Arab and Muslim Americans are constantly represented but almost never heard from.

Evidence

It seems barely an exaggeration to say that Arab and Muslim Americans are constantly talked about but almost never heard from. The problem is not that they lack representations but that they have too many. And these are all abstractions. Arabs and Muslims have become a foreign-policy issue, an argument on the domestic agenda, a law-enforcement priority, and a point of well-meaning concern. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 45

Categorization

• XREF: This is the central thesis Bayoumi will spend the rest of the book demonstrating, and it directly complements Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ concept applied to an American context.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox ‘when you are everywhere, you are really nowhere’ captures how hyper-visibility can function as erasure — a genuinely subtle and often missed point about representation.