Exterior of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, Feb. 29, 2024.
Photo: VOA
All About America explores American tradition, politics, developments, historical past, beliefs and locations of curiosity.
DEARBORN, MICHIGAN – The time period slacks, which means pants worn throughout leisure actions, was coined by an Arab American. Joseph Haggar, a Lebanese immigrant, based the enduring Haggar males’s clothes model in 1926.
“He settled in Texas, and he began this pant firm that was extraordinarily profitable within the twentieth century,” says Diana Abouali, director of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. “He additionally revolutionized the best way that pants and clothes had been mass produced.”
An exhibit on the museum is devoted to Haggar, whose pants had been worn by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Stories like Haggar’s are integral to the museum’s mission to display how Arab Americans have been a part of the American cloth for the reason that late nineteenth century.
“We talk the American narrative within the voices of Arab Americans. They specific their experiences in their very own phrases,” Abouali says. “This offers individuals with a extra genuine and actual illustration of what it means to be Arab American.”
The museum makes an attempt to share the total vary of the Arab American expertise, together with the journey to America, dwelling and work life, and repair within the U.S. Armed Forces.
The numerous choices embrace an exhibit concerning the tons of of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who owned homesteads in North Dakota between 1890 and World War I. Thousands of descendants of these pioneers nonetheless stay in North Dakota. Another exhibit consists of lists of Arab American passengers on the doomed Titanic, which sank in 1912.
The museum additionally challenges spiritual misconceptions.
“Half of the Arab American group is Christian,” Abouali says. “And in actual fact, the sooner immigrants, who got here within the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, had been predominantly Christian.”
A wall of fame highlights distinguished Arab Americans like journalist Helen Thomas, actress Kathy Najimy, politicians like former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, and Candace Lightner, who based Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980.
Arab immigrant tales aren’t well-known amongst mainstream America. And what little Americans do learn about Arabs is commonly knowledgeable by unfavorable stereotypes.
“The apparent one can be the indignant Arab, the terrorist Arab, the being afraid of the Arab that comes from overseas. I feel that is the very apparent one, however it’s kind of overplayed,” says Jasmine Hawamdeh, director of arts and tradition on the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights advocacy group. “And I feel one of many extra dangerous stereotypes that at the moment exists in American media is the oppressed Arab lady.”
The museum tries to right false narratives about Arab Americans.
“We’re not all the time responding to misconceptions and narrative, though that is a serious a part of our work and a serious type of impetus for making a museum like this,” Abouali says, “but additionally we’re type of presenting ourselves, as we’re, unapologetically.”
Arab Americans are a various group that come from 22 Arab international locations stretching from northern Africa to western Asia. But as soon as they settle within the U.S., the museum director says, they turn out to be as American as they’re Arab.