Geopolitical needs, not domestic racism alone, shifted Arabs’ legal racial classification in America.

Evidence

In 1944, Mohamed Mohriez, “an Arab born in Sanhy, Badan, Arabia,” who had been in the United States since 1921, succeeded in his case. Why the change? District Judge Charles E. Wyzanski explained. The “vital interest [of the United States] as a world power” required granting Mohriez’s petition, wrote the judge, because it was now necessary “to promote friendlier relations between the United States and other nations and so as to fulfill the promise that we shall treat all men as created equal.” … In other words, as the United States assumed its leadership role on the world stage, the domestic understandings of America’s racial-classification system and where Arabs fit within it altered alongside. The exigencies of international politics changed the supposedly immutable facts of the Arab “race,” all within the span of seventeen months. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 980

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running theme that Arabs in America are classified by foreign-policy imperatives, and to Saad’s observation that Americans only notice Arabs in relation to Middle Eastern crises. — connects to: US policymakers framed Arabs as racially predisposed to extremism in designing foreign aid. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 383
• DEFINE: Illustrates how a legal racial category is constructed by political exigency rather than immutable fact.