Twenty-five years ago, the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 became a defining moment in my life as a third-generation Arab American, shaping both my identity and my approach to museum leadership in ways that continue to this day. As our nation reflects on this anniversary, I’m sharing an article I wrote on this topic for the book The Inclusive Museum Leader, co-edited by a dear late friend, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, back in July 2021.
It is often said that September 11, 2001 was the day that changed the world. Most Americans alive at that time can vividly recall the details of that horrific day. The recollections of where we were, whom we were with, and the feelings that subsumed us are now etched in our minds and define both our individual and collective memories. And, in many ways, those acts of terrorism unified a majority of Americans as the nation sought to heal and respond to the trauma. However, for others, the events ushered in a new era of suspicion, surveillance, and marginalization that arguably continues to this day. This is especially true for Arab and Muslim Americans. In fact, 9/11 remains a day of multiple traumas for many Arab and Muslim Americans: one marked by the grief of the tragedy, and also the subsequent traumas associated with sharing a likeness to those responsible for the horrors. For me, as a relatively young, third-generation Arab American, the day would serve as a defining moment that would have a profound impact on my identity and outlook that continues to this day.
Throughout my life, I have been able to reap the rewards of White privilege. My family immigrated to the United States from Lebanon in the early 20th century. Despite the myriad challenges of being immigrants, including being defined as “dark” on Census papers and perceived as Other, they sought to quickly assimilate and become “American.” Externally, this process of identity-shedding included speaking English, concealing the use of their native Arabic, and giving their children Anglicized names. Moreover, they sought citizenship as Whites despite immigrating from a region known geopolitically as the Middle East. By the time I was a child, my complexion, name, and religion were enough to mask my ethnic identity and afford me great privileges. While we worshiped in a Maronite (Eastern Catholic) church and retained many of our customs, such as large extended family gatherings each Sunday that included a sumptuous meal with the foods that define our culture, most people had no idea we were Arab Americans.
Things changed after September 11, 2001. For the first time in my life, I began to experience the adverse impacts of a marginalization based on identity. I was dismayed to learn of family members getting detained while trying to board a flight or cross the border, by car, into neighboring Canada from Detroit. On a more macro level, it was a particularly challenging new era in metropolitan Detroit. Southeast Michigan is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in our nation. Diverse by religion, place of origin, and time of immigration, the Arab American communities that comprise the region were often perceived as a monolith and potential threats to the American way of life. The diverse characteristics that define Arab American communities, along with their histories and contributions to our nation for generations, was seemingly of little concern to most during the initial years of the War on Terror. Instead, fear and misinformation fueled suspicion and negative perceptions.
I spent the early years after 9/11 trying to figure out my place in the world. I pursued a graduate degree and found love, but struggled with how best to push back on harmful stereotypes and hostilities pointed at people that shared my cultural heritage. This all changed as I was completing my advanced degree. As graduation approached, I became aware of a new museum on the verge of opening in Dearborn, Michigan. This cultural institution, the Arab American National Museum, would become the first and only museum in the nation dedicated to documenting, preserving, and presenting the history, culture, and contributions of Arab Americans. As luck would have it, the new institution was in the midst of hiring personnel as the museum was being prepared for a public opening. The timing was fortuitous and, on a whim, I applied for the position of Curator of Community History. Given my academic training (a bachelor’s degree in psychology, followed by a master’s degree in historic preservation planning) and limited experiences working in a university museum as an undergraduate, I had little hope of actually landing the job. However, I secured the position and joined the museum just before the opening on May 5, 2005. In hindsight, founding director Dr. Anan Ameri’s hiring strategy was clear: hire staff based on their activism and passion for preserving Arab American culture and thwarting the harmful stereotypes that malign our communities. This would become a seminal lesson for my own leadership style: specialized knowledge and aptitudes are important, but even more critical is passion and drive to build community through culture. This inclusive approach to building a staff continues to define my hiring philosophy to this day.
Conceived prior to, but developed after 9/11, the Arab American National Museum was truly a first of its kind. The Arab American National Museum filled a critical void in the landscape of American museums. For the first time, Arab Americans would have a cultural venue of their own. This was immensely empowering: a place for Arab Americans to have agency in documenting and sharing their diverse histories and experiences. Prior to this, the Arab American story was either ignored altogether or told primarily by those who were not of Arab heritage. Now, Arab American communities would have the ability to tell their own stories in a safe and welcoming space.
Since its inception, the Arab American National Museum has played a critical role in enriching and broadening the spectrum of cultural institutions in the United States. As the singular museum in our nation dedicated to documenting and preserving Arab American history and culture, the Arab American National Museum strives to dispel stereotypes and misconceptions while building greater cohesion among Arab Americans. The museum has worked since its inception to shed light on the diversity of the Arab American communities. This diversity is reflected in a number of ways, including through religion, place of origin, era of immigration, settlement within the United States, political affiliation, and much more. In short, Arab Americans are far from being a monolith, and the museum’s success required us to develop an inclusive platform for all Arab Americans to feel pride and see a reflection on their story in this groundbreaking institution.
My first few years at the Arab American National Museum were spent in the curatorial department. This work included helping to build the museum’s nascent collection and launching a robust temporary exhibition program with my colleagues. Much of our work was done in collaboration with members from across Arab American communities near and far. Through these efforts, I began to see firsthand the positive benefits of working with our constituents to co-create and present museum content: it fostered community empowerment and ownership. What’s more, the work of the museum began to resonate with people that had a limited history of engaging with cultural institutions within our nation.
The community-based museum work we sought to implement required a great deal of flexibility. To engage with community means working outside the normal nine-to-five business hours. It means going outside the museum to engage with constituents where they are. The Wing Luke Museum best describes the nature of this work in their values statement:
People give us meaning and purpose. Relationships are our foundation. We desire community empowerment and ownership. To do this, we have found the following: The work is labor intensive. The work requires flexibility. We willingly relinquish control.[1]
In addition to working in an inclusive manner with the communities we were to represent with our exhibition and programs, it was also critical for us to partner with other, non-Arab communities. After all, we strived to be an ethically specific, not ethno-centric, museum. If we expected others to learn about our history and customs, then it was paramount that we reach outside to collaborate with other communities both to learn about them and to celebrate the diversity of our nation.
During those instrumental early years, the staff of the Arab American National Museum learned immensely from colleagues at other ethnically specific museums. We respected—and often sought to emulate—the pioneering work of Ron Chew and the team at the Wing Luke Museum to form a community-based model of exhibition development. From Irene Hirano and her team at the Japanese American National Museum we learned the importance of building coalition and developing timely and responsive programming. These museums, along with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, National Museum of Mexican Fine Art, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, demonstrated to us the value of building an institution that was people-focused and rooted deeply in the communities we serve; lessons that proved instrumental to building a fledgling institution.
The staff at the Arab American National Museum began forming numerous community-based committees to advise and consult the museum on its work. This included a collections committee, an exhibitions committee, a National Advisory Board, and many program-specific steering committees. In doing so, we more firmly rooted the museum within the communities it served while also building a shared sense of ownership: work that was simultaneously incredibly challenging and rewarding. While facilitating conversations around complex and often divergent viewpoints, staff worked to mediate a range of ideas and opinions in a way that both supported the objectives of the museum while also working to build more cohesion within the diverse Arab American communities it represented. Again, staff who were both technically competent and able to genuinely engage with the communities were instrumental for positioning the museum to be both welcoming and authentic.
My role evolved as the Arab American National Museum became more established. After over four years serving as a curator, I was promoted first to deputy director and then, when our founding director retired, as the second director of the museum. During my tenure as director, our team sought to further expand and evolve our community-based work. This manifested in several ways. First, we began to explore how we could design and implement programming outside the physical walls of the museum. One of the museum’s greatest assets was its location within the heart of a heavily populated Arab American community. The museum sought to capitalize on this in a way that would bring the local residents in closer contact with the museum while providing visitors with a unique and informative experience. As we conceived ideas, the U.S. was also grappling with growing Islamaphobia, and Dearborn was often wrongly perceived as governed by Sharia law and home to fundamentalist behavior. For the museum, it was of vital importance to push back on these harmful misconceptions and to humanize the experiences of the communities we sought to serve. In this regard, the museum served as both educator and facilitator.
The Yalla Eat! program best exemplifies this role. Similar to other ethnic communities, food is a vital cornerstone of Arab American culture. The role of food as a manifestation of culture is reflected in the museum’s permanent exhibits, but the museum is also located at the epicenter of scores of Arab American food businesses. We began to imagine the possibilities of collaborating with local food-based business to share our educators’ and docents’ knowledge of the nuances of food as culture. And, with that a novel idea came to fruition. Working in partnership with bakers, butchers, restauranteurs, and other food purveyors, the museum designed and implemented a culinary walking tour that involved the community in sharing its history, culture, and presence in America through food. While in the past a museum educator might explain the idea of halal food to a museum guest, now guests could learn directly from a butcher about food preparation that adheres to Islamic law. Through this inclusive work, we were able to immerse museum guests in the local community while directly involving Arab Americans in sharing their stories and culture. The Yalla Eat! program proved to be one of the most popular and successful programs during my tenure as director.
In addition to collaborating with community, the Arab American National Museum also sought to provide space for its constituent communities. Early on, it became apparent that our local communities needed a safe space to gather and create. I vividly recall an early conversation with an Iraqi American actor about his desire to use the museum’s auditorium as a space to craft a play about the Iraq War. It sounded like a promising project, and we were more than happy to support this creative endeavor. However, he worked on the line during the day at a local automotive plant and wanted to use the museum in the evening, after hours. Unfortunately, we did not have the resources to keep staff working late and the building open. Moreover, as an accredited museum, we couldn’t let members of the public into our facility after hours without ensuring the safety and care of our collections. Sadly, we were unable to support this playwright with his endeavor.
A few short years later, however, during the Great Recession, the museum was able to secure two neighboring buildings. In the years that followed, we developed a new space, called the Annex, immediately adjacent to the museum. This space was purposely designed to be minimal and physically separated from the museum so that it was highly flexible and could be used before, during, and after normal museum hours. We wanted the space to serve as a critical piece of social infrastructure in the community.
Much has been written on the importance and worrying decline of social infrastructure. Robert Putman, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, chronicled the decline of the “third place” in his book Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.[2] More recently, Eric Klinenberg, Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, explored the importance and urgency need for more social infrastructure in working to solve inequities in our society.[3] Dearborn had a robust patchwork of religious institutions, social clubs, and cafes that served as a nexus for social interaction. However, there were few spaces that were non-religious, accessible to all, and nurturing the creative spirit of the local Arab American community.
As we sought to activate the Annex, we began to explore new ways of working with the community to best utilize the space. This manifested in numerous ways and typically took place above and beyond normal museum hours. For example, the National Arab Orchestra, based in Dearborn, began to conduct rehearsals in the evening at the Annex. Further, the Orchestra’s founder and Music Director conducted music lessons in this new space. Arabic language lessons, which were typically taught at religious institutions, were designed and led by members of the community in the Annex. Additionally, we began to serve the community in ways we had not anticipated, but welcomed. The Annex was used by members of the community to organize politically, to host election return watch parties, and as a place to gather to find solace during times of grief.
In 2016, I had the privilege of hearing Reverend Starsky D. Wilson, president and CEO of Deaconess Foundation and co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, speak as the keynote at the Institute for Museum and Library Services’ Catalyst Town Hall Meeting in Philadelphia. Reverend Wilson implored those in attendance to contemplate the role of museums as places of sanctuary.[4] This idea resonated as we recently had done just that at the Arab American National Museum. In the days following the horrific mass shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the staff of the Arab American National Museum opened the Annex as a protected space for our local LGBTQ community to process the trauma and grieve in peace. In other words, our museum had become a non-religious sanctuary for healing.
In many ways, the examples I’ve just shared were experiments in working to build a more inclusive and equitable institution. We sought to explore where we activated museum programs, how we included members of the community in co-creating programs, and how we leveraged our assets to provide much needed space in a timely and responsive manner. This work was never fixed or finished; instead, it was constantly in flux and required continuously working in tandem with constituent communities.
As I reflect on the past, I’m overwhelmed by how one horrific day had such an impact on my profession and the manner in which I lead nonprofit organizations. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 put in motion a personal journey that continues to this day. I remain committed to the important roles that art and culture play in both empowering and building communities. To build a community-focused and inclusive organization requires hiring staff with shared values, committing to the hard and rewarding work of collaborating with constituent communities, and often sharing power in reaching mutually rewarding goals. Since departing the Arab American National Museum in 2018, I served as a senior consultant with the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management. It was there, working with dozens of cultural institutions across the nation, that I truly began to understand the importance of inclusive, community-based cultural work and its implications for a wide-range of cultural institutions. As I settle into a new role as the director of Science Gallery Detroit, transitioning an organization from a start-up amidst a global pandemic and push for greater social justice, the lessons learned as a leader during the formative years of the Arab American National Museum serve as my North Star.
[1] “About Us.” Wing Luke Museum. Accessed October 4, 2020. http://www.wingluke.org/about-us/.
[2] Putnam, Robert David. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
[3] Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Crown, 2018.
[4] “Rev. Starsky D. Wilson speaks at IMLS Catalyst Town Hall Meeting,” Institute of Museum and Library Services, September 23, 2016, YouTube video, 33:15,