Last Friday, Bernie Sanders’ campaign forayed into Arab consciousness worldwide with a viral Arabic language post. “The rich should be taxed,” the initial message reads. Five days later, the campaign published a followup post in Arabic with the statement, “healthcare is a human right.” This isn’t the first time the Vermont Democrat has reached out to his Arabic-speaking voters and followers. Long before Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker’s debate tirades in tortured Spanish, Sanders understood the importance of speaking his constituency’s language. In politics, as in life, language goes beyond syntax and semantics and takes on a life of its own. Soaking the rich and universal healthcare are hardly uniquely Arab-American issues of concern, but choosing to deliver a socialist message in Arabic is another matter entirely. It signals a new day in which speaking directly to Arab-American political aspirations in the community’s ancestral language is not an act of political suicide or worse, a terrorist battle cry. That wasn’t always the case. Like many non-white ‘immigrant’ populations spread across generations, Arab-Americans have had to carve out their own spaces in American politics. Despite their many contributions to American life—from…
