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Delayed Recognition
Arab-Americans haven't put much effort into advancing their rights as a minority. Until relatively recently, that is.
By Joel Millman
The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2005; Page R8

Arab-Americans are one of the country's oldest immigrant groups. But it's only recently -- and reluctantly -- that they've begun to identify themselves as a minority hurt by discrimination.

The discrimination, some Arab-Americans say, has been particularly evident since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And it's being played out in a host of areas -- from hiring and promotions at work, to portrayals of Muslims in the U.S. media.

'We'd much prefer celebrating our heritage and culture instead of filing lawsuits,' says Albert Mokhiber, a civil rights attorney in Washington, D.C., and an American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee board member. 'But unfortunately these incidents [of discrimination] are getting more common, not less. That compels the community to band together and defend less fortunate victims.'

Not all Arab-Americans view themselves as an oppressed minority. 'Arabs have never asked to be a minority, they consider it demeaning,' says Joseph Kassab, a biotechnologist who serves as president of the Chaldean National Congress of America, an Iraqi-American group based in Farmington Hills, Mich.

What Is an Arab?

According to the 2000 U.S. census, there are about 1.2 million Americans of Arab descent -- a population roughly equal to that of Czech-Americans. Partly because they are relatively few in number, Arabs haven't put much effort into advancing their rights in the U.S. for most of the past century. A surprisingly diverse group -- more Christian than Muslim, and hailing from different races and nations -- their interests as a people also seemed rarely to coincide.

Like 'Hispanic' or 'Latino,' the designation 'Arab' is not a racial term, but a linguistic one. Arabs are those from more than two dozen Arabic-speaking countries that stretch from the Atlantic Coast of Africa across the Sahara to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, whose racial make-up runs from black African to Semitic to Caucasian. Nor is 'Arab' a religious group; most Arab-Americans worship in Catholic and Protestant churches. This is because since the 1950s, most Muslim Arabs who chose to leave home tended to emigrate to the oil-rich Islamic monarchies of the Persian Gulf, while Christian Arabs, who still are likely to be discriminated against in places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, usually journeyed west, to America.

In recent years, that has started to change. Jobs aren't as plentiful in the Gulf kingdoms, and more Muslims are coming here. Even so, today only 24% of Arab-Americans are Muslims -- the highest proportion of non-Christians the community has ever had.

Workplace and other civil-rights issues started to emerge in a few isolated areas in the late 1980s. Starting in 1987, Omar Kader, a Palestinian-American born in Utah, waged a bitter fight to win 'disadvantaged minority' status for his software company under Small Business Administration rules that would allow it to compete for $600 million in government contracts set aside for businesses owned by underprivileged minorities. Mr. Kader says he documented dozens of rejections of applications by his company, Pal-Tech Inc. of Reston, Va., to install security software for government agencies, rejections that he says came as a result of his Arabic heritage.

'People told me flat out, 'We don't do business with ragheads or with terrorists or with Palestinians,' ' the 62-year-old entrepreneur recalls. 'I found there was no mechanism in government for punishing such anti-Arab behavior.'

In 1991, after a four-year lobbying campaign, assisted by Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, Mr. Kader became the first Arab-American to win the special status from the SBA. Along the way, he had to change his company's mission from security work to software training. But he says he now has 300 employees and will do $40 million of business this year with the federal government.

A few years later in Detroit, there came a case that showed U.S. companies, at least in certain areas, were becoming increasingly aware of the rights and growing power of Arab-Americans as a group. In 1998, dozens of Arab-American middle managers and hourly workers at Detroit Edison, Michigan's largest electric utility, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, charging it with discrimination, chiefly by withholding promotions and increases in pay.

Detroit, with an Arab enclave of about 150,000, is the city where Arab-Americans wield the most clout, both as consumers and as a business class. Detroit Edison moved within weeks to negotiate a settlement. In addition to offering cash to the plaintiffs -- in amounts undisclosed under the terms of the agreement -- the company spent lavishly disbursing funds to local Arab community groups, and promoted a Lebanese-born employee, Fouad Ashkar, as its new head of ethnic marketing. The company is a unit of DTE Energy, which recruited one of the state's most prominent Arab-Americans, Nick Khouri, formerly Michigan's chief deputy treasurer, to be its own vice president and treasurer. The company went even further, courting Arab-American businesses, and pledging that suppliers of Middle Eastern descent would fill up to 5% of the utility's procurement provided by minorities, which this year will exceed $70 million.

Today, Detroit Edison's president, Robert Buckler, is routinely lauded by the Michigan chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and serves on its advisory board.

After Sept. 11

The plight of Arab-Americans, however, took a turn after the Sept. 11 attacks. In the year following the attacks, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported almost 300 cases of workplace harassment of Americans of Arab descent, with almost $1 million in benefits paid to victims. Just in one month, September 2002, the EEOC filed suits against employers in Massachusetts, Florida and Arizona charging anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bias against employees. The commission had no category for Arab-Americans before 9/11.

In 2003, a Florida jury awarded an Arab-American $305,000 for abuse he allegedly suffered from his employer -- the Department of Homeland Security. The decision was not appealed. Four airlines, meanwhile, have settled lawsuits by the Department of Transportation alleging discrimination against passengers who were perceived to be of Arab, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian descent. UAL Corp.'s United Airlines, AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, Continental Airlines and Delta Air Lines each denied violating antidiscrimination laws but agreed to spend amounts as much as $1.5 million to train staff on respecting civil rights.