Arabs had to litigate their whiteness to gain US citizenship

Evidence

According to the citizenship laws of the period (and until 1952), only “free white persons” could qualify for naturalization, and laws were passed explicitly to bar “Asiatics” from American citizenship. Confronted with this reality, the Arab-American community from across the nation mobilized to prove that they were indeed “free white people,” and a series of court rulings eventually affirmed that position. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 978

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did the ‘free white persons’ standard get interpreted across other non-European groups — Persians, Armenians, Japanese? Worth a comparative look.
• XREF: Parallels the racial-boundary work in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ — categories of whiteness were legally negotiable, not biological. — connects to: US imperial wars abroad drive the racial exclusion of Arab Americans at home. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 236; Syrian immigrants won citizenship by proving their whiteness through Christian faith; Arab Muslims won US citizenship via the Semitic-race argument in the mid-1940s — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 230