Deconstructing "Arab" Identity
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Ever since we discussed in the last class that the US Census does not have an option to select Arab/Middle-Eastern heritage, I have been thinking about it non-stop. Race and ethnicity are such arbitrary qualifiers in the first place; who even decides what counts as "white" or "Arab"? Houda Asal explains that the use of the word "Arab" is itself contentious - it has "strong ideological and political significance," and because it so generically refers to a wide group of people, it is also quite reductionist (14). Within this broader community of "Arabs," there are various diverse groups of people with different heritages, such as Syrians. In the 19th and 20th centuries, "Syrian" was used as a catch-all term to refer to anyone from the Mashreq regions, including Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Jordanians. In legal terms, none of these distinctions existed - all people of "Arab" descent were classified as part of the "Asiatic race" in the 20th century in Canada (Asal 83). Syrian activists during the time fought against this kind of classification by claiming that it was "morally unjust and scientifically false," instead arguing that Syrians were among the "European races" according to encyclopaedia definitions (Asal 83).
These questions of classifying race within Arab communities keep coming up. We saw the same questions during the last module about Iran, and their argument that all Iranians are descended from a pure "Aryan race." Even Lebanese emigration to the West is linked to their Phoenician heritage, with people drawing connections between ancient Phoenician traders who were the first to explore the seas and modern-day Lebanese immigrants enacting cultural exchange. I think it says a lot about how much white supremacist ideas have proliferated throughout our societies to see how so many off-white communities are constantly trying to prove their legitimacy through claims of European or Semitic heritage.