March 2022 - Steve Salaita

Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University

An address delivered for the Graduate and Professional Student Senate Annual Research Symposium at Virginia Tech.

Let me start by mapping out my relationship with Virginia Tech. My brother went to Virginia Tech. My sister went to Virginia Tech. My father went to Virginia Tech. My father’s brother went to Virginia Tech. My two brothers-in-law went to Virginia Tech. My sister-in-law went to Virginia Tech. Much of my high school class went to Virginia Tech.

I grew up an hour west of here, in a border town called Bluefield, and spent what must have been a hundred weekend days in Blacksburg.

And I taught for nine years at Virginia Tech.

The Arab Color Wheel

Are Arabs white? An exegesis of the impossible question.

We begin with an apparently straightforward question: are Arabs white? People have answered the question in book form, in scholarly articles, in legislative briefs, and in thousands of social media comments.

It is a question with no singular answer; indeed, it often evokes answers unrelated to the question. We cannot neatly categorize Arabs into any racial identity. Really, it’s a question about the ambiguities of whiteness (and the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness). We don’t know what whiteness is, exactly, or maybe we don’t agree on the definition, but we do know that it cannot (or will not) accommodate Arabs.