Did the Pakistan government know Osama bin Laden was there?

[Martina]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

Detroit seems pretty racist to me not just with Arabs.

There are many Muslim US citizens.

Detroit is as racist as any other U.S. city.

i can say i have never felt seriously out of place in African American neighborhoods in Detroit -- unlike in Boston and Chicago. Detroit is a mess. It is a dying city. But it is amazingly and bizarrely creative. It is not the worst city in America to live in despite what you read in the news. It may be in the worst mess in a number of ways. Racism -- white flight -- is responsible for a great deal of that. But it is not defined by racism or poverty or any of that. In some ways, it is one of my favorite places on earth. i miss it.

By the way -- Detroit has the largest concentration of Arabs outside of the Middle East.

Most of us here do not have a clue what it is like to live in a European city where there is that kind of daily anger and hostility in the air between strangers of different ethnic groups. Rocky is an American living there. My sense is he is fairly shocked by it. He does seem to have taken some of the racist attitudes to heart -- the tax comment. But it's really easy for us to preach when we aren't living it. How many people have lived among Arabs and worked with them daily and lived side by side? i have. And there was no hint of the anger and hostility so common in France and Germany. My friend from Egypt reports the same experience from the other position -- as an Arab immigrant.

Since 911 it has gotten much worse for Arabs living here. But it's still a real life, a life with a future. It is not a life lived as a permanent outsider in your own home. That is true for many Arabs living in France.

i am not here to defend the U.S. re racism or its treatment of immigrants. i teach Latino students, and one of my students is living alone at 17 because her parents got caught in a raid and were deported. She has a kidney condition, and it has been hard to get her medical care. (It happened.) i have no illusions about how little American values people it deems outsiders. But i also know that the facts are that it is a different experience to live in European cities. There is a lot of intepersonal hostility. Much more of an effort by the nations themselves to disenfranchise even the native born children of immigrants. It's just a fact, not a defense of U.S. culture or policy.