Louise Cainkar

Arab Americans and Gender

Gender roles and expectations in which the behaviors of women hold substantially more meaning than those of men have enormous importance for Arab Americans. Gender ideas inform a multiplicity of matters of appropriateness, including public behavior, social relationships, education, occupation, health, marriage, and divorce. Nonetheless, as predicted by segmented assimilation theory, not all families are the same and gendered norms may be treated more flexibly in some families and more strictly in others depending on family resources (social class), the social capital (relationships and community) they build in the United States, and their interpretations and management of interactions with the host society. At the same time, assumptions commonly held in American society—such as that wearing hijab (modest clothing, headscarf) symbolizes submission to men or lack of education—ignore the complexities of social belonging and women’s agency that exist around veiling. Gender notions also have a range of implications for the health care status of Arab Americans, while discrimination and prejudice common to the post-9/11 era have exacerbated feelings of marginalization and disempowerment for some Arab Americans. Nonetheless, Arab American men and women surpass the overall American population on a range of measures of success, including educational attainment, median incomes, and occupational prestige, revealing some of the positive impacts of strong family and selective acculturation. Practitioners will be well served by adopting an informed and nuanced approach to Arab American clients.

Using Sociological Theory to Defuse Anti-Arab/Muslim Nativism and Accelerate Social Integration

For three days after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of angry suburbanites gathered to surround and lay siege to the bounded neighborhood hosting the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois. I concluded from a two and one-half year ethnographic study of the post-9/11 experience of Arab Muslims in metropolitan Chicago that the underlying sociological conditions giving rise to these post-9/11 events were racialized and nativist understandings held by a significant proportion of southwest suburban whites that positioned Arab and Muslim Americans as cultural threats to their communities. Armed with this knowledge, I designed a research project, outlined here, that included a social action component with the objective of expediting the social and civic integration of Arab and Muslim Americans in metropolitan Chicago.

Review of Race Scholarship and the War on Terror

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship. The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project.