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

“Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying it directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion my require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”

Bayoumi’s book opens with this quote from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk. In this quote, Du Bois describes different ways in which well-intentioned but ignorant white people often skirt around their curiosity about what it’s like “to be a problem” in America. Herein, the term “a problem” stands in for: a recipient of prejudice, a scapegoat for social issues, and a person who is not thought of as a complex, human individual, but as an exemplar of their race and the “problems” they face. Bayoumi’s book applies this idea of the problematic African-American racial experience to young Arab-Americans in this generation, suggesting that post-9/11, this group currently absorbs the majority of racial tension in the US. He implies that this way of thinking—consciously or subconsciously seeing a person of color as a “problem”—is a kind of racial profiling that prevents people from appreciating individuality, humanity, and nuances in personal experience. With his detailed portraits of Rasha, Sami, Yasmin, Akram, Lina, Omar, and Rami, Bayoumi hopes to provide empathetic representations of young Arab-Americans that help people to evolve beyond the idea of people of color as a social “problem.