Khaled A. Beydoun: "Are Arabs white?"
In the US, race has always mattered. Whiteness in particular has mattered most, standing as the seal of civilisation and the gateway towards citizenship.
Since 1944, Arabs have been deemed white by law. Many Arabs still embrace and defend that status today.
However, the US Census Bureau has proposed a new stand-alone classification – “Middle East or North African [MENA]” – which if adopted on the 2020 Census, may formally end more than 70 years of formal whiteness, and the “racial Catch-22” that perplexes the Arab American identity.
The proposed reclassification of Arabs from white to MENA appears to be a moment of racial progress. However, it comes during a time of expanding state surveillance, the emergence of “countering violent extremism [CVE]” policing, and rising immigration from turbulent Arab states.
These intersecting developments have further perplexed the legal status of Arabs as whites, and raised suspicion about the proposed MENA box.
White without privilege
Far from merely a racial designation, whiteness still stands as the paragon of social citizenship in the US and a gateway to a myriad of privileges.
Socially constructed in opposition to blackness, whiteness remains eternally associated with prestige, power, access, and opportunity.
Early Arab immigrants desperately pursued whiteness and performed it in immigration proceedings. The law officially mandated whiteness as a prerequisite for US citizenship until 1952. Key judicial decisions in 1915 and later 1944, solidified the legal designation that Arabs were white by law.
These early judicial decisions root the US Census Bureau’s current classification of Arabs as white – a legal profile that conflicts with discursive imagining and national security policing of the estimated three to six million Arabs in the US.
A social and political currency like no other, to be white in the US is to be free from the presumption that you are foreign or inferior. Whites are simply “American”, unfettered by the qualified or hyphenated identities compelled upon Asian, African, Latino, or Arab Americans.
Designated white by law
Although designated white by law, Arabs in the US are not extended the array of privileges associated with whiteness.
Arabs have been historically (dis)oriented as “alien” and “unassimilable”, and today, branded as “terrorists” and prospective “radicals”.
Source: www.aljazeera.com