As a part of Northern Michigan University’s week-long recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., award-winning author Moustafa Bayoumi chose to end his keynote speech with words written by the much-heralded civil rights leader.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Bayoumi read. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Bayoumi’s speech centered around his book, “How Does it Feel To Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” which focuses on young Arab-Americans living in Brooklyn, an area of New York City with a strong Arab community.
Their stories are as varied as they are: A young Arab woman forced to resign as president of student council because she is Muslim; an Arab Marine on an overnight bus to combat training on Sept. 10, 2001; an entire Arab family caught up in the post- 9/11 terrorism scare.
Some of the people struggle with their identity in a new America that’s fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some feel the sting of racism and choose to dedicate their lives to ensuring others don’t. Some are left in limbo, unable to decide if what they’re experiencing is prejudice or just bad luck.
To help describe the world that Arab-Americans live in today, Bayoumi cited an ABC News poll, taken every year since 2002, which asked Americans whether they were willing to admit they held a prejudice for Arab-Americans. The poll showed in 2010, the year of the controversial Mosque at Ground Zero, that 49 percent of those questioned said “yes.”
“In other words, being an American Muslim or being an Arab-American today is to live a life where your very existence is construed as some sort of political act,” Bayoumi said. “And that can be a hard place to live in.”
In the process of writing his book, Bayoumi, who is of Egyptian descent, was able to experience firsthand that hard place.
He told stories of FBI officials meeting with leaders in New York City’s Arab Community to hopefully “instill in the Arab, Muslim-American community that same love for our precious freedoms that we all have,” and to ask them to condemn terrorism.
He talked of recent AP articles which showcase a widespread use by the CIA and the NYPD of ethnic and religious profiling of the Arab-American community in New York City.
“The unfortunate truth is that we still have to enter Dr. King’s dream, where everyone would be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character,” Bayoumi said. “For Muslims and Arabs in America this can be an especially difficult time, where the ring of their name or the caramel of their skin or the cover on their hair has made their lives much harder to live. And while this is true for Arabs and Muslims today, it is also true for many others as well.”
At the end of his speech, Bayoumi cited lines from King’s oft-quoted “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” a piece filled with the hope of a man who wanted to see his country free of prejudice and bigotry and racism .
“Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea,” King wrote in the famed letter. “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
