Arab Americans Who Have Never Been “Home”: Inherited Displacement 

posted on: Jul 30, 2025

By: Laila Ali / Arab America Contributing Writer

A Home You Know by Heart

Second and third-generation Arab Americans experience “home” as an elusive, half-remembered place. Home is family stories around the kitchen table over mint tea, old photo albums stuffed in a drawer, an overseas phone call, or the name of a town or village they’ve never visited in person. For many Arab Americans, an emotional map of a land they’ve never physically known is laid down long before their first passport stamp. Psychologists and sociologists are increasingly framing this dual reality — a real homeland you’ve never actually experienced and an intuitive knowing you come from a place you can’t name as the story of your origin — as inherited or intergenerational displacement. 

Inheritance Without the Journey

 When most people think of immigration, they picture physical movement — a path from “there” to “here.” But many U.S.-born Arab Americans inherit a different kind of story: one born from the trauma of exile, loss, or departure without return. Some came fleeing war, colonialism, dictatorship, religious persecution, or economic collapse. In most cases, that first generation imagined their migration as temporary or held out hope they would one day return. Some did; most did not. Second- and third-generation kids often grow up suspended between memory and possibility, knowing they’re from “somewhere” but never knowing what it feels like to truly be from that place. And yet that place is real and etched into their bones.

The Science of Inherited Displacement 

Researchers are beginning to study intergenerational trauma in displaced populations more. A National Library of Medicine study of Syrian refugee families showed that children born into displacement may develop high anxiety, trauma symptoms, and stress responses — even when born in host countries like Jordan or Lebanon, and long from active conflict. A 2020 report by the Migration Policy Institute on second-generation Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrants echoed this, finding that unprocessed trauma, forced migration and systemic discrimination in the U.S. can lead to fractured identity and chronic stress in the next generation. Children may internalize their parents’ emotional adaptations: mistrust of institutions, watchfulness around government surveillance, or nostalgia for a homeland they’ve never known. This inherited vigilance is protective, but it can also be disorienting in American spaces that demand easy assimilation.

Language, loss, and unrecognized grief 

Not speaking fluent Arabic can also create a greater emotional divide for Arab American youth. Language carries memory, and without it, they feel they’ve lost something sacred. Guilt — and unacknowledged grief — over language loss can manifest over lost songs, idioms, and dialects, which is hard to validate in American spaces that pressure immigrant families to “move on” or “fit in.” Emotional reactions to loss are real, even if inherited. A 2021 Frontiers in Psychology study of Iraqi refugees and their children found that children born post-migration still showed signs of secondary trauma and cultural dislocation from their parents’ unresolved displacement. 

Finding Your Home 

Despite these challenges, many young Arab Americans are channeling inherited displacement into creative and cultural energy. They are building on poetry and music, organizing and food, bridges between their legacy and their self-expression. In reclaiming Arabic names and tatreez embroidery and mutual aid groups and Arab visibility in politics and media, they are refusing to let exile define them — and instead are using it as fuel to bloom on their terms. 

Many have found “home” not in a place, but in community: at Arab student unions on campus, over maqlouba shared with friends, at marches for Palestine, or during Ramadan nights filled with prayer and laughter. Some discover home in the act of storytelling — writing family histories or recording their grandparents’ voices. Others find it through healing: in therapy, in learning Arabic as adults, or in reconnecting with estranged relatives. Home becomes something they actively build, not something inherited in perfect condition. Still, the American spaces Arab Americans inhabit every day — their childhood homes, local mosques, bookstores, and block parties — also carry the quiet weight of home. These aren’t substitutes for what was lost; they are what has taken root in the absence. 

Arabness in America

In these hybrid places, Arab Americans are not only remembering where they came from but shaping what it means to belong here, in a country that often asks them to prove it. A homeland that evolves: “Home” for many diaspora Arabs is not tied to one location. It’s a story, a recipe, a rhythm. It’s a place you’ve never seen but feel in your bones. And sometimes, it’s a new space you make, one that holds both memory and hope. Claiming Arabness in America is both honoring history and actively shaping it into something living. It’s not about returning to a vanished past, but about carrying it forward — with pride, with creativity, with care.

Want more articles like this? Sign up for our e-newsletter!

Check out our blog here!