Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007. 378 pages.)

Abstract

The present American moment has been hailed by some as inaugurating an
era of “post-black” politics with the candidacy and election of President
Barack Obama. Obama’s election, in the words of Manning Marable, indicates
the possibility that America has entered “an age of post-racial politics,
in which leadership and major public policy debates would not be distorted
by factors of race and ethnicity” (“Racializing Obama: The Enigma
of Post-Black Politics and Leadership,” Souls 11, no. 1 [2009]: 1-15). While
his campaign and victory heralded the message of hope in a “post-racial”
landscape, the dangers of stumbling blindly onto the bandwagon could, and
in some cases have, result(ed) in erasing race’s enduring presence in contemporaryAmerican
politics.
Thus, there is perhaps no better time for the publication of Race and
Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, as it counters contemporary public
amnesia by reminding us that race and inequality still permeate the lives of
minority populations. Speaking to an interdisciplinary audience and seeking
to fill a critical gap in the field ofAmerican racial and ethnic studies, this collection
of essays highlights the complex and slippery ways in which race permeatesArab andArab-American engagements with the American social
hierarchy.
Foregrounding the complexities of Arab-American racial formation
as a critical site of inquiry in the introduction, Nadine Naber calls for
moving beyond the usual liberal multiculturalist “add on” approach in order
to consider “the shifting and contradictory historical contexts through
whichArabAmericans have engaged with immigration, assimilation, and
racialization” (p. 4). In a concise but evocative historical précis, she shows
how “anti-Arab racism represents a recurring process of the construction
of the Other within U.S. liberal politics in which long-term trends of racial
exclusion become intensifiedwithinmoments of crisis in the body politic…”
(p. 31) ...