So according to the US government, Arabs, Persians, Kurdish, etc people are white. Why is this?
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Because race is a fake social construct which allows you to change and modify it to whoever’s whims.
Apparently the federal govt just added “Middle Eastern/North African” as another race option on their forms. As someone who reviews lots of google forms where we ask for race, a LOT of Arabs/Middle Easterners selected “other” and then specify “Middle Eastern” in the box. So they clearly don’t consider themselves white, and most whites don’t consider them white.
Great question. There was a court case in the early 1900s that went all the way to the supreme court. At the time, there were laws discriminating against non -whites. Arabs wanted to be counted as whites and sued. They argued it was the birthplace of Jesus Christ. They won and have been legally white in America ever since.
The racial system that divides people into White, Black and more is particular to the colonization of the New World.* As such, applying it outside of the context of separating european rulers from various laboring castes always runs into problems. Greece is way more like Lebanon than like Spain, where do you draw the “whiteness” line?
When Irish immigration was at it’s peak, they weren’t considered fully white. Ben Franklin wrote a letter moaning about how *German* immigration would destroy the white racial purity of the US.
Look at Arab/Persian dude and tell us how different from Spaniards, southern Italians or Greeks are they.
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