meant that they were confi dent that the possibility of being targeted existed and they had an image of the perpetrator in their mind but never quite saw him/her commit the act.

‘Internment of the psyche’, or the general sense that one is always being watched and could at any time be attacked, deported, or disappeared, was prevalent particularly among working class immigrants living in poverty. Throughout my fi eld sites, it tended to generate the awareness that one must ‘drag’ conformity and normativity and must become habitually conc-erned about hegemonic misinterpretations and mistranslations. On the streets, working class Arab boys and men were among the most likely to phantasmatically embody ‘real terrorists’ such as Osama or Saddam, and were regularly told that ‘Osama’s your daddy or uncle’, or ‘Saddam’s calling you to tell you he is scared’.2 5 Such discursive strategies situate these men as at once foreign, or alien, to the nation, but at the same time connected, in the most familial and instinctive terms, to ‘Osama’ or ‘Saddam’. The following is an excerpt from an interview with a group of Iraqi youth that demonstrates the actively hostile interpellations of Arab Muslim youth into a violent (‘crazy’) masculinity, and the ways that many have become habitually caught up in a form of panopticism which they themselves came to reproduce.

Salah: Yeah, a couple of days after, I think 10 days after 9/11 happened—Ahmed and I we were walking to our house, it was getting sort of dark. Four kids came up behind us and said something like ‘You Osamas’—

Mohammed: And then they started throwing . . .

Salah: They started throwing rocks at us, coming after us and throwing more rocks, so we started walking faster and faster. They started running after us. So we ran and lost them and went to our house. Five seconds later, they threw this big, big black iron, some car part, at our front door. It was really loud.

Imad: But at school, people don’t mess with us. They think that you’re Arab so you’re violent and they think that God is like a cult, like the KKK is. When anybody fi rst fi nds out you’re Arabic, they have this mentality like, ‘Oh, he might know a cousin who’s a terrorist. He might have guns, bombs.’ I never had a fi ght in my life. . . . [Arabic] . . . But when that happened—with the rocks, I started interacting with people. Because they thought, if this guy left himself alone, he might have some plan. I just talk with everybody.

In this excerpt, the boys recognized themselves as subjects in the racialized discourses on the ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’. Their peers demarcated




their bodies with the trope of terrorism and/or Islamic fundamentalism. The boys’ reaction to this incident epitomizes the ways in which engagements with racism compelled my research participants to respond to dominant structures of power and control. In avoiding the use of violence in response to the youth who threw rocks at them and in Imad’s decision to ‘just talk with everybody’, these boys sought to counter representations of Arabs and Muslims with violence in an attempt to reduce the risk of violence or discrimination against them.

For some of my research participants, ‘internment of the psyche’ produced life-shifting reactions. In some of the most severe cases I learned of, such reactions included sleeping away from home or unexpectedly leaving the US to counter the real or imagined risk of violence, harassment, detention, deportation, humiliation, torture, or murder. Class differences signifi cantly shaped the day-to-day strategies that working class and upper–middle class Arab and Muslim research participants used to respond to the internment of the psyche and the routine of the panopticon. Working class Arab Muslim immigrants, for example, reacted to the post-9/11 state of fear by limiting the time they would spend walking outside on the streets or walking outside in groups as much as possible, particularly women. Yet while ‘internment of the psyche’ was intensifi ed among those living in poverty, middle and upper class research participants also expressed the sense that they were emotionally interned, but in terms that were less severe. Upper–middle class research participants shared stories in which they circumvented perceived surveillance and danger by avoiding the purchase of Arabic newspapers, not listing their phone numbers, anglicizing their names or their children’s names, and turning down Arabic music in their cars before they drop or pick up their children from school. Such acts indicated that hegemonic discourses infi ltrated processes of identity formation among upper–middle class Arab Muslims, yet in ways that were different than among working class immigrants living in poverty.

The increased use of the language of kinship post-9/11 within inner-communal relations illustrated that communal responses to the environment emerged in gendered forms and impacted working class and middle–upper class research participants differently. A group of young Iraqi refugee boys explained that they began using the language of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ to represent relationships between the Iraqi boys and girls at school. Yet the strengthening of communal forms of solidarity often entailed the reproduction of cultural nationalist and familial forms of power and control that tend to be reproduced within contexts of communal crisis. Young Iraqi boys referred to young Iraqi girls as ‘sisters’ in moments when they sought to protect them from harassment by other (non-Iraqi/non-Arab) men. Within the fi rst few months following 9/11, some working class fathers




and husbands increasingly required wives and daughters who wore hijab to avoid leaving the house alone or without a male counterpart out of fear that they might be harassed. Many middle–upper class fathers and husbands shared similar concerns, yet tended to require their wives and daughters to come home before dark rather than to avoid going out at all. While working class and middle–upper class research participants reacted to the post-9/11 environment differently, the intensifi cation of patriarchal control over Arab Muslim women demonstrated the manner in which the ‘security’ state and patriarchal control can be mutually reinforcing. Ironically as the community is blamed within dominant state and media discourses for controlling their women, the threats faced by families increase structures of familial and communal control and reify masculine authority.

Many critics have framed the Bush administration’s deployment of fear and intimidation as an unspoken strategy for justifying policies that under-mine civil liberties and human rights; silencing political dissent, debate, and critique; and legitimizing violence and hatred against persons perceived to be Arab, Muslim, or South Asian.2 6 Such critiques have focused on the chilling effects of fear on the nation at large or how a ‘nation in fear’ is less likely to produce critiques of policies that are implemented in the name of national security (yet might violate the constitution or principles of human rights). This analytical framework posits fear as a sentiment that has constrained the nation at large and Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians as those the nation is required to be afraid of. It assumes that fear constrains the nation on the one hand, and justifi es racism and xenophobia against Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians on the other. While this binarism (between ‘a nation’ vulnerable to fear and Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians who are vulnerable to actions inspired or justifi ed by fear) has constructed fear as a monolith, as if the only state of fear emergent post-9/11 is the fear of terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism, it has limited the possibilities for exploring the ways that a ‘nation in fear’ produces multiple states of fear that take on a variety of forms in different locations. My research illustrates that while the post-9/11 environment has produced the conditions for the government’s implementation of war and immigrant exclusion with little public debate and inspired a growing acceptance of censorship, particularly when it comes to public expression of political dissent, it has also produced signifi cant shifts within the lives of the people the nation is required to be afraid of. My research participants engaged in behaviors that might help to limit the potential of being targeted by the state or on the streets. At the same time, attempts to avoid association with ‘terrorism’ often coincided with practices that reinforced hierarchies of class and gender within and between the ‘targeted communities’.




Conclusion

Highlighting connections between the targeting of non-citizens from Muslim majority countries and histories of immigrant and racial exclusion in the US, many progressive lawyers, scholars, and activists2 7 have referred to the backlash against persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ using terms previously applied to the histories of African American incarceration or Japanese exclusion. For example, at demonstrations and teach-ins activists often referred to the post-9/11 backlash as a ‘massive lock-down’ or as a case of ‘internment, happening at a slow pace’. Locating the post-9/11 environment within the genealogy of racialized exclusion in the US suggests that the Bush administration’s policies are not anomalies that stand out of history. Instead, they remind us of moments in which racialized exclusion has intensifi ed in the context of crisis in the body politic—as in the period of the Alien Sedition Acts of 1790, the repression of abolitionists in the early 19th century, anti-immigrant and anti-labor policies of the late 19th century, and the era of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO of the 1950s. Amidst inter-communal linkages and coalitions made post-9/11, the historical moment most consistently evoked among scholars and activists has been Japanese internment. Perhaps activists and scholars have considered this link to be the most viable since the two contexts similarly emerged within heightened moments of US-led imperialism and war; and because they shared a hegemonic nationalist discourse that justifi ed racial exclusion through the discourse of protecting national security from an imagined foreign enemy of the nation.

Alongside these linkages, a series of debates has transpired. Is it possible to compare the aftermath of 9/11 to Japanese internment, even though a greater number of people were locked up during the Second World War? Comparisons between World War II Japanese internment and the post-9/11 backlash have opened up important possibilities for solidarity between Arab American and Japanese American communities. Solidarity has emerged on the grounds that they share an experience of collective punishment while the US has gone to war in their homelands. Yet post-9/11, according to Bush, the enemy is everywhere and anywhere—because evil knows no borders. Paralleling Bush’s rhetoric of endless, fl uid war, state violence against Arabs and Muslims has similarly transgressed borders and cannot be reduced to a singular time frame or a particular geographic space. The process of detentions and deportation has been gradual and unpredictable, taking anywhere from several days to several years. It has been constituted by multiple border crossings, within and beyond the US. Consider the case of 31-year-old Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was detained by US immigration offi cials at JFK airport, taken on a CIA plane to Jordan, shipped to Syria, and tortured into confessing that he attended




an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan until Syrian, US, and Canadian authorities concluded that there was no real evidence against him. Perhaps the arbitrary, boundless nature of the current backlash might inspire new questions about how internment has taken on new form in a post-9/11 environment.

While new research in American studies, anthropology, Arab American studies, and ethnic studies might explore such questions my hope is that this essay has opened up more and more possibilities for understanding: 1) anti-Arab racism within a US context; 2) the intersecting axes of oppression through which anti-Arab racism is structured (i.e. class, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship); 3) the connections between state policies, everyday acts of violence, and the realm of the psyche; and 4) the connections between anti-Arab racism and other histories of racial exclusion in the US.

NOTES

1. By focusing on Arab immigrant communities, this article addresses only part of a much larger and complex history of representation, interpellation, inclusion, and exclusion. On the one hand, the construction of the racial category ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ has interpellated multiple communities (i.e. Arabs who do not identify as Muslims; Middle Easterners who do not identify as Arabs; South Asians who do not identify as Arabs, Middle Easterners, or Muslims; Latinos/as who have been mistaken for Arabs, etc.). Yet on the other hand, it has also contributed to the exclusion of particular Muslim communities from discussions on Muslim experiences in the US. South East Asian and African American Muslims, for example, whose histories and/or physical appearances do not ‘match’ dominant state and media representations of ‘Muslims’ that confl ate the category ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ are rarely represented within dominant discourses on Islam and Muslims.

2. Here, I build upon Goldberg’s analysis of cultural racism where he argues that the ‘cultural conception includes identifying race with language group, religion, group habits, norms, or customs: a typical style of behavior, dress, cuisine, music, literature, and art’ (Goldberg, 1993: 70). I also build upon Moallem’s argument that cultural racism has also ‘consider(ed) religion as a key determinant in the discourse of racial inferiority’ (Moallem, 2005: 10).

3. See Abraham (1989); Joseph (1999); Saliba (1999); and Suleiman (1999) for analyses of the history of Arab American marginalization.

4. Here I build upon my analysis of the historical construction of the category ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ (Naber, 2000) and Volpp’s argument that after 9/11, a racial process has identifi ed persons perceived to be ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ as somehow associated with terrorism and disidentifi ed them as citizens (Volpp, 2003: 14).

5. Here, I build on Omi and Winant’s defi nition of ‘racial projects’ as ‘simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines’.




‘Racial projects’, they argue, ‘connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning’ (1994: 56).

6. This research was funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation and support from the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. First and foremost, I am indebted to my research participants. Special thanks go to Eman Desouky for her commitment to this project. I am indebted to Firyal, Suleiman, Malik, Ammer, and Michele Naber and also to Nabila Mango, Lillian Boctor, Suad Joseph, Barbara Aswad, Renda Dabit, Osama Qasem, Eyad Kishawi, Monadel Hirzallah, and the board members of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, San Francisco Chapters. This research could not have been possible without their support. I am grateful to Evelyn Alsultany, Andrea Smith, Sarita See, Maylei Blackwell, Frances Hasso, Paola Bachetta, and Andrew Shryock for their invaluable feedback in the process of framing this essay.

7. I selected organizations that have played key roles in responding to the post-9/11 backlash, attracted the most members, and have the greatest membership size. I also selected organizations that were diverse, focusing on a range of issues that were educational, religious, cultural, and political and serving persons from various generations, socioeconomic class backgrounds, and countries of origin within the Arab world.

8. The lawyers who participated in this research worked on a wide range of issues and projects in solidarity with Arab and Muslim immigrant communities. One lawyer, for example, represented more than 600 clients in cases related to the post-9/11 backlash and played an active role in struggles for immigrant rights locally and nationally. Another lawyer who participated in this research was the co-chair of the Bay Area Arab American Attorneys Association and served via mayoral appointment on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. The Program Director at the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter for the National Lawyers Guild also participated in this research and with NLG helped to develop a ‘Know your Rights’ campaign, set up a hotline for people contac-ted by the INS and FBI which would provide attorneys for people who called, and helped to establish the Community Protection Network, which conducted outreach to impacted communities for several years. Several of the lawyers who participated in this research worked closely with cases that resulted from special registration and regularly interacted with representatives of various community-based organizations about these cases. Another participant was the director of legal education and outreach for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee directly after 9/11 and played a key role in comm-unity education on legal topics relevant to a post-9/11 political landscape. One lawyer who participated in this research helped to develop a campaign that was committed to recording INS abuses in the city of San Francisco and organized a critical protest in front of the INS offi ce during special registration which entailed monitoring the INS offi ce’s activities during the period of special registration and recording the names of individuals who entered the building in order to determine the names of those who were detained and to develop




strategies for obtaining legal support for these detainees. A lawyer who was appointed as the Human Rights Commissioner of the city of San Francisco also participated in this research. She was recognized for calling for a series of hearings where individuals targeted by the post-9/11 backlash narrated and recorded their stories. These hearings, in addition to the work of many of the lawyers who worked in solidarity with Arab and Muslim communities in the aftermath of 9/11, contributed to mounting pressure on the city of San Francisco to pass a resolution that criticized the Patriot Act and called on California’s elected offi cials to work to repeal it. In 2003, the city of San Francisco reaffi rmed its ‘sanctuary policy’ that has forbidden local police from inquiring about an individual’s immigration status. The sanctuary policy was passed in the 1980s to create a safe haven at a time when thousands of refugees were fl eeing war-scarred Central America and joined other cities throughout the US to call on the US government to use due process, to stop the use of secret evidence, and to end the use of abusive INS enforcement tactics.

9. See Denzin for an in-depth analysis of ethnography and social transformation (1997: 250).

10. Throughout this essay, research participants’ original names have been changed to protect confi dentiality.

11. In addition to working within the Tenderloin, I also conducted interviews and participant observation among a group of Iraqi refugees who had recently moved out of this neighborhood to Santa Clara, CA, where they were granted better housing conditions through Section 8 Certifi cate and Housing Program. I had developed long-standing relationships among the Iraqi refugees who I interviewed for this research in 2003 since the late 1990s, when the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Francisco Chapter, where I served as a board member, developed fundraisers and community building projects (such as a youth picnic and a walk-a-thon) with San Francisco’s Iraqi refugees.

12. In 2002, an FBI report claimed that anti-Muslim hate crimes had increased by 35 percent (Scheivitz, 2002). In 2004, the organization Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported they had increased by 50 percent between 2003 and 2004 (CAIR, 2004).

13. See Visweswaran (1994) for an analysis of anthropological knowledge as incomplete.

14. These shifts were particularly pronounced between the early 1900s and 1944. Moreover, status as ‘white’ did not always exempt Arab immigrants from inquiries into their citizenship eligibility or from anti-immigrant political rhetoric. In the early 1900s, one southern politician labeled the Syrians ‘the spawn of the Phoenician curse’ (Conklin and Faires, 1987: 75). Since they were considered as originating in Turkey, which was part of Asia Minor, offi cial policy rendered Syrian immigrants as part of a ‘questionable racial stock’ (Samhan, 1999: 216). This ambiguous racial positioning was represented within public debates, such as the 1909 New York Times editorial, cited in Samhan, entitled ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ The editorial argues that, ‘the original Turks were of the yellow or Mongolian race’, and ‘freely intermingled with the Caucasian races whom they subjugated’, making the Turks of 1909 more European and ‘as much “white” people as the Huns, Finns, and Cossacks’. In




other words, the ‘western progress’ of the Turks has rendered them closer to a white, as opposed to a non-white, classifi cation. In 1914, a South Carolina judge ruled that ‘“Syrians might be free white persons, [but] not that particular free white person to whom act of congress had donated privilege of citizenship” in 1790—a privilege he ruled was intended for persons of European descent’ (Samhan, 1999: 217). Arguments that associated racial superiority with white American stock and/or modern European civilization or culture heritage set the stage for investigation into Syrian immigrants’ birthplace or geographic origin. Such investigations led to the eventual appeal of this case based on a report that said that ‘they belong to the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race and are widely different from their rulers, the Turks, who are in origin, Mongolian’ (Naff, 1985: 257). In 1923, the same judge attempted to deny a Syrian petition for naturalization on the ground that Syria fell under a 1917 restrictive immigration act—which bars immigration for natives from most countries east of the Persian Gulf. Later, it was proven that they do not fall within those wartime restrictions (®Samhan, 1999: 217). In 1942, the white status of Arab immigrants was challenged again when Muslim Arabs from Yemen were denied US citizenship on the basis that they were classifi ed as not white. A 1944 decision that classifi ed them as ‘white’ ‘marked the end of explicit challenges on racial grounds to the suitability of Arab immigrants for naturalization’ (Majaj, 1999: 333). See Gualtieri (2004) for an analysis of the racialization of early Arab immigrants.

15. Expanding US geopolitical interests in the region, for example, set the stage for the 1970s US–Arab oil wars that contributed to the production of the image of the ‘greedy Arab oil sheiks’ and the strengthening of the US’s alliance with Israel. Since the 1970s, a series of state policies have developed that were justifi ed in terms of arguments about a potential association between ‘Arabs’ and ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’ and have targeted Arab immigrants and Arab Americans for their political viewpoints, particularly those who expressed solidarity with Palestinian liberation, associating them with the enemy of the nation, or ‘the terrorists’. Since the mid-1980s, alongside the intensifi cation of anti-Arab state policies and media rhetoric, incidents of anti-Arab racism have escalated, particularly when the US government has been involved in a crisis in the Middle East.

16. See Shohat and Stam (1994: 156) for an analysis of the rape and rescue fantasy within colonialist discourse.

17. For further analysis on shifts in representations of the ‘Arab’ in US discourses post-1967 see Abraham, (1988); McAlister (2001); Suleiman, (1989).

18. See Alsultany (2005, forthcoming) for further analysis of media representations of Arab Americans post-9/11.

19. See Howell and Shryock (2003) for further analysis on the implications of the binary ‘those who are with us and those who are with terrorists’ on Arab American identities and experiences.

20. The July–August 2006 US-backed Israeli attack on Lebanon is indicative of how the Bush administration has used the discourse of terrorism to justify war in Arab homelands. In this case, offi cial Israeli and US discourse claimed to be fi ghting the organization Hizballah, which they deemed to be a ‘terrorist’ organization even though the Israeli army primarily targeted and killed




Lebanese civilians as opposed to members of Hizballah’s militia and even though there is no international consensus on whether Hizballah is indeed a terrorist organization. According to Lara Deeb, Hizballah is ‘a political party’ and ‘a powerful actor in Lebanese politics’ and ‘a provider of important social services … Hizballah’s militia arose to battle Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982–2000 and to advocate for Lebanon’s disenfranchised Shi’i Muslim community’ (Deeb, 2006). Yet when the Israeli military systematically killed over 400 Lebanese people, the majority of them civilians, US and Israeli state rhetoric claimed that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism’. A statement made by US ambassador John Bolton is indicative of the use of discourses on ‘terrorism’ to minimize the value of the lives that have been lost to US-backed wars and to quell public dissent against US foreign policy. In response to Israeli military attacks on Lebanese civilians, he ascribed a different value to the lives of Lebanese who are killed by the Israeli military and the lives of Israelis who are killed by Hizballah, or what he referred to as ‘terrorists’. He stated, ‘it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to [Israeli] civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts’. He then defended Israeli military action as ‘self-defense’ which has had ‘the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths’ (AFP, 2006).

21. That mosques were vandalized more than Arab Christian churches is indicative of the complex way that, on the one hand, Arabness was disaggregated from Islam (as in the case of Arab Christians), while it continued to be associated with ‘terrorism’—as illustrated by incidents of violence against Arab Christians. In the aftermath of 9/11 throughout my fi eld sites while Arab Christians tended to feel safer than Arab Muslims, hate crimes against Arab Christians and their institutions were reported, including an arson that took place at the Antiochian Church of the Redeemer in Los Altos that serves Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrians.

22. For further analysis on representations of femininity as ‘abject beings’, or the construction of the feminine as objects that supply the site through which the phallus penetrates, see Butler (1993: 56 – 60). See Tadiar (2002: 5) for an elaborate discussion on the ways that women within a colonialist, patriarchal society are not only imprisoned within particular ideals about gender, but also function as useful objects that serve patriarchal, national, and international structures and processes.

23. While this essay focuses primarily on the lives of Arab immigrants living in poverty, my research fi ndings are part of a broader study on engagements with ‘race’ among those living in poverty and their middle–upper class counterparts. The study indicates that, while the harassment of veiled women crossed class lines, it was most severe among those living in poverty.

24. See Shohat and Stam (1994) for an analysis of representations of ‘unveiling’ as a symbol of western intervention/penetration within colonialist discourses.

25. Cases such as these were most common during the fi rst year after 9/11. They continued in the second year, but to a lesser degree. They were intensifi ed with the onslaught of the US war on Iraq, but to a lesser degree.

26. Corey Robin, for example, has referred to the post-9/11 national mindset as one of ‘irrational fear based on a series of various illogical excuses and denials that




have allowed those in positions of power to implement policies and laws that otherwise would never have seen the light of day, let alone be embraced by a quivering electorate’. He adds that: ‘Many Americans do not even know what they should actually be afraid of’ (2004: 9). Moreover, the New York Times (2 Nov. 2001) describes Arundhati Roy’s critique of US imperialism as anti-US, implying that any position that seeks to critically re-evaluate US foreign policy in light of 9/11 and the ensuing war is anti-US, or, indeed, complicitous with the presumed enemy. This is tantamount to the suppression of dissent, and the nationalist refusal to consider the merits of criticisms developed from the other parts of the globe (Butler, 2004: 186).

27. See for example Ono’s analysis of Asian American studies after 9/11 (2005) or my analysis of coalition politics post-9/11 (2002).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Nadine Naber is an Assistant Professor in the Program in American Culture and the Department of Women’s Studies and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching focus on Arab American Studies; women of color and transnational feminisms; race and ethnicity; and colonialism and post-colonial theory. Nadine is a co-editor of ‘Gender, Nation, and Belonging’, a special issue of the MIT On Line Journal of Middle East Studies on Arab American Feminisms. She has published articles in the Journal of Asian American Studies, the Journal of Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. [email: [email protected]]



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