Becoming « White » : Race, Religion and the Foundations of Syrian/Lebanese Ethnicity in the United States | Sarah Gualtieri

/Becoming_White_Race_Religion_and_the_Fo

  • Becoming “White”: Race, Religion and the Foundations of Syrian/Lebanese Ethnicity in the United States | Sarah Gualtieri - Academia.edu
    https://www.academia.edu/12158528/Becoming_White_Race_Religion_and_the_Foundations_of_Syrian_Lebanese_Ethnic

    ON 14 SEPTEMBER 1915, George Dow, a Syrian1 immigrant living in South Carolina appeared before a circuit court judge and waited to hear the fate of his petition for naturalization. Twice already, it had been denied in a lower court because he was deemed racially ineligible for citizenship. Specifically, Dow had been refused naturalization on the grounds that he did not meet the racial requirement of the United States law, which limited naturalization to "aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent."2 George Dow could not, therefore, be accepted into the fold of American citizenry. The Syrian community which by conservative estimates num bered around 150,000 persons nationwide was outraged by the refusal to naturalize Dow.3 His was not the first case to ignite a community response, but around it Syrian immigrants mobilized to a degree that was unprecedented. Their efforts would ultimately prove effective, for in this, George Dow’s final appeal, the judge ruled that Syrians “were to be classed as white persons,” and were eligible for naturalization.4 Although it was not the last time a Syrian appeared before the courts attempting to litigate his (the cases involved men only) racial status, the Dow case established a weighty legal precedent in favor of Syrian white
    ness.

    [...]

    Simply put, Syrians wanted to be recognized as white because it made them eligible for citizenship and the privileges it afforded (such as the right to vote and travel more freely); but being white was not the only way to gain naturalization. It was also possible, since the amendment of the naturalization statute in 1875, to argue for naturalization on the basis of African nativity or descent. Yet, not a single appliant in the racial prerequisite cases, Syrian or otherwise, attempted to make this argument.9 One could argue that it would have been inherently illogical for Syrians to argue for naturalization on the basis of African nativity or descent since Syria was not in Africa. However, as this essay attempts to show, arguments in favor of Syrian whiteness were rooted more in ideology than logic, for there was nothing more fanciful, ridiculous and illogical than the idea that whiteness could be linked to a single skull; that of a Georgian woman found in the Caucasus.10

    The main reason Syrians chose to stake their claim to citizenship on the basis of membership in the “white race” was that there was some thing compelling, even alluring, about whiteness that went beyond the strategic and the practical. Historian David Roediger, drawing on W.E.B. DuBois, has called this the “wages of whiteness”, the psychological compensation of being “not black” in a racist, exploitative society.11 This theory helps explain why working-class immigrants claimed whiteness, but there is also the question of how they did so. As Roediger and Noel Ignatiev’s work on the Irish shows, immigrants participated in and transformed institutions and cultural traditions that marked them as “white” and blacks as "others."12 “To enter the white race,” Ignatiev reminds us, “was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society,” and whiteness was, ultimately, the "result of choices made."13