By Sarah Gualtieri, Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
At a recent conference on Arab American history held in Los Angeles, a young man asked a question and identified himself as being with a student organization at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) that was working to change the university's admission forms to allow students to identify themselves as being Arab and/or Middle Eastern under the race category. (Many are checking "Other" although the expectation is that they will check "white"). This development demonstrates how a young generation of Arab Americans are mobilizing around issues of racial identification (and misidentification); while it also presents a case of disassociation from whiteness with varying degrees of awareness about why people of Arab origin and descent are classified as "white" in the United States.
Between Arab and White answers this question by exploring the early history of Arab immigrants' engagements with race, a category with which they were not particularly familiar prior to their migration to the Americas. Like other immigrant groups, when their fitness for citizenship came under scrutiny in the early 20th century, they responded by litigating their whiteness in federal courts. Eager to access the privileges of citizenship (such as the right to vote and to own property) they argued that they were not Asian but Caucasian and should not therefore be excluded from the naturalization statute. Litigants and their supporters also marshaled civilizational and religious arguments to support their claims to whiteness. H.A. Elkourie argued in the Birmingham Age Herald that the "Semitic was the original civilizer, developer and intermediator of culture and learning" while lawyers in the 1914 Dow case argued that "the history and position of the Syrians, their connection through all time with the peoples to whom the Jewish and Christian peoples owe their religion, make it inconceivable that the [naturalization] statute could have intended to exclude them." This civilizational strategy reveals the intertwined histories of race and religion in the United States and the tendency toward imprecision and arbitrariness in the definition of racial difference. Judge Henry Smith, for example, ruling in the Shahid case, believed that there was no scientific basis to race. He did not abandon the tenets of white supremacy, but he did recognize the mental gymnastics involved in defining the "Caucasian race". They were, he would later write, the result of "a strange intellectual hocus pocus."