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

In Bayoumi’s Preface to How Does It Feel To Be A Problem, he speaks with a group of men in their twenties talking about the constant surveillance they are subjected to in the 21st century. One of these young men, Sade, tells the story of a harrowing realization, whereby he learned one of his close friends was actually an undercover police detective sent to spy on him because he is of Arabic descent. Sade says, “We’re the new blacks” (2), suggesting a link between the systemic scrutiny Arab-Americans now deal with and the historic mistreatment of African-Americans.

Bayoumi explains that in an age of “anti-terrorist” profiling, ArabAmericans are often thought of as a “problem” (8), considered only as extensions of their race and not in terms of their nuanced, personal experience. With his book, he chooses to focus on young Americans of Arab descent (a category comprised of various ethnic identities from the Middle East), arguing that their experience is built upon conundrums of identity and expectation: 

On the one hand, the older generation looks hopefully to you with the belief that you will produce a better world […] On the other, the culture at large increasingly spies on you with mounting levels of fear, aversion, and occasionally outright hostility (6).

In short, Bayoumi implies that the feeling of being “a problem” encompasses not only the problematic experience of being feared and spied upon, but the unsettled, in-between state young immigrants occupy, living between different worlds. 

Brooklyn, New York was the ideal locus of his book, Bayoumi explains, because in addition to housing the largest Arab-American populations in the United States, so many different ethnic groups and social forces converge there. He also illuminates his process for writing the book, explaining that his connections were made through a combination of local friends and community leaders at Brooklyn Islamic centers. He also describes a particularly telling meeting he was allowed to attend between these community leaders and terrorist-fighting officials from the FBI. Though the community members were cooperative and the FBI officials were polite, Bayoumi describes a palpable tension in the air, as well as a visible disconnect over the “clash of priorities” (11).