Being Arab in My Suburb in the 1970s

Our suburban school district has a reputation for not having much diversity. And it has always irked me. On our street alone, there are people from Ecuador, Mexico, and Vietnam. A man from Ireland who used to live down the block just moved houses. The catch is that most of these people don’t look like they’re from somewhere else. And that’s why I love the title of the book “But You Don’t Look Arab: And Other Tales of Unbelonging” by Emmy Award-winning international journalist Hala Gorani, which includes cameos from folks I actually know.

I heard about the book at the most Midwestern of places: a high school basketball game. A casual observer would have taken one look at the bench and leap to the assumption that they are all white American Christian students. But when the announcer named the starters, it quickly became a case of the cliche that first impressions are only skin deep.

If tackling a whole book feels like too much of a commitment, I get it. So here is a shorter piece by the author. It starts at the Father Dickson Cemetery (pictured in the cover image), which is about half a mile from my house. In fact, I walked by that historic Black cemetery today on the way to breakfast at a local restaurant. And you will want to know what a Syrian-American was doing there in the 1970s.