Courts disagreed over whether Syrians counted as White for naturalization

Evidence

Courts accepted a Syrian applicant’s status as a White free person within the meaning of Rev. St. § 2169 because “fair or dark complexion should not be allowed to control, provided the person seeking naturalization comes within the classification of the white or Caucasian race, and [District Judge Newman] consider[s] the Syrians as belonging to what we recognize, and what the world recognizes, as the white race.” In re Najour, 174 F. 735 (N.D. Ga. 1909). But later, they rejected the Whiteness of a Syrian applicant and found that “the meaning of free white persons is to be such as would have naturally been given to it when used in the first naturalization act of 1790[,] … ​such persons as were in 1790 known as white Europeans.” Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812, 814 (E.D. S.C. 1913). — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 1428

Categorization

• XREF: Beautifully parallels the figure/ground whiteness-as-legal-category scholarship of Haney Lopez’s White by Law, and the instability of race as a legal category generally. — connects to: Same-ethnicity petitioners were declared white in one court but not another; Legal whiteness construction created the Middle East category by separating Syrians from Asia — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 241; Whiteness rulings on Muslim immigrants varied absurdly by court rather than by consistent principle. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 172
• SEED: Essay angle: two federal courts, four years apart, reached opposite answers on whether Syrians are White — race as jurisdiction-dependent legal fiction, not stable ontology.