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Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority
Middle Sometimes White, Sometimes Not - an article by John Tehranian
The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most pressing issues of our the war in Iraq and on terrorism, the growing tension between preservation of our national security and protection of our civil rights, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society. Unlike many other racial minorities in our country, Middle Eastern Americans have faced rising, rather than diminishing, degrees of discrimination over time; a fact highlighted by recent targeted immigration policies, racial profiling, a war on terrorism with a decided racialist bent, and growing rates of job discrimination and hate crime. Oddly enough, however, Middle Eastern Americans are not even considered a minority in official government data. Instead, they are deemed white by law.
In Whitewashed, John Tehranian combines his own personal experiences as an Iranian American with an expert’s analysis of current events, legal trends, and critical theory to analyze this bizarre Catch-22 of Middle Eastern racial classification. He explains how American constructions of Middle Eastern racial identity have changed over the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the shift in perceptions of the Middle Easterner from friendly foreigner to enemy alien, a trend accelerated by the tragic events of 9/11. Focusing on the contemporary immigration debate, the war on terrorism, media portrayals of Middle Easterners, and the processes of creating racial stereotypes, Tehranian argues that, despite its many successes, the modern civil rights movement has not done enough to protect the liberties of Middle Eastern Americans.
By following how concepts of whiteness have transformed over time, Whitewashed forces readers to rethink and question some of their most deeply held assumptions about race in American society.
The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most pressing issues of our the war in Iraq and on terrorism, the growing tension between preservation of our national security and protection of our civil rights, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society. Unlike many other racial minorities in our country, Middle Eastern Americans have faced rising, rather than diminishing, degrees of discrimination over time; a fact highlighted by recent targeted immigration policies, racial profiling, a war on terrorism with a decided racialist bent, and growing rates of job discrimination and hate crime. Oddly enough, however, Middle Eastern Americans are not even considered a minority in official government data. Instead, they are deemed white by law.
In Whitewashed, John Tehranian combines his own personal experiences as an Iranian American with an expert’s analysis of current events, legal trends, and critical theory to analyze this bizarre Catch-22 of Middle Eastern racial classification. He explains how American constructions of Middle Eastern racial identity have changed over the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the shift in perceptions of the Middle Easterner from friendly foreigner to enemy alien, a trend accelerated by the tragic events of 9/11. Focusing on the contemporary immigration debate, the war on terrorism, media portrayals of Middle Easterners, and the processes of creating racial stereotypes, Tehranian argues that, despite its many successes, the modern civil rights movement has not done enough to protect the liberties of Middle Eastern Americans.
By following how concepts of whiteness have transformed over time, Whitewashed forces readers to rethink and question some of their most deeply held assumptions about race in American society.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2008
6 people are currently reading
131 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 2, 2022
"I had suspected that I would come face-to-face with discrimination at some point in my professional life, but I had never thought that it would be so unabashed and that it would stem from being considered white. At wit's end, I said the only thing that came to mind: "White, huh? That's not what they call me at the airport."
"The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most presing issues of our time-the ongoing conflicts in the region and the war on terror(ism), the delicate balancing act between preserving our national security interests and protecting our constitutional rights and civil liberties, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically enough, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society."
"Whitewashed joins several important works on the recursive impact of stereotyping in defining legal and social relationships and rights for groups."
"Like most Americans, academics have historically focused on the dichotomy between black and white and not on the broader racial issues in our nation. Although the black/white paradigm has played a profound role in our nation's history, it does not address the myriad issues related to individuals caught in blurry and gray portions of the divide."
"...in a bureaucratic age, the only thing worse than being reduced to a statistic is not being reduced to one."
"The category Middle Eastern immediately conjures up two ethnic and religious coordinates on aCartesian identity graph: Arab and Muslim. I am neither Arab nor Muslim, but both of these identities are frequently imposed on me when am I am perceived as being Middle Eastern."
"As writer James Baldwin once noted, racial consciousness may be the "price of the ticket" we pay to be an American. Without exaggeration, and despite my greatest hopes, the issue of race affects me on a daily basis."
"No country has ever been more open and welcoming to immigrants than the United States, and no country has ever demonstrated a greater respect for civil rights and the protection of minorities. We have risen to the challenges posed by the past, and I am confident that we can do so again. However, with respect to the Middle Eastern question, there is significant work to be done."
"The antinomy of whiteness has haunted our nation since its founding. For much of American history, the concept of whiteness has embodied an ostensibly august and pure tradition while simultaneously enforcing a regime of fear and oppression."
"Throughout American history, racial classifications have wielded expectional influence. Until 1952, federal law provided naturalization rights only to individuals who were white or black, but nothing "in-between." The American legal system was forced to confront the task of defining what or who constituted the white race for the purposes of naturalization when, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of new immigration from non-Anglo-Saxon countries arrived on our shores."
"Similarly, for immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the critical interaction between racial classifications (through the whiteness requirement for naturalization) and property played an instrumental part in the creation of socioeconomic hierarchies."
"In a groundbreaking study of the relationship between pigmentation and socioeconomic achievement among legal immigrants to the United States, Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, found that the average "light"-skinned immigrant outearned her "dark"-skinned equivalent by approximately 10 percent, even when controlling for race, country of origin, English ability, education, and occupation. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Hersch found that the detriment of a dark complexion was so significant that it sometimes wiped out any benefits accrued from educational attainment."
"An examination of the tortuous history of whiteness is instructive in what it reveals about the socially constructed nature of the category and its resulting ambiguity and fluidity. From the ancient world to colonial America, the concept of whiteness had no broad racial significance."
"Whiteness has been, and continues to be, intricately related to privilege. Yet, as the historical examples of the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks demonstrate, the concept of whiteness has always been riddled with ambiguity and fluidity. There is nothing instrinsic, factual, or natural about racial categories. Instead, as our analysis reveals, race is a social construct, guided in large part by performance."
"Throughout the course of American history, white performance has played an instrumental role in determining the scope of social, political, and economic freedoms by, inter alia, rationalizing conditions of servitude, guiding Native American property rights, determining wartime internment policies, delimiting the scope of segregation, and allotting naturalization rights."
"Americans of Middle Eastern descent are caught in a bizarre Catch-22. They are branded white by law but simultaneously reified as the Other. They enjoy neither the fruits of remedial action nor the benefits of white privilege. To understan how this paradoxical situation came about, it is first necessary to examine critically the racialization of Middle Easterners."
"In California, for example, public universities consider faculty applicants Caucasian if they come from Middle Eastern or North African descent. According to Uncle Sam, a Middle Easterner is as white as a blond-haired, blue-eyed scandinavian."
"The court's message to ne immigrant groups is clear: If you can assimilate yourself into the White Republic, you will gain the privileges of whiteness. Whiteness is not a given, naturally determined, exogenous variable. Instead, it is an outcome, a reward dependent on performance and assimilation."
"Once again, the court's racial calculus is highly performative: To act as a channel for whiteness, or to have whiteness flow through the veins of the culture, is to perform whiteness and therefore to constitute whiteness."
"The early years of the Republic witnessed the negotiation of the racial status of myriad immigrant groups. Some groups, such as the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs were initially deemed nonwhite and denied the privileges of full participation in the Republic. As perceptions of their assimilability changed, however, they eventually received the white designation. The case of Middle Easterners has been no different-perceptions of assimilability hah guided the construction of their racial status to this very day."
"Just as race is a function of social construction rather than inherent biology, the Middle East was invented from political considerations, not any natural geography. This observation is made plain by the region's ostensible boundaries, which encompass at least part of the northern coast of the African continent and typicaly stretch eastward as far as Iran (a non-Arab country, but one with sizable oil reserves), but not into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Indian subcontinent."
"As Richard Delgado reminds us, antiblack "prejudice sprang up with slavery. Previously, educated Europeans held generally positive attitudes toward Africans, recognizing the African civilization was highly advanced."As slavery emerged, infantilization became commonplace in media portrayals, as blacks were stereotyped as buffons unable to survive without the guidance of their masters. Blackface minstrelsy rose to popularity, in the guise of Sambo and other characters, conveying images of blacks as either "inept urban dandies or happy childlike slaves." Following emancipation and the end of the Civil War, however, images became more ominous, with black men portrayed as rapists preying on white women and black women reduced to pliable domestic servants. Stereotypes followed function, first legitimating slavery and later rationalizing lynching, segregation, imperialism, and Jim Crow."
"Race comes into existence only when a group grows sufficiently large, in terms of both numbers and powers, as to become a threat."
"Lawrence therefore warns us that, by limiting the remedial powers of courts to only those government policies that stem from overt animus, we ignore our broader culture of unconscious racism, its role in shaping our institutions, and its profound impact on our social, political, and economic lives."
"Based on pressures to conform to social norms enforced by the dominant culture, a rational distaste for ostracism and social opprobrium can lead individuals to engage in the purposeful act of toning down traits that identify them with a stigmatized group."
"The initiative defines people of color as individuals who are "Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Latino/Hispanic and Native American Indian." Consequently, Middle Easterners, who represent a significant victim of Hollywood stereotyping, are wholly excluded from protection under the DCI."
"Indeed, in a haunting recycling of the past, the racist tropes historically employed against blacks, Jews, and other persecuted minorities are now pointed against Middle Easterners, culminating in a discourse that juxtaposes our Western values against their Oriental barbarism. Such portrayals depict the Middle Easterner as a devious, hook-nosed perpetual foreigner who presents a continuous threat to our national security and way of life."
"The treachery of images results when we internalize these coded visual messages as reality."
"Hollywood serves as both reflector and cultivator of cultural representations, and its images directly influence construction of race, which "becomes ' common-sense'-a way of comprehending, explaining and acting in the world. This concept, abstract to many, becomes eminently tangible to its unwitting victims."
"I am reminded of the words of Franz Fanon, who captured the profound psychological impact and sense of hellessness that racial prejudice inflicts on its victims. Describing how individuals of African ancestry succumn to a heightened level of self-consciousness over their bodies, he writes, "I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the "idea' that others have of me but of my own appearance....I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed....Why, it's a N****!"
"I came to hate the question 'where are you from, really?' that followed my assertion that I had grown up in Boston." For certain groups, this question inevitably emerges in daily conversation and serves as a constant, nagging reminder of one's presumptive un-Americanness."
"As Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander have argued in their study Lay My Burden Down, systemic racism has mired the community in an underappreciated mental-health crisis. Quite simply, racism can result in the internalization of self-loathing and feelings of hopelessness that often express themselves in the ultimate form of self-devaluation: suicide."
"There can be no greater isolation than one's status as the perpetual foreigner in a society and the persistent demonization of one's ethnicity in the mainstream media. Images can be treacherous indeed."
"Only 38 perecent of white Americans believe that racism is still a significant problem. And this view is based, at least in part, on widespread misperceptions: a startling 65 percent of white Americans believe that there is little difference between the ecoomic and social conditions of whites and blacks have jobs that are either "equal" (46 percent), "a little better" (6 percent), or "a lot better" (6 percent) than those held by whites."
"IF the government continues to engage in the practice of racial profiling on the grounds that it is an effective tool in protecting our national security, then the government must necessarily admit that we do not live in the race-blind society imagined by opponents of affirmative action."
"Our racial-profiling practices are not only bad policy, however. They also fail to pass muster under the Constitution, which requires any government policy implicating race to be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest. Although our national security undoubtedly constitutes a compelling government interest, the racial porfiling of Middle Easterners as a part of the war on terrorism is not a narrowly tailored policy under existing Supreme Court jurisprudence."
"The Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican American experiences therefore serve as cautionary tales for our troublesome handling of the Middle Eastern question and the war on terrorism."
"When it was a matter of denying naturalization rights, courts frequently found individuals of Middle Eastern and Indian descent not white, but when it was a matter if denying relief for decrimination, courts have found the same individuals white. The results echo the Cathc-22 illustrated at the outset of this book."
"Alexis de Tocqueville's admonishment about power in the United States, made over a century and a half ago, still rings true today: "If I were asked wehre I place the American aristocracy, I should reply, without hesitation, that it is not among the rich, who are united by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar." The gateway to teh bar and the bench is the American university or, morespecifically, the American law school."
"The Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most presing issues of our time-the ongoing conflicts in the region and the war on terror(ism), the delicate balancing act between preserving our national security interests and protecting our constitutional rights and civil liberties, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically enough, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in American society."
"Whitewashed joins several important works on the recursive impact of stereotyping in defining legal and social relationships and rights for groups."
"Like most Americans, academics have historically focused on the dichotomy between black and white and not on the broader racial issues in our nation. Although the black/white paradigm has played a profound role in our nation's history, it does not address the myriad issues related to individuals caught in blurry and gray portions of the divide."
"...in a bureaucratic age, the only thing worse than being reduced to a statistic is not being reduced to one."
"The category Middle Eastern immediately conjures up two ethnic and religious coordinates on aCartesian identity graph: Arab and Muslim. I am neither Arab nor Muslim, but both of these identities are frequently imposed on me when am I am perceived as being Middle Eastern."
"As writer James Baldwin once noted, racial consciousness may be the "price of the ticket" we pay to be an American. Without exaggeration, and despite my greatest hopes, the issue of race affects me on a daily basis."
"No country has ever been more open and welcoming to immigrants than the United States, and no country has ever demonstrated a greater respect for civil rights and the protection of minorities. We have risen to the challenges posed by the past, and I am confident that we can do so again. However, with respect to the Middle Eastern question, there is significant work to be done."
"The antinomy of whiteness has haunted our nation since its founding. For much of American history, the concept of whiteness has embodied an ostensibly august and pure tradition while simultaneously enforcing a regime of fear and oppression."
"Throughout American history, racial classifications have wielded expectional influence. Until 1952, federal law provided naturalization rights only to individuals who were white or black, but nothing "in-between." The American legal system was forced to confront the task of defining what or who constituted the white race for the purposes of naturalization when, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of new immigration from non-Anglo-Saxon countries arrived on our shores."
"Similarly, for immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the critical interaction between racial classifications (through the whiteness requirement for naturalization) and property played an instrumental part in the creation of socioeconomic hierarchies."
"In a groundbreaking study of the relationship between pigmentation and socioeconomic achievement among legal immigrants to the United States, Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, found that the average "light"-skinned immigrant outearned her "dark"-skinned equivalent by approximately 10 percent, even when controlling for race, country of origin, English ability, education, and occupation. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Hersch found that the detriment of a dark complexion was so significant that it sometimes wiped out any benefits accrued from educational attainment."
"An examination of the tortuous history of whiteness is instructive in what it reveals about the socially constructed nature of the category and its resulting ambiguity and fluidity. From the ancient world to colonial America, the concept of whiteness had no broad racial significance."
"Whiteness has been, and continues to be, intricately related to privilege. Yet, as the historical examples of the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks demonstrate, the concept of whiteness has always been riddled with ambiguity and fluidity. There is nothing instrinsic, factual, or natural about racial categories. Instead, as our analysis reveals, race is a social construct, guided in large part by performance."
"Throughout the course of American history, white performance has played an instrumental role in determining the scope of social, political, and economic freedoms by, inter alia, rationalizing conditions of servitude, guiding Native American property rights, determining wartime internment policies, delimiting the scope of segregation, and allotting naturalization rights."
"Americans of Middle Eastern descent are caught in a bizarre Catch-22. They are branded white by law but simultaneously reified as the Other. They enjoy neither the fruits of remedial action nor the benefits of white privilege. To understan how this paradoxical situation came about, it is first necessary to examine critically the racialization of Middle Easterners."
"In California, for example, public universities consider faculty applicants Caucasian if they come from Middle Eastern or North African descent. According to Uncle Sam, a Middle Easterner is as white as a blond-haired, blue-eyed scandinavian."
"The court's message to ne immigrant groups is clear: If you can assimilate yourself into the White Republic, you will gain the privileges of whiteness. Whiteness is not a given, naturally determined, exogenous variable. Instead, it is an outcome, a reward dependent on performance and assimilation."
"Once again, the court's racial calculus is highly performative: To act as a channel for whiteness, or to have whiteness flow through the veins of the culture, is to perform whiteness and therefore to constitute whiteness."
"The early years of the Republic witnessed the negotiation of the racial status of myriad immigrant groups. Some groups, such as the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs were initially deemed nonwhite and denied the privileges of full participation in the Republic. As perceptions of their assimilability changed, however, they eventually received the white designation. The case of Middle Easterners has been no different-perceptions of assimilability hah guided the construction of their racial status to this very day."
"Just as race is a function of social construction rather than inherent biology, the Middle East was invented from political considerations, not any natural geography. This observation is made plain by the region's ostensible boundaries, which encompass at least part of the northern coast of the African continent and typicaly stretch eastward as far as Iran (a non-Arab country, but one with sizable oil reserves), but not into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Indian subcontinent."
"As Richard Delgado reminds us, antiblack "prejudice sprang up with slavery. Previously, educated Europeans held generally positive attitudes toward Africans, recognizing the African civilization was highly advanced."As slavery emerged, infantilization became commonplace in media portrayals, as blacks were stereotyped as buffons unable to survive without the guidance of their masters. Blackface minstrelsy rose to popularity, in the guise of Sambo and other characters, conveying images of blacks as either "inept urban dandies or happy childlike slaves." Following emancipation and the end of the Civil War, however, images became more ominous, with black men portrayed as rapists preying on white women and black women reduced to pliable domestic servants. Stereotypes followed function, first legitimating slavery and later rationalizing lynching, segregation, imperialism, and Jim Crow."
"Race comes into existence only when a group grows sufficiently large, in terms of both numbers and powers, as to become a threat."
"Lawrence therefore warns us that, by limiting the remedial powers of courts to only those government policies that stem from overt animus, we ignore our broader culture of unconscious racism, its role in shaping our institutions, and its profound impact on our social, political, and economic lives."
"Based on pressures to conform to social norms enforced by the dominant culture, a rational distaste for ostracism and social opprobrium can lead individuals to engage in the purposeful act of toning down traits that identify them with a stigmatized group."
"The initiative defines people of color as individuals who are "Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Latino/Hispanic and Native American Indian." Consequently, Middle Easterners, who represent a significant victim of Hollywood stereotyping, are wholly excluded from protection under the DCI."
"Indeed, in a haunting recycling of the past, the racist tropes historically employed against blacks, Jews, and other persecuted minorities are now pointed against Middle Easterners, culminating in a discourse that juxtaposes our Western values against their Oriental barbarism. Such portrayals depict the Middle Easterner as a devious, hook-nosed perpetual foreigner who presents a continuous threat to our national security and way of life."
"The treachery of images results when we internalize these coded visual messages as reality."
"Hollywood serves as both reflector and cultivator of cultural representations, and its images directly influence construction of race, which "becomes ' common-sense'-a way of comprehending, explaining and acting in the world. This concept, abstract to many, becomes eminently tangible to its unwitting victims."
"I am reminded of the words of Franz Fanon, who captured the profound psychological impact and sense of hellessness that racial prejudice inflicts on its victims. Describing how individuals of African ancestry succumn to a heightened level of self-consciousness over their bodies, he writes, "I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the "idea' that others have of me but of my own appearance....I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed....Why, it's a N****!"
"I came to hate the question 'where are you from, really?' that followed my assertion that I had grown up in Boston." For certain groups, this question inevitably emerges in daily conversation and serves as a constant, nagging reminder of one's presumptive un-Americanness."
"As Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander have argued in their study Lay My Burden Down, systemic racism has mired the community in an underappreciated mental-health crisis. Quite simply, racism can result in the internalization of self-loathing and feelings of hopelessness that often express themselves in the ultimate form of self-devaluation: suicide."
"There can be no greater isolation than one's status as the perpetual foreigner in a society and the persistent demonization of one's ethnicity in the mainstream media. Images can be treacherous indeed."
"Only 38 perecent of white Americans believe that racism is still a significant problem. And this view is based, at least in part, on widespread misperceptions: a startling 65 percent of white Americans believe that there is little difference between the ecoomic and social conditions of whites and blacks have jobs that are either "equal" (46 percent), "a little better" (6 percent), or "a lot better" (6 percent) than those held by whites."
"IF the government continues to engage in the practice of racial profiling on the grounds that it is an effective tool in protecting our national security, then the government must necessarily admit that we do not live in the race-blind society imagined by opponents of affirmative action."
"Our racial-profiling practices are not only bad policy, however. They also fail to pass muster under the Constitution, which requires any government policy implicating race to be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest. Although our national security undoubtedly constitutes a compelling government interest, the racial porfiling of Middle Easterners as a part of the war on terrorism is not a narrowly tailored policy under existing Supreme Court jurisprudence."
"The Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican American experiences therefore serve as cautionary tales for our troublesome handling of the Middle Eastern question and the war on terrorism."
"When it was a matter of denying naturalization rights, courts frequently found individuals of Middle Eastern and Indian descent not white, but when it was a matter if denying relief for decrimination, courts have found the same individuals white. The results echo the Cathc-22 illustrated at the outset of this book."
"Alexis de Tocqueville's admonishment about power in the United States, made over a century and a half ago, still rings true today: "If I were asked wehre I place the American aristocracy, I should reply, without hesitation, that it is not among the rich, who are united by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar." The gateway to teh bar and the bench is the American university or, morespecifically, the American law school."
December 30, 2020
The last lines of this book sum up how I feel: “...this book takes a first step in addressing a topic that has received far too little attention in academic, legal, and policy circles. Ideally, it represents only the beginning of a broader public discussion on the subject.”
It is written with very academic language, I found myself having to look up many word definitions along the way. It was very thought-provoking, insightful and personally empowering to read about the ambiguous racial status of Middle Eastern Americans within a legal and historical context.
I’m glad I read and stuck with it, Tehranian’s personal anecdotes helped with the readability. The chapter on the war on terror and the assault on Middle Eastern civil rights was hard to get through, not because of academic language, but because of the disturbing examples of civil rights abuses.
I do hope there are more books and discussions on Middle Eastern experiences, identities, and representation. This is a good read, but not necessarily an easy one.
It is written with very academic language, I found myself having to look up many word definitions along the way. It was very thought-provoking, insightful and personally empowering to read about the ambiguous racial status of Middle Eastern Americans within a legal and historical context.
I’m glad I read and stuck with it, Tehranian’s personal anecdotes helped with the readability. The chapter on the war on terror and the assault on Middle Eastern civil rights was hard to get through, not because of academic language, but because of the disturbing examples of civil rights abuses.
I do hope there are more books and discussions on Middle Eastern experiences, identities, and representation. This is a good read, but not necessarily an easy one.
May 6, 2013
Truly fantastic book. This book discusses the construction of race through a seamless blend of experiences, landmark supreme court cases, some cases I had never heard of before, and really put the treatment of the Middle Eastern people in the larger context of discrimination, racism, and general bigotry in America. For the shortness of this book, it is powerful and really expresses the limbo of white-but-not-white of Iranians and other groups of people who are ambiguous in the sense that they are considered white for demographic purposes and yet they have been treated with exceptional hostility and suspicion, especially after 9/11.
January 8, 2025
the legal history was interesting but the later chapters, while thorough, lost me at times tonally — perhaps i crave something more *radical* because sometimes things felt half baked; (e.g., p.134 “we also threaten to make the war on terrorism into a race war” when we should accept that it effectively is; several appeals to america as the land of opportunity and equality and whatnot; weird respectability politics sprinkled in by honing in on education and profession of folks discriminated against?). maybe some of this is due to its being published in 2009; on that note, i know that this book back then was important in facilitating this conversation because i remember how excited teenaged me was to buy it (yes, i’ve owned it and left it unread for that long).
May 2, 2023
I am glad to have finally read a book on this topic. The main thesis, that (some) Middle Eastern people can blend in with white Americans at the expense of a collective identity, is probably the best answer that I have seen for this topic. John Tehranian started from a legal look at whiteness before turning to court cases about Middle Eastern citizenship, then media portrayals of Middle Easterns, and finally, the real life consequences of this in between area. I like the reminder brought up in the conclusion that it would still be very difficult to group broad cultures together, due to historical relations amongst each ethnic group.
I wish the book could have had a little more sociological perspective/ public opinion research (If not case studies with the Kardashians), but to quote the author, this topic has barely been explored, so that could be the topic of other books on the subject.
Bonus points for the reference to the episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 where Matthew Perry plays an Armenian.
I wish the book could have had a little more sociological perspective/ public opinion research (If not case studies with the Kardashians), but to quote the author, this topic has barely been explored, so that could be the topic of other books on the subject.
Bonus points for the reference to the episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 where Matthew Perry plays an Armenian.
December 26, 2009
Insightful introduction to the legal and cultural bind of Middle Eastern-origin communities. The short of it - that while individuals of Middle Eastern ancestry have become quite visible in the US, their ancestry is almost always ignored in mainstream discussions and the desire of many immigrants and their children to fit into the mainstream has likewise created a sort of national invisibility until post-Sept. 11th. This has made it more difficult for Middle Eastern peoples to politically organize themselves in the current era of Islamophobia and immigration raids.
The author is a legal scholar and approaches the subject as a scholar - with a lot of legal terms and footnotes. Not the most friendly book for non-academics.
I also gave it only 3 stars because it's proposed solutions to Middle Easterner social problems is limited to short-term solutions, some legal and some political, but all within the narrow confines allowed by the relatively conservative legal/social system of the US.
The author is a legal scholar and approaches the subject as a scholar - with a lot of legal terms and footnotes. Not the most friendly book for non-academics.
I also gave it only 3 stars because it's proposed solutions to Middle Easterner social problems is limited to short-term solutions, some legal and some political, but all within the narrow confines allowed by the relatively conservative legal/social system of the US.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews