Whether a person is “white” has always been an important question in the United States, socially and legally. Some groups, like Irish and Italian immigrants, became more clearly identified as white over the course of the twentieth century. But, as sociologist Louise Cainkar writes, for Arab Americans in the same period, things went in the opposite direction.
How Arab-Americans Stopped Being White
With the emergence of the US as a global superpower in the twentieth-century, anti-Palestinian stereotypes in the media bled over to stigmatize Arab Americans.
