Working retail with diverse customers shapes identity more than mosque attendance does.

Evidence

Unlike many of Brooklyn’s Muslim youth, Akram didn’t become more religious after the terrorist attacks of September 11. He doesn’t regularly attend Friday prayers at the mosque. He’s usually too busy at the store, and anyway the imam at the nearest mosque is constantly lecturing his mostly Yemeni store-owner congregation about the sins of selling alcohol and pork, ideas that Akram and his cousin find boring, repetitive, and unrealistic. On the other hand, owing to his interactions with his customers, he knows all the countries of the Caribbean, their politics, their foods, and their vernaculars. He’ll joke with an older Grenadian woman that he went to school with Maurice Bishop’s son. Just when she believes him, he’ll smile the bad news to her that he’s joking. He curses the Haitians in Jamaican patois and the Jamaicans in Haitian Creole, to everyone’s surprise and amusement. He’s a curious mix that isn’t so strange in Brooklyn, equally at home with Arabs, African Americans, and West Indians. He’s a twenty-first-century United States American, absorbing and refracting all the ethnicities and histories surrounding him. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 471

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘middlemen minorities’ sociology in paragraph 472, and to broader work on immigrant identity formation and place.
• SEED: Essay angle: the immigrant corner store as an accidental school of cultural fluency — how commerce, not community institutions, teaches Brooklyn’s diversity.