Generational amnesia repeatedly claims Muslim invisibility lacks roots but has recurred for a century

Evidence

Americans have short memories. So do Arab/Muslim Americans. Young scholars and community activists often tell me that Detroit’s Arab and Muslim populations were “invisible” before 9/11, or that they avoided political activity. My interlocutors seem unaware that during the first Gulf War (1990-1991), young Arab/Muslim activists and scholars made similar claims about their former invisibility and aversion to politics. Traveling further into the past, we find that Arabs and Muslims also stepped out of obscurity during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the Iran Hostage crisis (1979-1981), the Israeli invasions of Lebanon (1978, 1982), the Arab Oil Embargo (1973), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Six Day War (1967), the Suez War (1956), and the first Arab-Israeli War (1948). Only a handful of archival scholars and lay historians know that, going back to the late nineteenth century, both The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News have provided continuous coverage of the communities now called Arab and Muslim. Simply put, there has not been a time during the last century when Detroit was unaware of its Middle Eastern communities, and these populations seem always to be active in public life. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 689

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the pivot of the whole volume — ‘us’ not ‘them’ — as each generation of Arab/Muslim Americans themselves reproduces the amnesia that invisibilizes them.
• QUESTION: Why does each activist generation believe its community was politically inert before now — is there a structural reason for this memory wipe?