Arab American intergroup relations

In the late 1990s, more than one million people of Arab origin were estimated to live in North America, 870,738 in the United States and 188,430 in Canada. Although figures for specific Arab national origin were not available for either country, they were available for the state of Michigan, which had a large population of Arab Americans. According to the 1990 US census, 77,070 persons of Arab ancestry were living in Michigan. More than half of those people, 39,673, were of Lebanese background. Michigan was also home to 7,656 Syrians, 6,668 Iraqis, 2,695 Palestinians, 1,785 Egyptians, 1,441 Jordanians, 14,842 unspecified Arab Americans, and 2,310 other Arabs. The US Census also reported the presence of 14,724 Assyrians (Chaldeans), who, contrary to the opinion of most scholars, considered themselves Arabs.

The Arab American Institute (AAI) estimated in 2012 that 3,665,789 Americans are of Arab descent. The US Census Bureau estimated that the population of Arabs in the United States was 1.8 million in 2013, based on data from the 2011 American Community Survey (ACS). The 2006 to 2010 ACS estimated that 1,517,664 people of Arab descent were living in the United States, up 76 percent since 1990. Of these, individuals of Lebanese descent were the most populous, followed by Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, Moroccan, Iraqi, Jordanian, and Yemeni descent.

By the 2020s, over 3.7 million Arab Americans, primarily from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq, lived in the US. However, the census notoriously underestimates this population.

Arab Americans come to the United States and Canada from the twenty-two countries of the League of Arab States. The responses collected in the 2006 to 2010 ACS included those who reported that their ancestry was Algerian, Bahraini, Egyptian, Emirati, Iraqi, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Lebanese, Libyan, Moroccan, Omani, Palestinian, Qatari, Saudi Arabian, Syrian, Tunisian, and Yemeni. (The other Arab League nations are Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, and Sudan.) Although the number of immigrants from most of these countries are too small for them to be separately counted, these subgroups have a significant effect on intergroup and intragroup relations. One Arab American group, Arab Jewish Americans, part of the Sephardic Jewish population and believed to be sizable, is not counted by any official sources. They trace their ancestry predominantly to Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. It is estimated that there are some 85,000 Arab Jews in the United States.

Demographics

According to the 1990 US Census, 48 percent of Arab Americans lived in twenty metropolitan areas. The largest populations were in the Detroit, Michigan (61,065), New York City (58,347), and Los Angeles-Long Beach (56,345) areas. In eight out of ten of the metropolitan areas with the highest Arab American populations, the median household income for Arab Americans exceeded that of the overall population. For example, in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, the median income for Arab Americans was 130 percent of that of the general population. By 2015, the AAI reported up to 94 percent of Arab Americans lived in metropolitan areas, and by the 2020s, the AAI reported this figure at 85 percent.

Between 2010 and 2020, the Arab American population increased by about 30 percent, with most people reporting their ancestry in Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. Although Arab Americans live in all fifty states, some states have particularly large groups of individuals of Arab heritage, including California, Michigan, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Minnesota, Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The cities with the most prominent Arab American populations include New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis.

Overall, Arab Americans obtain higher levels of education than the average American and hold graduate degrees at a rate twice that of the general population. In 1990, 80 percent of Arab Americans were employed versus 60 percent of all Americans. By the 2020s, the labor participation rates of Arab Americans nearly equaled that of the general population. Most worked in technical, managerial, and professional fields, and many were self-employed, with 110,000 Arab American-owned businesses operating in the US.

Historically, most Arab immigrants to the United States sought permanent status. One exception was the temporary male Yemeni workers, who often wanted to earn large sums of money to send to their families in Yemen. Some Arab Americans of higher educational and occupational status looked down on Yemenis because of their lower education levels and incomes and because many adopted the dress and lifestyles of young working-class American men. This violation of traditional manners irritated non-Yemeni-Arab Americans, especially those striving for acceptance by American society. They feared that non-Arab Americans with ambivalent attitudes toward Arab Americans and who hold negative stereotypes of Arabs fostered by their unfavorable portrayal in the mass media would think less of them because of the behaviors of some young Yemeni men.

Arab Americans’ fears are intensified by hate crimes against them such as the one that took place in Dearborn, Michigan, in spring, 1976. In that incident, two young Yemeni immigrant workers who lived in one of the city’s Arab American neighborhoods were murdered with shotguns for no discernible reason other than the fact that they lived in an Arab neighborhood and “looked Arab.” Reports of anti-Arab hate crimes increased after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. In 2014, the FBI reported that starting in 2015, the FBI Hate Crimes Statistics report would include a reporting category for crimes motivated by an anti-Arab bias. Trends indicated an ever-increasing rate of hate crimes against Arab Americans. In 2016, 307 incidents of anti-Muslim hate crimes occurred, an increase of 16 percent from 2015. This trend largely continued each year with a few exceptions. By 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the AAI received record-high reports of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias. The FBI's data indicated an increase of 34 percent from 2022.

Arab American Women

Arab American women have become strong and courageous feminists. Carol Haddad, of Lebanese and Syrian heritage, founded the Feminist Arab Network (FAN) in 1983. It was composed of about one hundred women, about one-third immigrants, and the rest born in the United States. FAN organized panels, wrote articles for progressive feminist newspapers, magazines, and journals, and spoke to numerous groups about what Arab American women wanted for themselves, non-Arab American women, and women throughout the world. Although FAN did not last for more than a few years, it nevertheless brought together activist Arab American women and Jewish, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women to further feminist and progressive causes. In 1994, the South End Press published an anthology by Arab American and Canadian feminists entitled Food for Our Grandmothers. Thanks to FAN’s efforts, women have served as chairs and presidents of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

The Multicultural Immersion Program

The Arab American community is a diverse and successful one. Because of the turmoil in the Middle East, however, and the negative portrayal of Arabs in the mass media, Arab Americans have often felt the sting of prejudice and discrimination and the tragedy of violence and murder. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, African American politician Jesse Jackson expressed empathy for the plight of Arab Americans, saying that “Arab Americans, too, know the pain and hurt of racial and religious rejection. They must not continue to be made pariahs.”

During the Middle East turmoil in 1989, Arab American businesses in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods were frequently boycotted by African Americans. The boycotts were motivated by the anti-Arab defamation with which the mass media showered the nation and the failure of Americans to distinguish between Arab Americans and overseas Arabs. All over the United States, Arab Americans became the targets of violence, property destruction, and even murder.

In 1996, to combat anti-Arab sentiment in Detroit, a social service agency called New Detroit launched the Multicultural Immersion Program. Directed by Sonia Plata, it consisted of yearlong programs that brought together people from the major ethnic, religious, and racial groups in the metropolitan area to learn about one another through seminars presented by designated leaders from each of five major groups: African Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans. The key organizations that lent support to the groups were the Charles Wright African American Museum, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), American Citizens for Justice (an Asian American group), Casa de Unidad, and the American Indian Health and Family Services agency.

The first of the seven sessions in the annual program was an orientation, which was followed by five sessions that consisted of seminars presented by members of each of the five major groups. Each group selected ten to fifteen of its leaders and members to organize and present an all-day, eight-hour program to members of the other four groups. These seminars featured lectures, discussions, presentation of audiovisual materials, dissemination of literature, and other creative efforts to foster communication, mutual understanding, and friendship among the program participants. The seventh session was a summing up of the program and graduation ceremonies. The program was underwritten by the Ameritech Corporation. Participants have access to websites that deal with multicultural issues.

The Multicultural Immersion Program served as a model for all American communities intent on fostering positive relations among minority groups and intergroup peace based on justice, mutual respect, and understanding. In 1997, the program had seventy graduates.

Bibliography

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