Arab Muslims gained US citizenship rights by being classified as a Semitic white race

Evidence

Arab Muslims had a more difficult time acquiring citizenship, Gualteiri argues. However, by the mid-1940s Arab Muslims were also incorporated into legal definitions of whiteness on the grounds that they were part of the Semitic race. The Immigration and Naturalization Services department argued that since the Semitic races had contributed to Western civilization, Arab Muslims could be granted citizenship. Thus, while Arab Americans were legally discriminated against in a process that we might understand as racism, it was a shifting and unstable form of racialization that did not target them specifically but was part of a system of oppression directed at all “new immigrants.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 230

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Arab Muslims won US citizenship via the Semitic-race argument in the mid-1940s (similarity 0.95)
• Arabs had to litigate their whiteness to gain US citizenship (similarity 0.84)
• INS granted Arabs citizenship eligibility by classifying them white and separate from Asians. (similarity 0.84)
• Courts disagreed across jurisdictions about whether Arabs were white (similarity 0.82)
• Courts admitted Arabs to whiteness via cultural contribution discourse, not religion (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic identity exceeded skin color in rendering Arabs non-white for citizenship (similarity 0.81)
• Syrian immigrants argued Christianity and Holy Land ancestry to win US citizenship (similarity 0.80)
• Arabs gained whiteness-status in 1943 while Muslims generally remained excluded because Islam signified non-whiteness. (similarity 0.80)
• Arabs were legally classified as white in 1943 to distinguish them from ineligible Asians. (similarity 0.80)
• Arab Americans’ racial exclusion from whiteness tracks the rise of US global empire (similarity 0.80)
• Islam was not associated with whiteness, blocking Muslim naturalization (similarity 0.80)
• INS declared Arabs white by shared civilization, reversing court rulings to the contrary (similarity 0.79)
• Arab Christians were denied US naturalization through conflation with Islamic racial otherness (similarity 0.79)
• Religion shaped whether courts classified Arab immigrants as White for citizenship (similarity 0.79)
• Muslims are racially assigned to blackness while immigrants aspire to whiteness. (similarity 0.79)