From Silent Minority to Problem Minority: Middle Eastern Arabs and Muslims in the United States in the Twenty-First Century

This paper looks at the ways in which the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terror” affected communities of Middle Eastern origin in the United States, and how the deployment of a pervasive security apparatus to address internal threats deeply affected their civil rights and human dignity in the United States in the two decades that followed. It discusses how Arab and Muslim migrants to the United States in the twentieth century were placed in an “in-between” racial status that had grave repercussions on their quest for naturalization and assimilability to the American mosaic, arguing that their contested status in the United States predated the terrorist attacks of 2001. It finally asks whether national perceptions of Arab and Muslim communities in the United States as “problem,” rather than “model” minorities