Racist tropes about domestic labor are transplanted from one group to another.

Evidence

In Washington DC and the rest of the United States, and certainly in the White House, a whole history of African slavery has determined who, as a matter of racist cliche, cleans the floors. In the racist mind of the aging Benjamin Emanuel—who does not know the language of concealing one’s bigotry and speaks like the Irgun terrorist that he was—he simply switches the African for the Arab and lets go of “the values upon which he has raised his family”. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 567

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how racist tropes get recoded across groups — echoes the chapter’s central argument and connects to studies of ‘model minority’ or scapegoat transfer.
• SEED: An essay on how the ‘who cleans whose floors’ trope travels across racist registers — from African slavery in the US to Palestinian labor in Israel — as a microeconomics of dehumanization.