Common Reading Controversy at Brooklyn College
8.28.10 – Ashley Thorne – Is Brooklyn College using freshman reading for ideological goals? In June NAS published a survey of books colleges assigned this year as “common reading.” One book that didn’t make our list is the one Brooklyn College recently announced, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, by Moustafa Bayoumi.
The assignment of this particular book at a school where more than a quarter of the students are Jewish is remarkable. Controversy arose when several concerned academics individually challenged the College’s decision.
Bayoumi teaches “postcolonial literature” in the English department at Brooklyn College. He went to Columbia University for graduate school, where he studied under and became close friends with Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary theorist who was famous in his hostility toward the West and toward Israel. Said “taught a whole generation of English professors to search for racism in writers (like Jane Austen) who did not think as the professors do” (Edward Alexander, NAS Forum, October 2, 2003).
Bayoumi embraced Said’s resentment of Israel and the West. His most recent book, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara (subtitle: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict), is a collection of essays on the May 2010 Gaza flotilla raid. Professor Jonathan Helfand, professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, described the anthology as “at best biased, at worst vile propaganda” (see his email attached below).
The book that all new Brooklyn College students should have read by now—classes started yesterday—tells the stories of seven young Arab Brooklynites who faced discrimination after September 11. Such discrimination, Bayoumi writes, includes profiling, detentions, denial of due process, and unwarranted wiretapping.
The title question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” is a quote from W.E.B. Dubois’s book Souls of Black Folk (1903). Bayoumi’s theme is that Arabs and Muslims are “the new blacks.” Edward Alexander, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, wrote in a letter to President Gould that the author is trying “to enable young Arab Americans to latch on to the mournful coattails of the black experience.”
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