chicagotribune.com
Arab-American causes found her
1982 trip to Morocco changed life's path of Evergreen Park native
Dawn Turner Trice
September 21, 2009
Louise Cainkar grew up in 1960s Evergreen Park in an all-white neighborhood. Her father was an attorney who wore "Mad Men"-type gray suits and took the Rock Island train daily to downtown Chicago. As a child, Cainkar would sometimes ride to work with her father.
She remembers looking out the window as the train passed through some of the city's most impoverished black neighborhoods. Frame after frame, nice bungalows dissolved into tenement-style buildings with laundry lines of tattered clothing hanging amid squalor.
"I was only 5 years old, but I remember thinking: There's something wrong with this picture," said the 52-year-old Cainkar (pronounced Cane-CAR).
It wasn't until she went to Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School that she actually crossed paths with the handful of black students in attendance. Though she would meet other people of color in college, there were absolutely no opportunities to interact with Arabs.
That didn't happen until 1982 when Cainkar, who is white, was in graduate school and took a trip to Morocco. The trip would change her life. She was so moved by the experience that she returned to Chicago -- where she had been completing a dissertation in criminology -- and searched for more information about Arab people and their culture.
"If I had found something other than this racist textbook, filled with misconceptions, and that defined Arabs as being more sexualized and hotblooded than other people, then I might have continued with criminology," said Cainkar, a sociologist specializing in Arab and Muslim affairs who teaches at Marquette University. She lives in the Edgewater neighborhood.
A large part of Cainkar's research has been guided toward dispelling the stereotypes of Arabs as greedy, backward-thinking terrorists and oppressors of women.
"For decades, Arabs were considered white and afforded all the privileges of one having white skin," Cainkar said. "But by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the images we began to see of Arabs in the media, in books, in Hollywood depictions were one-dimensional and negative."
Cainkar has worked for American human rights organizations specializing in Palestinian issues. She has traveled to Iraq to study the impact of the first Gulf War in 1991 and sanctions on Iraqis and Kuwaitis. Among other things, she even lived in Jordan, where she met her Yemeni husband, for two years as a Fulbright Scholar.
"The three questions people always asked me of my time there were: 'Did you feel safe?' Yes. 'Did you drive?' Yes. 'Did you cover your hair?' No," she said. "But why not ask me about the food, or the climate, or the beautiful scenery? It was the best two years of my life, but people don't want to hear that. I felt safer there than in Chicago, but the stereotype must be upheld."
She said that over the years her work has been stifled because, as a white female expert in Arab affairs, she has struggled to get papers published in mainstream academic journals and to find the right institution hospitable to a non-Arab teaching in the discipline.
But that changed on Sept. 11, 2001, when the country suddenly was desperate to learn more about Arabs and Muslims. The color of the expert's skin was of little consequence. The Russell Sage Foundation asked Cainkar to write a book. "Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American & Muslin American Experience After 9/11" was published last month.
In the book, Cainkar allows Arab and Muslim Americans to tell their stories of the discrimination and fear they faced in the aftermath of the terror attacks.
"About a week after 9/11, the government received 96,000 tips regarding Arabs and suspicious activity," Cainkar said. "You were suspicious if you walked out to your mailbox twice in a day. And you were suspicious when the FBI came to check it out. An entire group had to pay for the terrible, terrible actions of a few."
She said that the arrests over the weekend of three Afghan nationals -- one is a naturalized citizen and the other two are legal immigrants -- in connection with an alleged terror plot have the potential once again to cast Arab- and Muslim-Americans under suspicion.
"The three are not even Arabs," Cainkar said. "But most people won't make that distinction."
Cainkar said she feels passionately about her work in part because she grew up in a house in which her parents never tolerated racism. But she said she never knew as a child that one actively could play a role in social justice.
"I had instincts and activist desires early on, but no way to mobilize until social movements found me," she said. "One of the messages I tell my students now is that they don't have to wait for a movement. They can create it themselves."
Most Arabs I know talk about "white people" in the third person, but I'm pretty sure they mark white on census forms.
Throughout the past century, most Arab immigrants to the United States have striven to be accepted as "White." For details, see the first section of U.S. Supreme Court Rulings on Who is White, titled "Eleven U.S. Supreme Court Cases Ruling on Whether Arabs are White." As you can see, the SCOTUS has overruled itself and switched back and forth many times regarding the Whiteness of Arabs. On the other hand, Arab litigants have consistently demanded a White identity
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 07 Oct 2009 18:46 Post subject:
fwsweet wrote:
Dragon Horse wrote:
Most Arabs I know talk about "white people" in the third person, but I'm pretty sure they mark white on census forms.
Throughout the past century, most Arab immigrants to the United States have striven to be accepted as "White." For details, see the first section of U.S. Supreme Court Rulings on Who is White, titled "Eleven U.S. Supreme Court Cases Ruling on Whether Arabs are White." As you can see, the SCOTUS has overruled itself and switched back and forth many times regarding the Whiteness of Arabs. On the other hand, Arab litigants have consistently demanded a White identity
Well there was the article in the "improving American society" of Arab students in California not wanting to be considered white, but it seemed that was only because they feel they are discriminated against because they were Muslim and wanted to be eligible for affirmative action. This could be a reversing trend, as most earlier Arabs immigrants were Christian, and not Muslim, which is still not a mainstream religion in the U.S., but I think there would need to be more study.
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