Claiming Whiteness
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According to Atiya Husain's article, whiteness among white Muslims frequently changes once they exhibit outward signs of Islam. Allison's experience, for example, illustrates this change when she starts donning a hijab. She explains that before donning the hijab, she was never considered non-American, but the hijab immediately made her appear “foreign” to others. This encounter challenges the prevalent racial presumptions about whiteness by highlighting the close connection in America between the hijab and foreignness. Other white Muslims in Husain's study also talk of feeling cut off from their previous racial identity because of their Islamic clothing, showing how whiteness in America is conditional and shaped by outward religious symbols.
The route to whiteness was fairly intentional, according to Sarah Gualtieri's analysis of early Syrian migration to America. Gualtieri contends that by contrasting their identity with that of Black and Asian groups, Syrians intentionally sought whiteness in order to obtain privileges and conform to American racial hierarchy. Elkourie, for instance, separated Syrian Christians from marginalized racial groups by stressing their compatibility with Western society. Syrians established their "whiteness" through collective organizing and legal assistance, eventually being recognized by citizenship legislation. While denying other minority groups the same status and strengthening racial hierarchies, this decision gave them access to social mobility.
Neda Maghbouleh investigates how the Iranian diaspora's perception of whiteness is influenced by the Aryan myth. Iranian families frequently adopt this complicated identity, which perpetuates the concept of "Persian exceptionalism," which holds that Iranians are culturally superior to Arabs since they are "original Caucasians." This difference encourages Iranians in the United States to connect themselves with white identity in order to gain racial privilege, but it also frequently causes tension among the second-generation Iranian-American population, who doubt the myth's veracity. This illustrates how racialized minorities in Western societies negotiate whiteness in order to gain mobility and acceptance.