U.S. citizenship law mandated whiteness as a prerequisite until 1952.

Evidence

Though until 1952 citizenship laws that mandated whiteness as a prerequisite to U.S. citizenship were unevenly applied and wrought with contradictions, they contributed to defining American identity as white and Christian. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s marked a move away from the construction of white national identity toward a more inclusive, diverse, and imagined national identity that continues to be contested and remains incomplete. One significant moment in defining a diverse and unified U.S. citizenry, particularly in relation to the Middle East, was the 1991 Gulf War. In this case, highlighting previously neglected though always historically important African American soldiers helped erase the imagined imbalance of a white U.S. military attacking a nonwhite populace in the Middle East. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1164

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the concept of imagined national identity from Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ and to the broader study of race and citizenship in American law.