Ishmael Reed

My

mother named me after her favorite cousin, and a few weeks ago at the St. Louis airport, the salesperson asked me whether I was a Muslim. I said no, but when I arrived at the baggage claims section at San Francisco airport, I noticed that mine was the only luggage with a red tag attached to it. Maybe the red tag meant "this is a wonderful person," but how would I know? It was an unsettling experience.

Within two weeks after the WTC and Pentagon bombings, my youngest daughter, Tennessee, was called a dirty Arab, twice. An elderly white woman made such a scene on a San Francisco bus that my daughter got off. She was wearing a scarf that I bought her in Egypt last year, but on the other occasion there was nothing distinctive about her clothing. Some of the post-9-11 profiling would be comic and ironic if the circumstances weren't so tragic. Marvin X, an African-American playwright, has been criticizing some Arab-American owners of ghetto stores for selling pork, alcohol, drugs and extending credit to poor women in exchange for sexual favors. A few days after the terrorist attack, he was surrounded by men with guns at Newark airport. They mistook him for an Arab terrorist.

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The experience of me, my daughter and Marvin X points to the problem with flashing a searchlight upon an entire community, which is what's being done to Arab-Americans by many white Americans, who've become apprehensive as they move about their daily lives.

But who's Arab ? A few years ago, journalist Earl Caldwell and I entertained over 30 Arab journalists at the Maynard Institute in 0akland. Their escort, an Arab-American attorney, said that he'd been stopped, while driving an expensive car, because the police mistook him for a black American. Is anyone with a dark skin Arab-American? Should those who are caught in the net meant for Arab-Americans follow the example of some Chinese Americans who, when the Japanese- Americans were herded into detention camps, wore signs which read "I Am Chinese?"

The Bush administration has taken advantage of the hysteria that's been ignited by the media and other institutions to jam a "Patriot" bill through congress. This bill gives the Executive Branch tremendous powers with very little judicial review. They detained over a thousand people, some of them incommunicado, refusing to identify who is being detained and why, when requested to do so by Sen. Russ Feingold. They want to monitor communications between lawyers and their clients. They are questioning 5,000 Muslim men, a procedure which Feingold describes as "offensive" and "intrusive." They established military tribunals without consulting the defense department or congress. (Military Tribunals that are opposed by the Spanish government!)

Given President Bush's switch-happy record as Texas executioner, I'd hate to be one of those tried. Senator Kennedy has criticized such tribunals for their lack of "openness" and "fairness," and "due process." Burma, Egypt, Nigeria, Turkey, and Egypt are among the countries where such military tribunals are used. Now the United States. Some have complained that the United States is becoming a "banana republic" as a result of the 9-11 events. William Safire, a genuine conservative (not just one who plays the role on TV) calls these powers "dictatorial."

Arab-Americans won't be the first group to be singled out for scorn as a result of international events over which they have no control. Lois Fassbinder writes about the prejudice her German-American family experienced during World War II. During the same war, hundreds of Italian immigrants were interned and thousands had their travel restricted by the Justice Department. Italian Americans were forced from their homes and required to submit to hearings before Military Tribunals. Some members of both groups were able to deal with such humiliation by turning "white" — an option that is open to those with white skins and maybe open to white-skinned Arab-Americans. (As Malcolm X discovered during his trip to the Middle East, Islam includes members of all races.) They can change their names and disappear into the white world.

But this has its drawbacks too. A few years ago, I was a panelist at an Irish-American writers conference. At the end of the panel, I asked members of the audience if assimilation had been worth it. None of the audience members said yes. Some complained that they had to change their names, and marry Anglos in order to get jobs. They had to give up their roots.

Yes, decades later, the United States apologized to the Japanese-American community for the internment but, judging from the complaints of some contemporary Japanese-American poets and novelists, who were children in those camps, the psychic scars remain. With the exception of Native-Americans, however, no group has been terrorized as much African-Americans by the kind of homegrown terrorists about whom the Justice Department seems indifferent. Maybe the experience of African-Americans will be a guide to all Americans about how to handle both profiling and terrorism.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an object of hate crimes and his home was bombed. He didn't go into a funk and yield to his tormentors, but persisted. Both Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass were born slaves; their lives were at risk every day. In their lectures, they always warned their white audiences that if such outrages could happen to blacks they could happen to them as well. Now the President and the Attorney General are hunting Arab-Americans. Who's next?

Ishmael Reed's "The Reed Reader" (Basic) is out now. You can also check out his magazine, Konch, at ishmaelreedpub.com