Maryam Nahhal is a fourth year PhD candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She completed my BA in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, and my MLitt in International Security Studies at the University of St. Andrews. Her research interests include the political development of racial classifications and racialised precarity. Her current work focuses on the U.S. census and the racial classification of Arab Americans. 

 

Ezekiel Vergara is a third-year Ph.D. student in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of
Philosophy. He completed his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College, where he studied
Philosophy and Government. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Vergara worked at the Yale Program on Financial Stability, where he studied governments’ responses to financial crises.

Vergara’s research interests primarily lie in political philosophy, ethics, and metaethics. In political philosophy, he is interested in global justice, liberal political thought, and debates about ideal/non-ideal theory. In ethics, he is interested in the ethics of self-defense, the ethics of economic foreign policy, and our duties to future people. He also likes to think about relational accounts of morality and consequentialism. In metaethics, he is interested in non-naturalism and moral disagreement.

The study of racial formation in the United States has generally ignored the role of Islam and Islamophobia in the construction of racial categories. This became exponentially more apparent after 9/11 with the substantial increase in surveillance, unlawful detentions, hate crimes, and media rhetoric targeting Muslims and those perceived to be so, as well as military interventions in sovereign countries in the Middle East. This paper seeks to understand the racialisation of a category of people that had hitherto been mostly absent from racial politics literature. I argue that predominantly Christian Arab immigrants enjoyed a relatively benign position within the US racial system in the first half of the twentieth century. While this position was not uncontested, both by the courts and by the nativist backlash of the early 20th century, the Christian Arab was granted legal status as white on the basis of a shared Christian heritage. It was not until the 1960s that the Arab, while still officially white in legal instruments such as the Census, lost the invisibility and protections that such whiteness had granted them. This shift is linked to the increased immigration of Muslim Arabs following the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as the US’s increased interests and involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War, which shaped its relationship with its own Arab population. I will show how the coincidence of a series of international conjunctures, from the establishment of the state of Israel, Johnson’s 1965’s Immigration Act, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Iranian Revolution, the 1970 oil embargo and other international crises drastically changed American perceptions about Arabs, highlighting the impact of American foreign policy on Arab diasporas in the U.S. While significant, 9/11 intensified and systematised existing patterns but it by no means instigated them.