Following the guidelines set by the Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau classifies as White those who descend from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. By using the 2010 American Community Survey ancestry and race data, this paper analyzes the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of Arab Americans. This study focuses on analyzing Arabs and non-Arab White ancestry groups according to their nativity status (native versus foreign born) and the following three outcomes: First, in regards to demographic characteristics, we examine the age and gender composition of both native and foreign born population. Second, we analyze these groups’ economic achievements by measuring their median income and occupation distributions. Finally, we analyze these groups’ social traits as indicated by their educational attainments, marital status, language spoken at home, and family size. By examining differences and similarities between native-born and foreign-born Arabs and non-Arab White ancestry groups, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the Arab American population.

Among the most puzzling developments of the post-9/11 era is the dramatic upsurge in political, economic, and cultural influence experienced by Detroit's Arab and Muslim communities. New mosques and churches have been built, and old ones are being renovated and enlarged. More Arabs and Muslims have been elected and appointed to public office. Key civil rights and advocacy groups are today better funded and arguably more effective. Greater Detroit's Arab and Muslim populations are growing, even as the city's non-Arab and non-Muslim sectors, and the state of Michigan as a whole, steadily lose population. The tendency to conflate Arab and Muslim identities is pervasive in Detroit, despite endless attempts to distinguish them. The city's Arab populations are majority Christian, and at least half its Muslim population is non-Arab. Locally, these demographic facts have turned the War on Terror into a tale of two cities: Arab Detroit and Muslim Detroit. Tremendous overlap exists between these two cities, yet their histories, experiences, and collective identities are not the same. This paper explores how a decade of Islamophobia, foreign wars, and domestic anti-terrorism campaigns has affected Detroit as a variously Arab and Muslim place. How can we make sense of the institutional gains Arab Detroit and Muslim Detroit have experienced over the last ten years, and how are these trends related to the stigma and political marginalization Arabs and Muslims still face in Detroit? How do religious and ethnic identities differ as platforms for political incorporation? Who is most concerned to distinguish Muslim and Arab identities in Detroit, and why? Amid a growing sense that Islamophobia is now the most pressing threat to Muslims and Arabs in America and globally, how are the intense zones of overlap and mutual definition that connect these populations changing? Finally, how and why do Arab American Studies and Muslim American Studies provide different answers to these question? By examining these questions, I hope to shed light on new developments in the politics of Americanization that existing discourses of multicultural inclusion leave us ill-equipped to understand. I will also ask if Arab American Studies and Muslim American Studies stand at a crossroad.

While in recent years Arab American scholarship has taken a progressively more inclusive approach toward the study of the ethno-religious clusters that form the overarching Arab American community, an increasing number of Chaldean American community organizers and culture-makers have been adapting a contrastive approach to weave their own separatist, localized collective narrative of who Chaldean Americans are. This presentation is primarily about the burgeoning sub-field of "Chaldean American Studies" and the discursive spaces it occupies between Assyro-Chaldean-Syriac Studies and Arab American Studies. The changing relations between religion (Catholic Chaldeanness, and the Islam of Arab America, nation (Iraq and the United States) and ethnicity (Arab, Chaldean, Assyrian, and the numerous hyphenated variations) along with the sustained contact with the west, have driven segments of the Chaldean communities that have been settling in the United States over the course of a century to search after their ancient historical roots and to seek to foster a uniform, stabilized public image that relies heavily on Catholicism and monumental Mesopotamian symbolism. The fact that selective representations of folklore and antiquity are being used by U.S.-based Chaldeans to express a revived ancient-modern identity indicates the power of the politics of representation in mediating and interpreting Arab-world ethnicities in the United States. It also indicates the emergence of a Chaldean American elite class interested in heritage attractions and capable of carrying out auto-ethnographic projects successfully and on a transnational scale through which the new articulations of Chaldeanness can be exported to Iraqi Christian communities in transit and in other diasporic locales as well as back to Iraqi Christians in the originary country. While situationally negotiating the inclusion and exclusion of their Arab profile for strategic purposes, Chaldean American community organizers mainly construct an official narrative that emphasizes how Chaldeans are non-Arab, non-Arabic speaking, and non-Muslim. I endeavors to juxtapose this official narrative with the reality of daily practices, where Chaldean Americans in fact share several spaces, visions, and practices with the Arab American communities in which they are socially embedded. The framework of this presentation necessarily calls for a discussion of the liminal voices of the Chaldean counter-narrative. The latter remains on the periphery of the official Chaldean narrative, and at the crossroads between a progressively more inclusive Arab American studies and Chaldean-specific communal ethnographies.

Racial liminalities and ambiguities have created major stumbling blocks for the inclusion of Arab Americans in race and ethnic studies. Census Bureau and federal classifications of Arab Americans as “white” often justify this exclusion under the assumption that this status carries with it privileges and options. While some segments of Arab Americans do enjoy “white” privilege and are not treated as minorities, others feel that they are minorities – and are treated as such - in the US. Therefore, the dominant racial rubric is just too rigid for broad studies on Arab Americans and creates a framework that calls into question the legitimacy and relevancy of Arab American Studies in Racial and Ethnic Studies. The way out of this dilemma is to broaden the approach to racial and ethnic studies and to disrupt disciplinary boundaries through using interdisciplinary and transnational approaches. Interdisciplinarity enables the use and combination of a variety of approaches from different fields so as to hybridize methodologies, subjects and frameworks. Transnational studies extend the arena of research across national borders and away from traditional disciplinary definitions based on national belonging and location. While it is possible to challenge these boundaries from within a discipline, this paper will argue that Cultural Studies provides a flexible yet solid home for an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to Arab American Studies. Through an examination of the interdisciplinary fields of Cultural Studies and Arab American Studies, this paper will argue that the two are compatible matches that can address the many historical social, cultural, linguistic and political issues that face Arab Americans. Using ethnographic experiences and knowledge from past activism on behalf of Arab Americans, the central thesis of this paper will be that race and ethnic studies, transnational and diaspora students can concurrently coexist under the rubrics of Cultural Studies and Arab American Studies.

A central concern of Arab American studies has always been the representations of Arabs in U.S. popular culture and the real consequences that these typically negative and stereotypical images have had. My work intervenes in the scholarship on representations of Arabs by analyzing a key component of the production, transmission, and reception of stereotypical images: the complex ways that Arab Americans themselves have deployed these representations. Arab Americans have a long history of adapting Orientalist imagery from U.S. popular culture (e.g. camels, deserts, sheiks, and “harem girls”), and utilizing these images to market an “authentic” cultural identity. Following the long line of scholars that have mobilized and modified Edward Said’s framework, my use of the term self-Orientalism refers to the ways that Arab Americans have strategically deployed Orientalist imagery and rhetoric as a representational practice within liberal multiculturalism. Even though this complex process of self-Orientalism has been a constant in Arab American communities for a century, scholars have largely ignored this rich site of analysis, opting instead to focus on representations of Arabs in U.S. popular culture. There has yet to be a sustained critique of the Orientalist representations that emanate from the Arab American community. What are the ramifications for Arab American studies, an emerging field that relies so heavily on Said’s Orientalism, when the communities we study engage in the same processes that we critique? How can we effectively offer scholarly critiques of the communities that we work with? For example, scholars of Arab American studies have only recently begun dealing with the racism and gender issues that exist within the Arab American community, but at what cost? One solution is to examine the structures in which these practices (racism, self-Orientalism, etc.) develop and are sustained, both within and outside of the community. To ignore these issues in favor of not airing dirty laundry is a disservice to the discipline and the communities that we work with. My paper will not only examine the history of self-Orientalism within Arab American communities, but will also offer strategies for the dilemma of scholarly critique.