The Arab Color Wheel

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. 

We’ve seen a lot of lively academic inquiry into matters of race as they pertain to Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Afghans, and Muslims more generally.  Twitter and other social media make the issue sound much simpler than the literature would justify.  I’ll try to keep it simple, anyway:  an Arab can be white in the United States, but the Arab people cannot be white in the United States.  This is so because in specific situations an individual Arab can be decontextualized from Arabness; Arabness, however, can never be reduced to the individual. 

The best example I can think of is the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.  Upon hearing the news, I took to the internet for answers, along with millions of other people.  A football message board, of all things, led me to Reddit, where there were spirited conversations about the event. 

By 2013, social media and message boards were well-established sources of information, so it shouldn’t be surprising that tons of people flocked to Twitter and Reddit with theories of the crime.  Still, online dialogue about the marathon bombing felt different than what had come before based on the scope and volume of the discussion. 

Video clips captured the horrible event and its aftermath:  the abrupt detonation amid a large and dense crowd; panicked athletes and spectators; dozens of bloodied bystanders; an elderly runner collapsing to the ground.  Those images came from multiple angles. 

The video clips were uploaded onto Reddit along with numerous pictures.  Pretty soon thousands of amateur online sleuths were looking for clues.  Some of the contributions seemed downright scientific.  Users deployed significant brainpower and technical knowhow to identify the perpetrator.  Various suspects quickly came into view. 

An interesting, if maybe predictable, thing happened during the search:  users began pinpointing bystanders who could be taken for Middle Eastern.  Anyone who looked swarthy in the grainy images became notable.  Those with dark skin were especially suspicious. 

In time, Redditors locked into some possibilities.  There was the Indian student who had gone missing from Brown University.  He would later commit suicide.  There was also the 21-year-old Saudi whose picture was later plastered onto the front page of the New York Post.  Most of the focus landed on a young man wearing athletic gear and a backpack.  He turned out to be a high school student originally from Morocco with an interest in distance running. 

Police later identified the bombers as brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, immigrants from Kyrgyzstan of Chechen descent.  They too had been mentioned during the online scramble for culprits.  Users made note of their olive skin and dark eyes, unmistakably Islamic features.  When there was little doubt left that the Tsarnaev brothers were behind the bombing, the online crowd, having defamed three innocent young men to grievous consequences, congratulated one another for being so discerning. 

Corporate and social media evinced tremendous angst about Dzhokhar (police killed Tamerlan during the manhunt).  He was a seemingly nice boy with big eyes and shaggy hair, not your normal terrorist.  He appeared slightly glamorous for a Muslim.  But in this case the audience was obliged to look closely and discovered that the religion in fact was inflected in the boy’s features. 

Now, maybe Dzhokhar—a man of the Caucuses, after all—would have been considered white by pedestrians strolling a peaceful Boston street on a random afternoon, but in the impersonal environs of the screen, amid an online manhunt for terrorists, his identity was quite less stable.  In the new context, he wasn’t white enough to avoid suspicion and when authorities confirmed his participation in the bombing, whiteness was no longer an option.  Suddenly those large dark eyes took on a sinister essence; the shaggy hair morphed into a symbol of Eastern mystique.  He could be a teenage heartthrob in one instance and an existential nightmare in the next.  This kind of inconsistency is exactly how U.S. racism has always functioned. 

The Arab youngsters targeted for suspicion didn’t receive even this dubious level of grace.  They were marked as unmistakably nonwhite from the get-go.  It was wild observing the process in real time.  A horde of anonymous Redditors set themselves to the task of locating elevated levels of melanin, bushy eyebrows, heavy beards, kinky hair, hairy forearms.  Even off-white skin was cause for suspicion. 

“He kinda looks Arab” or “he could pass for Muslim” became a common metric.  It was important to match physical features to racialized imagery in order to rescue whiteness from the depredations of foreign terrorism. 

I always go back to the marathon bombing when the question of Arabs and race arises in the United States.  (The same general question holds for other Middle Eastern and Central Asian communities.  In fact, these disparate geographies are intertwined by virtue of the very racism under discussion.)  An Arab can be a certain kind of white, but only in ahistorical conditions.  It happens only to select individuals, on a unique level, and when anatomy is divorced from genetics, or when personhood is divorced from culture.  We can access whiteness precisely to the degree that we can be anonymous.  When context is required to sort citizens into a hierarchy, we lose the privilege. 

Or, to put it more plainly, when vigilantes of American justice want to find us, they know exactly what to look for. 

We sometimes become white for the sake of social media one-upmanship.  Some random can deem a profile picture inadequately colorful, but that kind of judgment is easily discarded amid geopolitical tension.  Likewise when a scapegoat or villain is needed to reify imperialism.  Who the hell thinks of Sirhan Sirhan as white?  Who isn’t playing an ugly game of racialization when contrasting Ukrainians from Afghans and Iraqis?  Who really believes that U.S. drones target civilizational peers in faraway places? 

Arabs are constantly inducted into brownness in the visual conventions of pop culture.  South Asian actors often play Arab characters so audiences will understand what kind of specimen they’re dealing with.  Even with light-skinned actors, production makes sure to highlight specific characteristics.  We’re always made up too dark to pass for white. 

Arabs, it should be pointed out, are rarely inducted into blackness, an exceptional category that draws from a different set of libidinal needs and geopolitical narratives.  (There is, however, some overlap.)  Here too the multiplicity of Arabs is flattened for the sake of Orientalist commonplaces. 

Whiteness is a dynamic signifier that deviates according to material and political circumstance.  One source of its dynamism is the stagnancy of the Arab. 

There are a million ways to approach questions of race vis-à-vis Arabs:  skin tone, bone structure, hair density, nose size, and lip volume; but also language, clothing, culture, custom, behavior, location, nomenclature, religion, temperament, and ideology.  Whatever the criteria, there’s always enough of the foreign marked onto our bodies to render a negative verdict. 

You see, the United States is enamored of the bombs that do so much to create a national identity, which means there’s always great need of an Arab to either plant or receive them.