"What you will find are seven Arab-American narratives

that are in the end very American stories about race, religion, and civil rights and about how the pressures of domestic life and foreign policy push on individual lives....They are students and grocery-store clerks, teenagers and twenty-somethings, community workers and soldiers. They are religious and secular, male and female. What they want most is what the majority of young adults desire: opportunity, marriage, happiness, and the chance to fulfill their potential. But what they have now are extra loads to carry, burdens that often include workplace discrimination, warfare in their countries of origin, government surveillance, the disappearance of friends or family, threats of vigilante violence, a host of cultural misunderstands, and all kinds of other problems that thrive in the age of terror.

And yet this is far from a gloomy book. In fact, I have developed a great deal of optimism through its writing. What I have found is that young Arab Americans understand both the adversities they face and the opportunities they have with an enviable maturity. They have a keen awareness about their lives, an acute kind of double consciousness that comprehends the widening gap between how they see themselves and how they are seen by the culture at large. They live with multiple identities and are able to draw connections to the struggles others have faced in our American past. These young men and women have been raised by immigrant parents and educated in a post-civil-rights-era America. They bring with them a deep, sometimes first-hand, understanding of the conflicts ranging in the Middle East and at the same time they are well versed in the recurring battles for equality in the United States. They often draw lessons from this past to their own lives, reading themselves through the pages of American history. This is a remarkable trait often missing today, where telling someone she's "history" is the equivalent to telling her that life is over. But their lives are just beginning.

Stories connect us to each other. In ways that polemics and polls cannot, they can reveal our conflicts within ourselves and our vulnerabilities to each other. Stories can describe why certain choices are made and others are passed over, and they can reveal the colors of our emotions. Stories have the capacity to convert a line drawing into flesh, to dislodge the power of the presumption and prejudice. Perhaps this explains why I responded the way I did to the many inquiries I heard from friends and associates after I described the project of this book to them. "Oh, you're writing profiles," they would say.

"Portraits," I would answer. "Hasn't there been enough profiling already?"

-Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, p. 11-12