I’m Glad I Look Like a Terrorist: Growing up Arab in America

By Ray Hanania. Urban Strategies Group Publishing Co., 1996, 247 pp. List: $17.95 paper; AET: $10.95.

Reviewed by James M. Ennes, Jr.

Recently I was privileged to discuss at some length with a senior media executive my impression that in modern America, racial slurs are taboo with but a single exception. Slurs against Arabs are OK. Worse, they are rarely even recognized as ethnic slurs. Arabs are routinely demeaned in movies, press or television, and the offense usually goes unnoticed.

My friend suggested that the reason is that Arabs are under-represented in the press, television, and the motion picture industry. People rarely demean their friends and co-workers, she said. The solution is for more Arabs to find employment in the news and motion picture industries.

And that is the essential message of Ray Hanania’s new book.

Born in Chicago in 1953, Hanania’s Palestinian parents sought to integrate their children into American life. They gave their children American names like “Raymond” and spoke to them only in English so that they would be proficient in the language.

Ray Hanania is as American as any compatriot born of blue-eyed German or flaxen-haired Swedish parents. He grew up to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. He watched “Batman” and “Gilligan’s Island.”

Yet when Hanania visits a major airport, he gets special attention. He is frequently followed, questioned, taken out of line. At customs he can expect to be interrogated. His luggage will be searched.

His Arab heritage gives him the dark hair and eyes and the olive skin that is said to match the profile of an international terrorist. So he gets special treatment.

Partly to help balance these things, he studied journalism. For 15 years he worked as a reporter in Chicago. Jews were routinely assigned to cover Jewish issues. Italians covered Italian issues. Ray Hanania was rarely assigned to cover Arab issues, however, for fear that, as an Arab, he might not be objective.

He served a tour in the Air Force. He has published two small newspapers. He ran for public office. He volunteered to work for Nebraska Senator Robert Kerry’s presidential primary campaign, but was rejected because his Arab heritage “would be a disadvantage.”

He has received numerous awards for excellence in journalism, and he has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. But he still is treated routinely as a terrorist suspect.

He accepts this in good humor. A raid on a group of terrorists in the movie “Death Before Dishonor,” he says, looked like an assault on a Hanania family picnic.

His book describes dozens of incidents that should make fair-minded people groan. Hanania doesn’t complain, however. He thinks most Americans are, at least unconsciously, bigots. He laughs about it. Readers will laugh with him. And at the end of his book, he offers some solutions.

Like my friend, the media executive, Hanania suggests that much of the Arab “image” problem can be cured by Arabs themselves. Learn public relations, he says. Learn moderation. Learn the system.

“No one controls the media,” he writes. “It’s just the other way around. The victims are the people who don’t participate in the multi-media circus.”

Don’t whine about the media, is his message. Join it.