Legally-white Middle Easterners lack recourse since law can’t grasp white-on-white bias

Evidence

In the twenty-first century, and in a social environment gripped with inchoate Islamophobia and strong anti–Middle Eastern sentiment, Iranian Americans found themselves stuck in racial loopholes. Legally white but socially brown, and on the receiving end of racialized enmity and discrimination, Iranian Americans and other Middle Eastern groups have lacked the strongest possible legal recourse because the law cannot make sense of white-on-white discrimination. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 148

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does any jurisdiction treat Middle Easterners as a protected class, and what would need to change in the law to allow white-on-white discrimination claims?

Related

• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.91)
• Iranian Americans face discrimination legally invisible because they are white by law. (similarity 0.83)
• Legal white classification excluded Middle Eastern students from diversity resources (similarity 0.82)
• Socioeconomic success and legal whiteness do not guarantee protection from racial browning (similarity 0.81)
• Iranian Americans are legally white yet can claim minority status in discrimination suits (similarity 0.81)
• Ethnicity, nationality, and religion cannot fully explain anti-Iranian bias (similarity 0.80)
• Iranians are legally white yet socially non-white in America (similarity 0.80)
• Iranian Americans are legally white but are routinely racialized as non-white in schools (similarity 0.80)
• Iran has functioned as a racial fencepost determining whiteness’s boundaries (similarity 0.80)
• Early twentieth-century courts positioned Iran as a borderland for whiteness (similarity 0.79)
• Early twentieth-century courts used Persians as a hinge to define Middle Easterners’ race (similarity 0.79)
• Iranian experience reveals what official whiteness can and cannot protect. (similarity 0.79)
• Social whiteness on the ground remains elusive for Iranian Americans (similarity 0.79)
• Arabs and Iranians experience racism while being officially classified as white (similarity 0.79)
• Early US courts defined Middle Eastern whiteness by reference to Iranians. (similarity 0.79)