Skin shade determined how easily early Arab immigrants were racialized

Evidence

Skin color and class position would influence how these new immigrants were regarded. A New York Times article describing the people in the Syrian enclave in New York City noted that “a good many of them are easily distinguishable by a rather dark complexion, and might by some be taken for Italians or Frenchmen from the South of France, but not a few are of quite light complexion, and with light-colored hair.” This latter group was more easily accepted. This parallels the experience of the tens of million southern and eastern European immigrants who also entered the United States in the same period who were known as “new immigrants.” Race scholar David Roediger’s analysis of these groups shows that they were at first racialized but, after World War II, accepted into whiteness. He states that they occupied an “inbetween” space: “‘Inbetween’ hard racism and full inclusion neither securely white nor nonwhite—new immigrants were also chronologically inbetween sharply posed calls for their racially based exclusion … and far greater acceptance.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 227

Skin color and class position would influence how these new immigrants were regarded. A New York Times article describing the people in the Syrian enclave in New York City noted that “a good many of them are easily distinguishable by a rather dark complexion, and might by some be taken for Italians or Frenchmen from the South of France, but not a few are of quite light complexion, and with light-colored hair.” This latter group was more easily accepted. This parallels the experience of the tens of million southern and eastern European immigrants who also entered the United States in the same period who were known as “new immigrants.” Race scholar David Roediger’s analysis of these groups shows that they were at first racialized but, after World War II, accepted into whiteness. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 239

Skin color and class position would influence how these new immigrants were regarded. A New York Times article describing the people in the Syrian enclave in New York City noted that “a good many of them are easily distinguishable by a rather dark complexion, and might by some be taken for Italians or Frenchmen from the South of France, but not a few are of quite light complexion, and with light-colored hair.” This latter group was more easily accepted. This parallels the experience of the tens of million southern and eastern European immigrants who also entered the United States in the same period who were known as “new immigrants.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 239

Skin color and class position would influence how these new immigrants were regarded. A New York Times article describing the people in the Syrian enclave in New York City noted that “a good many of them are easily distinguishable by a rather dark complexion, and might by some be taken for Italians or Frenchmen from the South of France, but not a few are of quite light complexion, and with light-colored hair.” This latter group was more easily accepted. This parallels the experience of the tens of million southern and eastern European immigrants who also entered the United States in the same period who were known as “new immigrants.” Race scholar David Roediger’s analysis of these groups shows that they were at first racialized but, after World War II, accepted into whiteness. He states that they occupied an “inbetween” space: “‘Inbetween’ hard racism and full inclusion neither securely white nor nonwhite—new immigrants were also chronologically inbetween sharply posed calls for their racially based exclusion … and far greater acceptance.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 239

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly parallels the vault cluster on racialization as fluid rather than fixed, echoed in Aziz and Rana’s accounts of how Muslim status shifts.

Related

• Lighter-skinned Syrian immigrants found easier acceptance in early 1900s America (similarity 0.88)

Broader Connections

• Lighter-skinned Arab immigrants were more readily accepted than darker ones #corroborates (0.95)