Between Arab and White

Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora

By Sarah Gualtieri

[Available Here]

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."

While early Arab immigrants (the vast majority of whom were from geographical Syria) eventually secured their access to white citizenship, the history of Arab racial formation in the United States is not just another story of "becoming white," (a story that has been told for the Irish, the Italians and Eastern European Jews.) First, what makes their story different is that it took place in a transnational context. Questions about racial classification were not confined to the United States, but occurred in Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and France - the last of which had especially close ties to Syria and Lebanon and became the colonial power there after World War I. Through family networks, community associations and the Arabic-language press, Syrians shared information and fine-tuned their arguments about race based on their experiences in different countries. In 1928, for example, Syrians in the United States promised "some of our best legal talent" to assist their compatriots in New Zealand secure their right to white citizenship. Journal editor, Salloum Mozarzel, warned that: "The fight now looming on the horizon in New Zealand should be watched with special interest as it is the latest development in what seems to be a world-wide outburst of antipathy against the Syrians."

Second, there are fissures in the story that suggest that being "white by law" did not protect Arabic-speaking immigrants from violence and discrimination. When Nola Romey was lynched in Florida in 1929, his killers did not view him as a white man, but as a foreigner and outsider to the community. And while the dominant pattern was for early Arab immigrants to embrace the privileges of whiteness, there are also counter histories that show alliances and solidarities with people of color. There are the Lebanese restaurant and grocery store owners in Mississippi who served black clientele during Jim Crow segregation; and there are the neighborly relations that Syrians had with Latinos in Los Angeles before World War II when restricted covenants brought non-Anglos into close contact with each other -- relations that help explain Syrian American attorney George Shibley's decision to defend the Mexican American youth in People v. Zammora. These and other examples predate the more obvious alliances of the 1960s and 1970s when young Arab Americans, inspired by Arab nationalism and Third Worldism, made connections to the Civil Rights movement. It is to this longer history that students at UCLA could point to when they advocate for a new category on admission or Census forms. Doing so would make their efforts seem more than a strategic embrace of minority status, but a move rooted in lived experience and long-standing traditions of alliance-building and shared sense of "otherness."