The borrower bee doesn’t always follow the news, but today she turned on the radio to hear about immigration chaos in Texas, followed by news of someone tweeting about it, followed by … and oddly enough it reminded her of the first chapter of a book in our own Behrens library, called How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?, by Moustafa Bayoumi. The title is taken from W.E.B. du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk, and racism directed against black people in the United States is a recurrent theme in the book, but a minor one. Mostly the book presents what its subtitle says: Being Young and Arab in America. It is an expansive book, but engaging, well-researched, well written and well-constructed. We have the book in our library because the author gave a lecture at UUCL (March 2018), but the book was first published in 2008. It won several prizes then and our edition is a later edition that offers additional materials, including questions for discussion. What has struck me, to my regret, is how well the book continues to speak to current events and provide useful background. Each chapter presents the story of one person, and the stories are arranged in a way that, among other things, starts at what you might think of as the beginning, namely with an experience of an immigrant family’s detention. They were not, however, detained as they were entering the United States, but instead after they had been living here for years and without having done anything whatever that ought to have led to their detention, except for being Arab in Brooklyn in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The chapter (called “Rasha”, for its heroine) is helpful for us today, in at least two ways. First, Bayoumi provides historical background and statistics about immigration detention in the United States. Although September 11 provided special impetus, the system, with much of its physical manifestation and its financial incentives for abuse, had been in place long before. And, second, thanks to his ability to transform narrative into art, Bayoumi shows what this experience meant for the young woman whose life he is writing about. Since the issue of detaining entire families in immigration facilities (or other facilities into which they are off-loaded) is sometimes treated as new, this opening chapter in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? is a good introduction for those of us who are fortunate enough not to have needed to think about it deeply before. Highly recommended.