Arab Americans are a much more diverse group than many of their neighbors mistakenly assume

• In 2022, Joe Biden made history as the first U.S. president to recognize the month, which he did again in 2023.
• States such as Illinois and Virginia have passed legislation to make the celebration an annual event, and dozens more have commemorated it.
• From TV stations to entertainment media, people of Arab descent are often stereotyped as violent, oppressed or exotic.

Arab Christians

• For many in the United States, this overlap seems natural, given how often Islam is conflated with Arab identity.
• But just as most Muslims around the world are not Arab, not all Arabs are Muslim.
• During the first significant wave of Arab immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century and early 20th century, families more often than not were Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian Christians.
• While the Arab community in the greater Detroit area, a short drive from where I live and work, is majority Muslim, that sets it apart from many other Arab communities in the U.S. Arab American Christians are themselves diverse, identifying as Protestants and Catholics, and with a variety of Eastern Christian traditions, such as Antiochian and Coptic Orthodoxy.

From Mizrahi Jews to Shiite Muslims

• Arab Jews, often called Mizrahi Jews, have existed since ancient times and helped shape Arab heritage through their philosophical, poetic and political contributions across centuries.
• To be sure, Israel’s establishment and its occupation of Palestinian territories has complicated Arab Jewish identities, with new forms of antisemitism becoming more common within many Arab communities.
• Over half identify as Sunni, 16% as Shiite and the rest with neither group, according to a 2017 Pew poll.
• Finally, many Arab Americans identify with no religion at all, or with other faiths beyond the Abrahamic traditions.

Many nations, one box

• Arab heritage not only includes a variety of religious traditions, but encompasses a wide range of ethnic and racial identities.
• It is difficult to make generalizations about Arabs, whose skin tone, facial features, eye colors and hair textures embody the rich histories of human migrations and settlements that characterize western Asia and northern Africa.
• And Arab identities in the U.S. are becoming only more complex, given the diversity of national backgrounds reflected in the more recent waves of Arab immigration from the 1960s to today.

Complicated identities

• The term Afro Arab is growing as a term of self-description for Black Arab Americans seeking to make space for their multifaceted identities and heritage.
• Black communities are a part of every Arab country, from Iraq to Morocco.
• These dual identities are still fraught, given the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism within some Arab communities, which often stems from the legacies of the trans-Saharan and Ottoman slave trades.
• Still, Tunisia’s president recently provoked outrage after he gave a racist speech targeting African migrants and Black Tunisians.

500-year journey

• Based on true accounts, Lalami narrates how he was enslaved and brought to current-day Florida by 16th-century Spanish colonizers.
• If heritage months are an opportunity to celebrate the diversity of America, the diversity of the Arab community itself should not be overlooked.