Accruing whiteness: power and resistance in prerequisite citizenship cases of immigrants from the ‘Middle East’

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore the role that immigrants from the ‘Middle East’ (Southwest Asia) and their applications for citizenship played in the construction of whiteness in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. I examine this role by studying six major citizenship applications through which immigrants from Southwest Asia ‘achieved’ whiteness. The legal cases examined below reveal how the first wave of immigrants from Southwest Asia, exposed to an unfamiliar taxonomical practice, learned about race politics in the United States and adopted a racial language of white Christian supremacy to achieve whiteness when citizenship was limited to free white individuals and individuals with African ancestry. This achieved whiteness by Christian applicants was first revoked when a Muslim applicant from Yemen took his citizenship application to courts and was reinstated later in the court case of a Muslim applicant from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I highlight the significance of global geopolitics in racialization processes to explain these ‘discrepancies’ and show how the final placement of immigrants from Southwest Asia in the white category was settled only when the United States’ interest in the oil-rich countries of the region mandated their inclusion.