Panel opens discussion on race and ethnicity at UNC

The Integrated Curricula Program and the 2017 Carolina Summer Reading Program hosted a panel discussion on this summer's reading, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” on Tuesday night.

"How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?" was written by Moustafa Bayoumi and focuses on the prejudice that young Arab and Muslim Americans face. 

The panel began with a Poll Everywhere question that asked the audience to choose a word that captured their thoughts on the current state of relations between people of different backgrounds and identities at UNC. 

Answers included “fragmented,” “strained” and “misunderstood.”

A topic of focus at the panel was agents of change in today’s society. 

“I wanted to try to change perception with the book,” Bayoumi said. “I feel like it has been taken seriously, and that is something I wished for as an author.” 

Bayoumi said he knows that the problems Arab and Muslim Americans face have become worse since the book was published because the book is still relevant today.

“Writing the book required a great deal of interaction and trust between the people I was talking to,” Bayoumi said. "I expected that might happen, but I didn’t expect their participation in the book to have so much of an impact on their lives afterwards.” 

Cary Levine, moderator of the panel and associate professor of contemporary art history, said the problems Arab and Muslim Americans face every day are not just their problems, they are everyone's problems.

Bayoumi said one character in his book told him after his book was published that she was relieved that people could hear her story because they wanted to help. 

People often fixate on the term “problem” in the title of his book, Bayoumi said, but he thinks the most important word is "feel".

“When I was writing the book I felt like I was engaged in the process of essentially re-humanizing the population that was being dehumanized," he said. "I thought the best way to do that was through storytelling.”

Keith Payne, a panelist and professor of psychology and neuroscience, said he studies many themes in his research that resonate with themes in the book, like how people cope with having multiple social identities that are sometimes in conflict with one another. 

“Omar in the book, for example, is desperately looking for a job, and he can’t tell if he is being discriminated against because he is Arab,” Payne said. “In the real world, we send out lots of different resumes with the same qualifications but then change the name or picture associated with the resume to see how people respond differently. We have learned that discrimination based on race, gender and religion is not a thing of the past.”

Payne said people are likely to discriminate when they feel some part of their identity is being threatened. 

Mosi Ifatunji, assistant professor of sociology, said when it comes to enacting change, we may have the solution to the problem wrong. 

“All our problems with race are founded within the development of Western society,” Ifatunji said. “In order to undo race problems, we need to rethink the way our political system runs and the way our economy runs."

@nicolebooth56

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