An Arab-American friend owns a local car repair shop down the street. Recently, I stopped by his establishment to get an oil change and we visited with each other for a few minutes. As I was about to leave, he looked me in the eye and said he wanted to mention something to me that was very embarrassing and even shameful to him.
He said that he had taken his wife and 10-year-old son to a movie the previous evening. As they were entering the theater, a Muslim woman in hijab walked by them. His son was startled and my friend asked him what had startled him. His son said, “Daddy, I’m afraid of those people that dress like that. I’m scared that they will hurt me.” My friend said that he couldn’t believe it. He said that he thought that he had raised his child to be aware of his Arab and Muslim heritage and, hopefully, proud of this tradition. How could this have happened, he asked me?
I then recalled a similar incident that had happened many years ago. I was appearing on a local TV show to discuss Arabs and the Middle East and my children were left with a baby-sitter. When I returned home, the baby-sitter told me that my children had watched me on the TV program. She said that my then 6-year-old daughter had asked her while watching the program, “Why do they talk about Arabs so much on TV”? The baby-sitter answered that Arabs were in the news a lot and TV picked up on that news. My daughter then whispered in her ear, “You know I’m Arab, but I don’t tell anyone.”
My friend and I discussed how whatever he and I felt that we were doing to instill pride in our heritage, somehow our children seemed to be getting a different story and relating that different story to their personal lives.
In the mid-1970s, when I served as the first executive director of the National Association of Arab-Americans in Washington, D.C., a local graduate student came to see me to discuss her research on children of people of Arab heritage living in the US, she had compiled data on perceptions held by the children of Arab-Americans and children of citizens of Arab countries living in America. She focused on the children’s perceptions of Arabs. She found that with one exception, every group that she tested had overall negative perceptions of Arabs. That one exception was, interestingly, the children of Saudi Arabians living in the United States.
To what did she attribute her findings? She told me that she did not do in-depth research on the causes of these negative perceptions of Arabs by Arab children, but she thought that it all came back to what these children were picking up in the media and what their non-Arab friends were telling them. Why did the Saudi kids have different results? She wasn’t sure, but their results were only slightly better than the other Arab children and she felt that the Saudi students possibly worked harder to have their children feel pride in their Arab heritage.
One only has to look at the recent Dubai ports flap to see the difference of how the American general public and the mainstream media deal with anything Arab. Ports all over the United States are managed by non-American entities. There are even American ports managed by Communist China and no one has ever raised a public issue about these other countries. However, when the United Arab Emirates became involved in managing an American port, the mainstream media and the US Congress panicked.
After my daughter whispered to her baby-sitter that she was Arab but she didn’t tell anyone, I was really shocked. Here I was an Arab-American proud of my heritage and active in Arab-American affairs and my daughter was afraid to tell anyone that she was Arab. Where did I go wrong and what did I do incorrectly? I began to watch the TV cartoons that my kids were viewing. I couldn’t believe how many negative references there were to anything Arab even in the cartoon world.
I will never forget a cartoon that I saw at that time about a very Arab-looking ruler of a far-off country who controlled the world’s largest herd of milk cows. In this cartoon, all of America’s milk cows were dying off due to some strange disease and American children had no milk to drink. All of a sudden there was no place to turn but to this Arab ruler to get milk for our children. What did this Arab ruler do? He raised the price of his milk 10 times and refused to give the American children any milk until their parents paid him the new high price for the milk. Does that scenario sound familiar?
I tried to protest about this offensive cartoon at the time and I brought this cartoon to the attention of every major Arab-American and Muslim American organization. We didn’t get very far but we made the effort and we must continue making these efforts whenever we see this happening.
But at the same time, we must realize that our children are being influenced daily by what they see and hear in the media even if we adults find it negative and offensive.
As an aftermath to my young daughter’s comments about her Arab heritage, I began to make a serious effort with my children to instill pride in their heritage. We read books together about Arab heritage and we attended events that promoted the positive side of being Arab. I recommended a similar tact to my Arab friend at the car repair shop. We can protest when we see something wrong but we must simultaneously teach our children what is right. We have a strong positive heritage and as the Arabs say, “He who denies his heritage, has no heritage.”
