ABOUREZK FOUGHT TENACIOUSLY, LOVINGLY FOR AMERICAN FREEDOMS
Upon hearing that James Abourezk, the first Arab American U.S. senator, had died last week, I found big tears on my face. James was 92 with a long and amazingly productive life that touched many Americans, not only Arab Americans. Abourezk, dubbed a pioneer populist, left us with the toolbox and templates for justice and social action. The U.S. Constitution was his principal ideological motivator.
Throughout American history, our government has used ignorance, assumption and rumor to manipulate injustice against hyphenated Americans because of the color of their skin, ethnicity, religion and political or social affiliations. Black American authors have excavated — and enlightened and connected us to — current and past suffering under systemic racist policing while other examples include the erasure of North American Indigenous nations cut off from their resources, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the herding of over 100,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps, the Jewish artists blacklisted during the McCarthy era, the incineration of whole islands by nuclear weapons in the euphemistic “trusts” called the Pacific Proving Grounds, and the Arab Americans and Muslim Americans facing convictions under anonymous accusations, the neglected Alex Odeh assassination and the deportation of Palestinian professors.
Abourezk, fearlessly and consistently, called out American state-sponsored aggressions.
A Lebanese American, Abourezk grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota where his family owned a general store. He spoke fluent Arabic in his family’s home, and was an adventurous pioneer. He was a kind of disciplined, swashbuckling cowboy who stood up for the rights of Indigenous Americans first and then Arab Americans soon after.
As a U.S. senator in South Dakota for six years starting in 1973, he wasted no time testing our founding documents. Abourezk seized the stereotypes of Native and Arab peoples out of the shameless jaws of ignorance so those communities could define themselves. Today, we continue to find ways to stay on the paths of equality and acknowledgment, all in the pursuit of erasing ignorance and not erasing our identities.
Abourezk’s experiences fueled his courage and shaped how he would serve the underserved for the rest of his life. Abourezk witnessed firsthand how Native Americans were not permitted to be in control of their families’ and children’s lives. He penned the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which ensured that Native children were not handed out to families outside of their tribes, ending a sad governmental practice of forcibly taking children from their parents and giving them to Caucasian families for adoption. The hate-soaked Abscam FBI operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the last straw and led Abourezk to found the AmericanArab Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1980.
Now in its fourth decade, the committee was the first, and largest, civil rights organization for Arab Americans, growing from the Abscam operation when the FBI used fictitious Arab sheikhs to bribe elected officials. Imagine how most Americans would feel if their ethnic stereotypes were used to frame people. To this day, that fictitious operation confounds me because not much has changed in how Arab stereotypes continue to be used to control perceptions of our foreign and domestic policies.
I first met Abourezk at an Alex Odeh Memorial Conference in 1989, four years after Odeh’s assassination. I had imposingly large paintings on display there. He looked at one of them, a surrealist landscape of French colonial fabric flying in the sky over a Palestinian refugee camp, and asked me why I had put the fabric in the sky. I explained how these paintings were based on the writings of Edward Said and colonial imagery contrasting devastated land. He looked at me quizzically and pronounced that the fabric looked like old Arab faces carved into an ancient olive tree. I looked hard and could sort of see what he meant. He was strong and engaged, but perhaps also wanted to caution me about how to more broadly discuss art with non-artists.
Arab Americans are not monolithic. We share aspirations with all Americans and have mightily contributed to what is considered quintessential American culture. Abourezk reminded Arab Americans how to broadly serve our country.
Our contributions stem from an innate ability to create linkages that pave the way for innovation. Our centuries-long experiences with diversity, wired into our DNA, give us insider views and outsider views. Extroverted, empathetic and loving characteristics help to create collective insight.
Abourezk shined that light on us to guide us into resolute and confident accomplishments; some were inside the box and some were outside it. He asked us to be our best selves by his example and taught us to support others, to exemplify freedoms gained by Americans, and to fight tenaciously, lovingly and courageously for those freedoms.
The first Arab American senator took on the FBI’s ugly discrimination against his community.