Accruing Whiteness: Power and Resistance in Prerequisite Cases of Immigrants from the Middle East

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Abstract

In this paper, I explore the role that immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa and their applications for citizenship played in the early construction of whiteness in the US. By studying six citizenship applications and court debates in the early years of the twentieth century through which people from the Middle East and North Africa “achieved” whiteness, I show how legal conception of whiteness variedly relied on different criteria such as geography, skin color, culture/civilization, religion, and personal qualifications of applicants, as well as different sources of definition like the knowledge of the “average person,” “science,” and congressional intent. While courts were trying to define the boundaries of whiteness and borders of white America, the prerequisite cases examined below reveal how the first wave of immigrants from the Middle East, exposed to an unfamiliar taxonomical practice, learned about race politics in the context of the US and chose to adopt a racial language of white Christian supremacy to prove their “whiteness.” Based on this finding and through a Foucauldian lens, I criticize the literature that romanticizes the agency of the subjugated and sympathizes with their claims for whiteness through perceiving it as the “logical” option for naturalization and citizenship.

Author

• Hadi Khoshneviss, Kenyon College