Abstract
Excerpted From: Alia Malek, Dying with the Wrong Name: The Role of Law in Racializing and Erasing Arabs in America, 1 Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives 211 (Fall, 2009) (269 Footnotes) (Full Document Requested)
If Arabs did not exist in every American's consciousness before the events of September 11, 2001--whether as a part of America's “melting pot” society and history or as a group of people generally from the Middle East the tragedy, they surely did. Given the subsequent treatment of Arabs and Muslims, the sudden way members of these partially over-lapping (though not at all synonymous) groups were understood to have collective physical features and behavioral patterns, we are compelled to admit that under a layman's understanding of the concept, Arabs have race in America. This racial identity is unequivocally non-White and arguably synonymous with “terrorist.”
When we closely examine Arab-American racial identity, deep tensions between popular conception, lived experience, and legal definitions emerge. For the purposes of official racial classifications such as the census, for example, Arabs in America are in fact “White,” and the federal government has resisted the Arab-American community's efforts to change or modify this classification. Before 9-11, Arab-Americans used many terms such as “White not quite,” ““honorary Whites,” and “probationary Whites,” to describe the schizophrenia derived from being constantly classified as White yet not feeling White; that is, not enjoying the benefits of whiteness. Official whiteness has long been belied by instances of anti-Arab discrimination--such as various hate crimes, government targeting even before 9-11, and perennial assignment of collective guilt to the community in times of geopolitical flare-ups. In short, there is a longstanding and substantial dissonance between the official classification of Arab Americans as “White” and how they feel and are treated in the United States.
This article seeks to explain how this dissonance between legal classification and experienced reality has come about and argues that the current conflation of Arab with terrorist is simply the latest step in a tortured racialization process that has long branded Arabs in America as perpetual foreigners. A concise but thorough examination of how Arab Americans have been raced by law over their more than 100 years in the United States will show that America's racial paradigm has made the community both invisible as bona fide members of the melting pot nation and hyper-visible as a perceived threat.
Part I considers how the arrival of non-European, non-African persons, brought to America by immigration, raised the question of where they would belong in the U.S. racial system. Part I also examines the experience of Arabs during the time when they established lives and families in the United States and found that their official whiteness was probationary and unstable. Arab Americans experienced discrimination and constant reminders that they would only be considered White if they did not challenge the status quo of White Supremacy.
Part II describes the subsequent Civil Rights Era, which was defined for Arab Americans (as it was for many minorities), by litigation struggles against discrimination and the political struggle for recognition by the census and other official measures. At this stage, Arab Americans found themselves hamstrung by their ostensible whiteness--once an advantage for immigrants seeking citizenship, racial ambiguity or official whiteness now disqualified Arab Americans from statutory protections against real harms. In this section, I also argue that lack of official recognition as a minority group also implied that Arab Americans were not, in fact, a legitimate minority and therefore not legitimately American. Therefore, as Arab-Americans, they were constitutively un-American.
Part III asserts that the racial discrimination experienced by Arab Americans in the late twentieth century largely derived from the negative depiction of Arab and Arab American advocacy for Palestine. Official and popular opinion conflated the multiple national, ethnic, and religious identities of Arab Americans and Arabs with dissent on the Palestinian fate, and the dissent was in turn stripped of nuance. In this period, to critique the United States policy on Palestine was to subscribe to an irrational, anti-Semitic, terroristic ideology, and to, again, be fundamentally un-American. Here we see the great risk of being historically invisible in America--Arab Americans had not been recognized as a legitimate, contributing, fully American community within the nation and therefore were easily made “foreign” by the political debate surrounding Palestine.
Part IV considers the most pernicious aspect of Arab racialization--the equation of Arabs and terrorists. This phenomenon predated September 11, 2001, which only exponentially magnified the association between terrorist and Arab that had been established during the Palestinian conflict. This section specifically examines the racial way in which terrorism has attached to the Arab and Arab-American community (contrasted with the Ku Klux Klan and other White domestic advocates of violence, who are rarely if ever labeled “terrorists”). Here I argue that after 9-11, the pre-existing racialization of Arabs and Arab Americans motivated and justified official acts such as Guantanamo Bay detention and the passage of statutes that curtailed the civil liberties of Arab American citizens. The Conclusion then briefly comments on the post-9-11 reality of Arab Americans' racialized vulnerability and urges a race awakening that defines Arabs as minorities.
In general, I argue that these processes have emphasized Arab Americans' un-American-ness or “foreignness.” “Foreignness” in this context has nothing to do with citizenship or place of birth, nor is it fluid; it is the idea that certain peoples are permanently foreign. This permanence comes from the idea that they are not of the same people as “real Americans.” “Real Americans” are White and to a lesser extent, Black. Arab Americans are instead un-American. As Neil Gotanda, who has called this the “Miss Saigon” syndrome, writes:
[I]f a person is racially identified as African-American or [W]hite, that person is presumed to be legally a U.S. citizen and socially an American .... [T]hese presumptions are not present for Asian Americans, Latinos, Arab-Americans, and other non-Black racial minorities. Rather there is the opposite presumption that these people are foreigners; or if they are U.S. citizens, then their racial identity includes a foreign element.
A few preliminary definitions and clarifications are necessary at the outset. First, the term “Arab American,” for the purposes of this paper, refers to immigrants to North America from the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and their descendants. This definition necessarily includes peoples of various phenotypes, or visible racial differences, because Arabs from these lands possess physical characteristics that range from light to dark complexions, blue to brown eyes, and straight to kinky hair. By such a measure, they do not easily comprise a traditional separate race. However, phenotypic diversity is not a legitimate reason to exclude Arabs from recognition of a particular racialized experience. Race has never been merely a biological or visual categorization, but rather an “unstable and 'decentered’ mixture of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.” Similar to phenotypically diverse Hispanics, Arabs are subjected to a particularly racialized experience that includes the stereotyping, prejudice, and burden of collective guilt that traditional racial minorities experience. This paper also takes the pervasiveness of negative stereotypes of Arabs as a given and does not trace its evolution. Finally, the focus of this article is primarily on macro-level processes of state activity, under the premise that the state is “deeply involved in the organization and interpretation of race.”
[. . .]
The attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a “predictably racialized” response from society and government alike, manifested by hate crimes, discrimination, and racial profiling. People who were perceived to be Arab were attacked; this included people neither Arab nor Muslim, such as Sikhs who were murdered in response to 9-11. As Thomas Joo rightly points out, the killing of people who were perceived to be Arab because of their looks demonstrates how “racial categories are under constant social construction and reconstruction and ... need not bear any correlation to 'real’ ethnic, national, or religious categories.” Because of their history in the U.S., invisible as an American community yet targeted for racialized animus, Arab Americans were not sufficiently represented in policy, government, or media to prevent or even mitigate the post-9-11 response themselves. Their powerlessness was disastrous for the civil rights and liberties of all Americans.
Arab Americans' powerlessness was disastrous, but also explicable. The transition from invisibility to hypervisibility as the enemy of civilization after 9-11 was set in motion nearly one hundred years ago. As detailed above, in the early twentieth century prerequisite cases, Arabs were only grudgingly granted White status and throughout that century they never truly attained White identity. In fact, whiteness seemed to adhere most strongly to Arab Americans when it privileged race discrimination against them by precluding Section 1981 protection. A consequence of this probationary, conditional White status was that Arabs never transitioned from being immigrant foreigners to full members of the American community--no space existed in the community's racial paradigm for them. They therefore remained defined by their foreignness. American policy and public opinion surrounding Palestine pushed dissenting Arab Americans more firmly into a “foreigner” identity, and soon the violence of Palestine would also racially define the community as a whole. By September of 2001, Arabs in America were already racialized as terrorists by American law and official policy makers and faced persistent silencing pressure. Arab Americans have thus always had a non-White racial identity, but before 9-11, the community, other Americans, and the law were in denial. After 9-11, the veil was lifted.
Whether demographers and policy makers continue to strategically force Arab Americans into the “White” box, for many Arab and Muslim Americans the aftermath of 9-11 triggered an irreversible racial awakening. That awakening involves asserting control over racialization. To accomplish this, Arab Americans must both deconstruct the layers of meaning that have been given to their politics, dissent, ancestors' culture, and reconstruct and reclaim their history here in America. As this article has attempted to show, America's racial construct has offered Arab Americans more risks than rewards. In spite of and because of this experience, the community must continue to work to ensure that their de jure status matches the de facto status that shapes their everyday lives.
Alia Malek, J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories (Free Press) and a former trial attorney in the U.S. Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division.
