It isn’t every day that a community can be ubiquitous and invisible at the same time. Arab Americans, however, have achieved this paradoxical status. We achieved this status by playing a crucial role in the recent presidential election without having been properly acknowledged by the candidates or by an increasingly compliant progressive media.
Most Americans are familiar with the verbal infelicities involving Arabs that became common as Election Day approached. The most notorious of these infelicities entailed a flabbergasted John McCain taking the microphone from a concerned spectator accusing Barack Obama of being “an Arab.” McCain promptly issued a defense of Obama that reinforced the spectator’s notion that being Arab is inherently bad: “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.”
In fact, Americans heard the same tacit message repeatedly during the general election campaign, particularly from Obama and his supporters: being called Arab or Muslim constitutes a smear because apparently being Arab or Muslim is objectionable in itself. Obama inspired a nation. In the meantime, Arab and Muslim Americans solidified our standing as the quintessential domestic stranger. Obama wouldn’t have accepted anything less. He didn’t need to, in any case, because Arab and Muslim Americans supported him despite his constant insults, both tacit and explicit. Those of us untaken by Obama were deemed idealists or even heartless. As Obama’s hawkish and neoliberal Cabinet selections thus far indicate, it wasn’t Obama’s skeptics who were being idealistic. And the Palestinians who always suffer the brutal aftermath of liberal pragmatism can explain better than I exactly who is being heartless.
The problem is not that fear-baiting tactics around Arab ethnicity went uncontested. They were condemned widely. The problem is that they were rarely contested beyond their effect on Obama’s candidacy. Everybody was so focused on how the so-called smear of being Arab or Muslim unfairly represented Obama they forgot to mention that over a billion people were also being smeared, including millions of Americans.
As a child of Arab immigrants, I found this election remarkably difficult to follow. Obama was somebody easy to be excited about for a person of my background. We are both ethnic minorities. We both have funny names. He is young and eloquent, and looks much more like the Americans of my generation than do typical politicians. Obama has that effect on others. I was happily surprised to see so many young people mobilizing and participating actively in American political discourse.
On the other hand, I was disappointed that Obama never stood up for Arab and Muslim Americans. I often found myself feeling betrayed that he didn’t use his influential position to improve the situation of Arab and Muslim Americans dealing with the slander of being deemed terrorists, enemies, and fifth columns. Instead, it was another supposedly transcendent figure, Colin Powell, who came to our defense: “Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? The answer’s no.”
The imaginary Arabs and Muslims from whom Obama constantly distanced himself don’t at all resemble actual Arabs and Muslims. The Arabs I know, including those who raised me, are peaceable, honest people who participate in American cultural, economic, and political life in various ways. It would have been appropriate, and it certainly was necessary, for one of the candidates to have mentioned this fact. Such an omission was expected from the dreadful McCain. From Obama—the racial healer, the steadfast hoper, the heavenly dreamer—that omission was unconscionable.
In a historic election that is widely believed to have mitigated or even ended racism, it is ironic that racism against Arabs and Muslims constituted its most important rhetorical feature. This racism has been overlooked in the euphoria of Obama’s victory, but for many Arab and Muslim Americans the merriment of 2008 is premature. We are aware that the candidate supposedly representing the demise of racism achieved victory in an election that reinforced Islamophobia and relegated Arabs to the status of an absurd ethnic spectacle. The sort of racism engendered by the election is now omnipresent but somehow forgotten.