How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
by Moustafa Bayoumi
Seven people. Not a policy question. People.
For you if
you've heard "the Muslim community" used as if it were one thing and needed someone to sit with the actual people
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Bayoumi takes the Du Bois formulation — "How does it feel to be a problem?" — and gives it seven faces: seven young Arab and Muslim Americans in Brooklyn navigating the years after September 11 under surveillance, deportation threats, FBI visits, and the daily friction of being made into a national security question. He spent years building relationships with these seven people before writing a word. The book is reported and intimate, which means it refuses the abstraction that makes policy possible. Not "the Arab community." These people. This is what it costs to still be here.
Where This Book Lives
- Topics
- war on terror
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