Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

On Margins and Mainstreams

On Margins and Mainstreams Andrew Shryock and Nabeel Abraham THIS IS A book about Arabs in Detroit, and like most contemporary attempts to portray immigrant and ethnic communities in America, it is a self-conscious exercise in cultural representation. We realize that Arab Detroit's size (roughly two hundred thousand strong), its age (over a century old), and its economic and cultural prominence (measured in thousands ofbusinesses and hundreds ofmosques, churches, and social clubs) all but demand that a book be written about it. Studies of Cubans in Miami (Portes and Stepick 1993), Dominicans in New York (Pessar 1995), and Koreans in Los Angeles (Abelman and Lie 1997) arise from the same imperatives, and their publication can seemjust as inevitable. In this respect, the portrait of Arab Detroit we offer here is part of an ongoing, often contentious effort to shape collective perceptions of America's diversity by cataloging its zones of "internal Otherness." This volume is perhaps unusual among community ethnographies , however, for the wariness with which its many contributors employ themes of celebration and exclusion. These opposed motifs are currently the easiest, most familiar devices for framing the experience of immigrant and ethnic groups (indeed, the experience of all "special," "marked," or "minority" communities) in North America. In simplest terms, the celebration theme says: "Look how far we've come, against great odds. Marvel at our contributions to American society. See what we have accomplished." The theme of exclusion, by contrast, says: "We shall overcome, but we've not yet arrived. Consider the prejudice and adversity we face every day. Recognize all you are doing to keep us down." Although themes of celebration and exclusion appear in this book, neither manages to capture the mood of Arab Detroit. As editors , we often found ourselves balancing these messages or moving beyond them altogether. Themes of celebration, which dominate the portrayal of "white ethnics" in our popular media, seemed patently wrong to us, since Arabs have not attained the public acceptance 15 Introduction (and protection from defamation) that Italian, Irish, Polish, Greek, or Jewish Americans now enjoy. Arabs are still routinely smeared in the national media, and even the most politically correct Americans have trouble thinking of Arabs as a standard "ethnic group/' This mental block is evident (outside Detroit at least) in the tendency to exclude Arabs from multicultural school curricula, multiethnic political coalitions, arts festivals, tolerance and diversity workshops, and most other vehicles of mass pluralist conditioning. Just look for Arabs in these settings; you will be surprised by how little you find. At the same time, however, themes of alienation and discontent, so compelling to Americans of color, seemed to us equally inauthentic as representational motifs. Arabs in Detroit have been highly successful in business; they are even influential in municipal and state politics. Mosques and churches are thriving, families are growing, children are going off to college and entering the professions. Is it prudent to accentuate the experience of exclusion when opportunity, upward mobility, and political complacency are no less real for Arabs in Detroit? In the end, we decided to make use of our own misgivings by framing our portrait of Arab Detroit in relation to taken-for-granted ideas—thus doubly vexed and powerful ideas—about margins and mainstreams. Arab Detroit is peculiar for the extent to which it exists "on the margin" and "in the mainstream" at the same time. It is a place where the administrator at the local high school is involved (they say) in Lebanese militia politics; the college instructor who lectures on feminist literary criticism is having her marriage to an Iraqi immigrant arranged by her parents; the successful businessman and Republican Party activist spends his off-hours crushing, albeit by phone, Yemeni opposition parties; the manager at Taco Bell sends a large check home to Jordan to help cover the "blood money" his family must pay to resolve a dispute with a neighboring tribe. In Arab Detroit, where cases like these are altogether ordinary, it is best to think of margins and mainstreams as overlapping imaginative zones, each with its own relationship to Arab and American things. The people described above enter the American mainstream whenever they represent or think of themselves in relation to a larger, non-Arab society. They enter the American margins whenever they represent or think of themselves in relation to Arab worlds, private or public, that are not generally accessible (or even intelligible) to a larger, nonArab society. For some Arab Detroiters, life...