"Mom, what are we?"

[mary_assal]

I remember taking the ACT for the first time (The American standardized test) and filling out the oh so dreadful census question: race? I remember being confused that Middle eastern/Arab was not on the list, so I was gonna do the only logical thing… check “Other” and write down “Middle Eastern” But that wasn’t an option, there was no “Other”, only “White/Caucasian”, “Black”, “Asian” and “Native American”. I checked White but felt quite uncomfortable doing so. I went home that day and asked my mom what we were? White/Caucasian? Or “Asian” maybe? She then told me that we were technically white, as we were part of that Caucasian group.
Like every kid proud of their ethnic background I argued that we were not and that there should be a “Middle Eastern/Arab” option.
Putting my frustration to good use I decided to look it up: “Are Arabs considered white?” Low and behold, the Dow v. United States court case came up. A Syrian, In North Carolina? Appeared before a court to fight for Arabs to be classified as white. Why? After reading into it and looking at the time period it happened in, I understood, they wanted to be granted citizenship.

Reading the Gualtieri paper brought back the memories of questioning whether I was White or not, most of all, of me telling people that I was “Considered white according to US law” and some of them laughing saying I wasn’t. Again, I was too proud so I never took their remarks seriously: “its just the legal thing I have to check” The next time I took that test there was an “Other” box added and finally got to do what I wanted to the first time. I realize looking back now at how odd this whole situation was. A century ago people like me fought to be considered white in America, using several different tactics, of which, faith: “Elkourie's argument for inclusion in the "white race," for example, was made on the basis of membership in the Christian fold” (Gualtieri , 2001) and the current fight to include a Middle Eastern/Arab box: “For many Arab Americans, the desire to disassociate from the category "white" is rooted in a basic disconnect between their own self-perception as a people marked as outsiders and… the official racial status accorded them”

The final quote from Gualtieri’s paper that really stood out to me having grown up in the South was this one: “Particularly threatening to white southerners was the "in-betweeness" of the new immigrants…their status as neither white nor black in the southern racial scheme of things. The ambiguous racial status of Italians, East European Jews, and Syrians stemmed from the perception that they possessed cultures and habits that were fundamentally at odds with the southern way of life, and that they would not abide by the "white man's code." Further, I was never aware of the fact that Syrians were targets of the KKK in Georgia and that a Syrian immigrant was lynched in Florida. This paper truly shocked me.