My mother has never made it through an airport without security selecting her for “random” security checks. Nothing–not her American citizenship or the near-imperceptibility of her accent–has ever been able to protect her from the seemingly inherent criminality of her Egyptian birth certificate. It is a sad reality to which my mother has grown numb; even the novelty of a new airport loses its charm after a while. Swedish racism looks no different from Italian racism, or French, or German; after a while, it all blends together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Professor K brought up the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, <\/em>she mentioned that Jared Diamond classifies Egyptians (and other North Africans) as white. <\/em>From my little corner of the classroom, I overheard a few people\u2019s surprised reactions and couldn\u2019t help feeling a little jaded: as shocking as this revelation might be to some, I\u2019ve grown depressingly accustomed to checking little boxes that read \u201cCaucasian, including people of Middle Eastern descent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact is that the US government, despite stark differences in physical appearance and in culture, despite racist travel bans and years of discrimination hailed as a \u201cwar on terror,\u201d despite my mother\u2019s sad inability to make it through a single airport <\/em>unmolested, classifies Middle Easterners as white when, in reality, Middle Eastern people have never <\/em>enjoyed the privileges American society affords white people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a historical basis for this, of course: the Naturalization Act of 1790 defined eligibility for citizenship as confined to \u201cany alien, being a free white person who shall have resided within the limits . . . of the United States for a term of two years.\u201d Various ethnic groups attempted to achieve legal whiteness and therefore obtain American citizenship, but most failed. Dow v. United States, however, expanded the definition of white to include Middle Eastern heritage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This reminds me of two discussions we\u2019ve had in class: the first, of course, is that of the Black\/white binary and all the ways it erases outlying racial subgroups–Egyptians, for example. The push to exist as \u201coppressor\u201d rather than \u201coppressed\u201d directly relates to the Dow v. United States case. While the ruling might have immediately benefitted Middle Eastern people, it has since only suffocated Middle Eastern culture and facilitated discrimination against Middle Eastern persons; after all, it is difficult to explain to your friends exactly how Donald Trump\u2019s travel ban is racist when the inhabitants of the eight affected countries are \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second (and pertinent to our most recent lectures), I wonder why <\/em>everyone seems so eager to lump Egyptians (and other Middle Easterners) in with other Causasians. I\u2019d never really considered this before Professor K mentioned it in class, but Jared Diamond\u2019s destructive misclassification might reference some desire to claim Egyptian achievements for the white man. The pyramids, the Temple of Amun Siwa, the Valley of the Kings–that Ancient Egypt accomplished any one <\/em>of these feats is impressive enough, but that the list is so much more comprehensive is almost unbelievable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This, in turn, reminded me of Baldwin\u2019s assertions that \u201c[t]he story of the Negro in America is the story of America–or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans\u201d (CE 19). Our entire nation has been built on Black backs; this entire country is the ultimate achievement of African Americans. Why don\u2019t we learn more extensively about slavery in America, or the racist attitudes to which most of our founding fathers subscribed? Why do we ignore African-American literature in favor of white authors in our American Lit classes? Why do we so violently whitewash our history–that is, African-American history? Could it be that we are trying to discredit the enterprises of the African-American community, just as Jared Diamond discredits Egyptians? Could it be that \u201cthe white man on whom the American Negro has modeled himself for so long\u201d is not actually the model<\/em>, but the modelled<\/em> (CE 657)? I certainly don\u2019t have the answers, but that doesn\u2019t make it any less worthwhile to think about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My mother has never made it through an airport without security selecting her for “random” security checks. Nothing–not her American citizenship or the near-imperceptibility of her accent–has ever been able to protect her from the seemingly inherent criminality of her Egyptian birth certificate. It is a sad reality to which my mother has grown numb; … Continue reading A Rant \ud83d\ude09<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3922,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[471414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-native-son"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3922"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}