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Created: February 19, 2003
Latest Update: February 19, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Arab-Americans and Double Consciousness

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, February 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on a New York Times article by Dinitia Smith in the Arts section, on Wednesday, February 19, 2003: Arab-American Writers, Uneasy in Two Worlds. Backup. The article provides a good example of conceptual linking for essay answers to discussion questions.

W.E.B. Du Bois published Souls of Black Folks in which he describes double consciousness in 1903. Thus, it is clear that he could not have been thinking of the situation with which Edward Said and other Arab-American writers are dealing after the September 11 World Trade Center tragedy. Yet look at what Dinitia Smith says:

Like all immigrant groups, Arab-Americans have a sense of doubleness, feeling torn between their parents' traditions and their new culture. In the black-white division of American racial politics, their added burden historically has been the perception of them as black or, at the very least, as occupying an indeterminate place in the country's racial mix.