Being Middle Eastern American: Identity Negotiation in the Context of the War on Terror

Abstract

Using in‐depth interviews with naturalized U.S. citizens and immigrants as well as autoethnographic data, the author examines the stigma management strategies Middle Eastern Americans deploy, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. He applies the concepts of interpretive practice and accounting to narratives of disrupted encounters in which Middle Eastern Americans were prompted to explain their identities, and classifies the stigma management strategies this group utilizes into five types of accounting: humorous, educational, defiant, cowering, and passing. This article evaluates the strengths and drawbacks of each accounting type for combating stigma and discusses how these findings inform existing scholarship on the social construction of deviant identities and their management in everyday life.

Immigrants' Identity Negotiations and Coping with Stigma in Different Relational Frames

“…This mode of interpretation also includes a notion of “networking as identity management” (Valenta 2008), where it is assumed that “the frames of interaction” not only influence but are also influenced by immigrant strategies (Goffman 1974; Holstein and Gubrium 2000; White 1992). Since an important part of immigrants' identity management is related to stigma management (Knudsen 2005; Marvasti 2005), a better understanding of immigrants' social integration may require exploring the connections between immigrants' stigma management and social network management.…”

“…Several studies also suggest that immigrant strategies need to be linked, among other things, to their ethnic networks, prejudiced social reception, and socioeconomic marginalization. Such contextualization is a valuable feature in the Zhou and Bankston (1998) study of young Vietnamese Americans, in the work of Sackman et al (2003) on Muslim immigrants in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, and Marvasti (2005) in his study on the stigma management strategies of Middle Eastern Americans in the context of the “War on Terror.” These studies, and others (Knudsen 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006), have adopted a middle‐ground approach to how immigrant identity projects incorporate dynamic integration strategies and social maneuvering. The present article adds in new ways to the insights in these studies by showing how immigrant identity is managed and constructed in different social relations.…”

“…Immigrants may experience discrediting because of several factors (e.g., their race, ethnicity, or religion). However, immigrants also resist these misconceptions in various ways and reconstruct the identities imposed on them by locals (Kurien 2002; Marvasti 2005; Purkayastha 2005). Drawing from previous research, I ask, “How do immigrants cope with ethnic discrediting?” and “Do their identity negotiations and networking need to be interpreted in light of this coping?”…”

Interrogation and the Minority Suspect: Pathways to True and False Confession

“…Criminal stereotypes of Middle Easterners have been documented more recently, particularly after the September 11 terrorist attacks (Alsultany, 2012 ;Marvasti, 2005 ). Indeed, Marvasti argues that stigmatization of Middle Eastern Americans has become commonplace to the point that they are subject on a daily basis to unwarranted questioning by the general public about their beliefs, intentions, and ideologies.…”

Assimilating to a White Identity: The Case of Arab Americans

“…The post‐9/11 world has directed attention to the religion of Islam in a stigmatizing way, making the religion both more prominent in the everyday language of Americans, but simultaneously more negative. Events following 9/11 including the War on Terror, the emergence of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, as well as more micro‐transformations such as heightened security at airports, have altered the lives of Middle Eastern Americans in many ways (Cainkar, 2003; Marvasti, 2006). Such tendencies resemble the experiences of Italians, Germans, and Japanese during World War II.…”