Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy

Much of the public conversation about homelessness focuses on individual responsibility and personal choice. The data and analysis in this IRRPP report commissioned by the Illinois Office to Prevent and End Homelessness demonstrates that we cannot understand homelessness without taking seriously the ways that racism, and especially structural racism, shape patterns of housing insecurity. The report outlines how structural factors such as a lack of affordable housing, evictions, incarceration, unemployment, healthcare access, and aging out of foster care often push Black residents in Illinois towards homelessness and offers an action plan to address the homelessness crisis.

In this report, we use demographic research, surveys, focus group data, as well as expert commentaries by organizers and academics to analyze how systemic inequities and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism affect the lives of Arab Americans in employment, education, health care, housing, and policing. The report engages with the diversity of experiences among Arab American communities and their common challenge in navigating being at once hypervisible as a result of commonplace stereotypes as well as invisible due to being classified as white by government agencies and due to the general lack of knowledge about Arab Americans in our society.