The complicated relationship many people with MENA origins have with whiteness is entangled with a naturalization system in the U.S. that, until 1952, imposed racial restrictions on which immigrants could become citizens.
First arriving in large numbers in the late 1800s, the earliest generations of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa saw whiteness as the path towards claiming full rights in their new country.
There were several court cases where Syrian immigrants emphasized their Christianity because it was considered a European religion and, therefore, a marker of whiteness, says Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University Law School and author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.
“They argued they were white in court because the only immigrants that could naturalize to become U.S. citizens had to be found white by law,” she says.
Anti-Black racism in the media and other parts of U.S. society, Aziz adds, has helped drive many immigrants from around the world to try to “disassociate themselves from Blackness and try to associate as close to whiteness as possible.”
In more recent decades, however, there’s been a growing disconnect between the way the federal government officially categorizes people of MENA descent by race and many people’s lived realities – a dissonance that was underlined after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Over the past 20 years, people who are from the Middle East and North Africa have experienced a form of stereotyping that presumes that they are inherently prone to violence, that they are prone to being sympathetic to terrorism, that they are forever foreign,” says Aziz, who served as a senior policy adviser for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties during former President Barack Obama’s administration.
“All of these stereotypes are what people who do not have the privileges of whiteness experience,” she adds.
— To read the full article on NPR, click here.
