A cartoon at the Ellis Island Museum

DEARBORN — In the Arab American community, “boater” is used to portray a wide range of qualities in a person, from good cooking to bad driving. It describes accented English, a sense of fashion, a way of life. 

It is also a deliberate insult sometimes. 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “boater” as “a person who travels in a boat.” But Arab Americans employ it to describe Arabs who took airplanes to immigrate to the United States. 

Matthew Stiffler, professor of Arab American studies at the University of Michigan, said the word “boater” is strictly used in the Arab American community in Michigan to describe newcomers from Arab countries. 

He added that the word likely evolved from of the term “FOB” (fresh off the boat), which the Asian American community started using in the mid-1900s to refer to recent immigrants from China and other Asian countries.

According to Stiffler, “fresh off the boat” is an English expression that was not originally used to describe immigrants, but it literally meant items or people that had recently arrived on a boat.

“Boater” is used as a demarcation to distinguish immigrants in the Arab American community, the professor said. 

He added that the distinction is a powerful marker, like national identity.

Stiffler, who is also a researcher at the Arab American National Museum, said people in the local Arab American community use the word so frequently that they are unaware that it could be offensive. 

“The term has a negative connotation, even when used in a loving context,” Stiffler said. “Arabs from outside Michigan are appalled when they hear Arab Americans using such a negative term to describe each other.”

However, Stiffler added that the word is not racist. “It is not a racial term, but it has a hint of nativism,” he explained. “Being U.S.-centric is different than being racist.”

Saher, a University of Michigan- Dearborn student, immigrated to the United States from Yemen when he was 7. He said he was excessively called a boater from fifth to seventh grade. 

“I was mainly called a boater by my fellow classmates who are from Lebanon,” he added. “It made feel have less-self satisfaction. It made me think there was something wrong with me.”

He said in high school, the term was reserved to describe more recent immigrants than himself.

Although he acknowledged that the word is often told “for fun, not as an insult,” Saher said it should not be used.

“I strongly believe that the use of the word boater should be dismissed from everyone’s vocabulary list,” he said. “All of us are immigrants and we are ‘boaters.’ Thus no one is better than anyone else.”

This writer was called “boater” abusively throughout three semesters at Dearborn High School.

When I emigrated from Beirut to Dearborn at the end of 2005, I spoke broken English. I started the second semester of my junior year at Dearborn High School. Since day one, fellow Arab students mocked my speech and had little interest in helping me get acquainted with the new system.

It wasn’t long before I found the label “boater” attached to me. It was not pleasant. Every time I was referred to as a “boater”, it felt like an attempt to nullify my struggle, experience and name and replace them with a tag that dubbed me as inferior to those who hurling the insult. 

As one of the most recent immigrants in the school, my life was different than those kids who were born or relocated here at a young age. But calling me a boater was not to highlight those differences. It was a conscious attempt to cast me as a less important individual.

Putting others down is often an attempt to elevate oneself. Calling me “boater” was bullying.

Once, when I was struggling to unlock my locker (we didn’t have lockers in Lebanon), a band of Arab American students mocked me. They called me a “boater” and one of them shoved me to the wall. 

In gym class, while the teacher was trying to demonstrate to me how to swing a baseball bat, a student shouted, “What a f—ing boater.” The gym teacher had neither words of encouragement for me nor words of condemnation for him.

A few days later, that same student visited the retail store where I worked at the time. He was accompanied by his mother, who wore a black abaya with a conservative hijab that showed little of her face. Ironically, she did not speak a single word of English. I had to tell her the prices in Arabic.

I wondered if the kid who tried to humiliate me in front of the entire class would call his mother a “f—ing boater.” The word “boater” in that context in high school seemed a product of a cultural, generational struggle. 

That kid might have been subconsciously trying to rebel against his mother by abusing me with the word. As if parents’ imposing the old ways of the old country on children born in a new world caused the second generation to despise Arab immigrants such as myself.

My most painful encounter with the word “boater” occurred on the school bus. Homesick and often tired, I sat in the back of the bus for seclusion. On one cold day, a student sitting in front of me was whistling. When a girl from the other end of the bus complained, the whistler pointed at me, which prompted the girl, who lived in my neighborhood, to instantly yell, “Stop whistling, boater.”

“Yes, I’m an immigrant, a boater, just like your parents,” I replied. To which she said, “who is feeding him those words?”

To her, a “boater” could not formulate a thought as simple as that one. The incident demonstrated to me that I was surrounded by people who could only see me through their flawed conception of a “boater” as a less intelligent person. Like all teenagers, I cared about others’ perception of me. I made a decision to return to Lebanon permanently after that bus ride. Fortunately, it did not come to fruitfulness. 

Post-high school, I rarely heard the term used in a derogatory fashion.

Not everyone dislikes the term. Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr defended it. 

“It is a term of endearment,” he said. “We basically use it to describe Arab immigrants who have an accent and hold on to traditions from back home. We use it in a funny —not a derogatory— way.”

Zahr explained that “boater” can be also used to describe second or third generation Arab Americans, who still preserve customs from their countries of origin. He added that the term is justifiable because it was generated in the community. 

“It is a Arab Michigan term,” he said. “It was not created against us by a dominant culture. We made it up ourselves. It’s not like calling somebody ‘A-Rab.’”

Zahr said he uses the term “incessantly” during his shows and that members of his audience are hardly ever offended by it.  He acknowledged that some people in the community call others “boater” to insult immigrants. 

“But the word in and of itself is not offensive,” he said. “People who use it derogatively could insert any different word. Is it less offensive to say, ‘We are better than those immigrants?'”

Zahr said non-Arabs should not use the term “boater”, adding that there are many expressions that we used internally among ourselves that should not be used by people outside the community.

“If White people use it, it would entail an anti-immigration sentiment,” he explained. “We’re obviously not anti-immigration. We are the children and grandchildren of immigrants.”

Zahr, who is also an activist and writer, said the use of “boater” in schools is a bullying issue. 

“Mean kids in school will find a way to bully people. The word itself is not the problem,” he said. “My advice to the kids who get called that is to just say, ‘I’m a boater. I’m proud of it.’ We are proud of where we come from.”

He added that there is a cultural struggle, not animosity, between immigrants and second generation Arab Americans, “but the boaters have won.”

“As Arabs, we held on to our culture more than any other community,” he said. “You have third and fourth generation Arab Americans making stuffed grape leaves. You will not find Irish people, whose ancestors immigrated here 100 years ago, still making shepherd’s pie like they make it in Ireland.”