Muslim attire and garb is associated with foreignness. It is neither white nor black, but foreign. It is because of this that white people who wear hijab, or other Muslim clothing are seen as foreign. It is not that people now see them as brown necessarily, but that they are from a foreign place. An example of this is Allison as recounted by Husain, a white revert who began wearing hijab and suddenly started getting assumptions that she “came from” from a different country, that she doesn’t speak English, and that she is unfamiliar with “western hygiene practices”.
The legal rulings of citizenship and naturalization of off-white immigrants affected their attraction to whiteness, especially in the case of Syrian immigrants in the US. According to US law, non-native people applying for citizenship who were not of white or black descent were not eligible for naturalization in the US. It is for this reason that many people, including Syrians, were insistent in proving their whiteness in order to be naturalized in the US. Another component of this attraction to whiteness is the fact of anti-black racism in the US, not wanting to be associated with blackness, claim blackness and deal with the added burden of being classified as black. When given the choice to fight to identify as either black or white in hopes of naturalization, Syrians chose whiteness, not out of logic or factually being any closer to whiteness than blackness, but because of the added privilege whiteness brought on turtle Island, in addition to the right to naturalize. The granting of whiteness to Syrians and the fight put up by other off-white immigrants to identify as white led to these communities celebrating whiteness and glorifying it even further. This glorification and celebration of whiteness by off-white communities also contributes to their anti-black racism on turtle island. As a result of the strict binary of black and white in turtle island at this time, as highlighted by Husain, for off-white communities to glorify and celebrate whiteness, meant to demonize and look down on blackness. This can explain (though never justify) the anti-black racism perpetuated by these off-white communities. In addition to this, in wanting to prove their proximity to whiteness, they simultaneously tried to prove their distance to blackness, which also took on forms of anti-black racism in these communities that today, are often still normalized.
In terms of religion, much like Husain highlights that the Muslim religion is associated with foreignness, and thus Muslim attire, and anyone who wears it, (or even something that reassembles it) is seen as foreign. Christianity on the other hand, is often seen as Islam’s opposite, thus local, familiar. To mediate the difference between Syrians and white Americans, the case was made that Syrians come from the Phoenicians, and the land of Jesus Christ and birthplace of Christianity. It is not necessarily that because Syrians practice the same religion as the white southerners that they were granted white status, in fact, eastern Christian practices are very different from American Christian practices and, many Syrians at the time were not even Christian. Rather this was an attempt to bridge what the southerners saw as the huge civilizational and genetic difference between them and the Syrians. If the Syrians could prove that they descend from the same people of Jesus, who they saw as the backbone to their Western civilization (and who they saw as a white man), they could successfully bridge this perceived difference.