Workbook
For Arab (American) Families
A Workbook on Faith, Honor, Post-9/11 Identity, and the Life You're Building Between Two Worlds
You know what the world thinks you are. This is where your family writes down who you are.
For the Arab American families — Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Jordanian, Yemeni, and others — navigating the intersection of faith, family honor, political identity, post-9/11 surveillance and stereotyping, and the daily work of being Arab in America. Families trying to name what they hold together across two worlds.
The Name It First Experience
Your family is Arab American. That means something specific — and it means it in a country that has often reduced you to a stereotype, a threat, or a political abstraction. It means navigating faith and culture and family honor and post-9/11 identity all at once, often without a space to name any of it directly. This workbook does not ask your family to defend itself or explain itself to the outside world. It asks you to name — together and on paper — what Arab American means in your specific household, what you are carrying from the Arab world, and what you are building here. Grounded in Racial Identity Development theory (Cross, Helms), Acculturation Theory (Berry), Intersectionality (Crenshaw), diasporic identity scholarship (Brah, Hall), and research on Arab American family and post-9/11 identity, this workbook gives your family a structure for the conversation. The work is yours to do together. This is where you write it down. You leave with The Arab (American) Families Agreement.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What has your Arab American family given you — the hospitality, the honor, the specific cultural values and practices that shaped who you are before you could choose them?
- What does navigating Arab American identity after September 11 mean in your life — the way that event reshaped how you were seen, and how that has followed you?
- What would The Arab American Family Record say — from your experience, across faith and generation — about what this identity has given you, what it has cost, and what you are building between two worlds?
Research basis
Cross (1971, 1991) Nigrescence Model applied to Arab American identity / Helms (1990) racial identity statuses / Berry (1997) acculturation strategies / Crenshaw (1989, 1991) intersectionality applied to race, religion, and national origin / Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora applied to Arab diaspora / Hall (1990) Cultural Identity and Diaspora / Naber (2012) Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism / Suleiman (1999) Arabs in America on Arab American identity / cultural frameworks of ird/sharaf (honor), wasta (social capital), and Arab family collectivism / post-9/11 Arab American identity and racialization (Jamal & Naber, 2008) / Christian Arab American identity (Orfalea, 2006) / Palestinian American identity and diaspora (Abdulhadi, 2011) / Peek (2005) on Muslim American identity development applied to Arab Muslim American context.
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