Terrible move. Jews and Arabs are white, and the move to separate them comes from a desire to further fractionalize and divide the US. Hispanic and Latino shouldn't be a category at all.
This forum will not allow me to use the words I want to describe my rage at this. My mother didn’t get called sand n***** in school for people like you to erase her identity.
Racism and anti-semitism can occur without making someone non-white. Black people can hate black people, white people can hate white people, etc, without changing them from black to non-black or white to non-white.
But that is actually how Race in america works. In the most simpliest since you have "White" and "Not white". With the definitions basically being what ever cultural groups are in acceptance being "white" and everyone else being "not white".
But arabic people have been othered. Historically, culturally, religiously, culinarally, every other -ly arabic people are not white. They are only considered white by people who are ignorant. There is little shared history, there is little shared culturally. The only whites that are somewhat close are the greeks and thats only from proximity. The assertation of skin color as the only marker of race does not hold water. If it is pale skin that makes a person white then why aren't the Japanese considered white.
This also isn't a modern thing. This exact thing as I mentioned about the Japanese was brought before the supreme court in 1922. Also if you want to go by "Caucasian" that should also exclude Arabs as they migrated from central Asia and north Africa.
Even linguisitcally Arabic shows my former point to be true. There is literally no metric I know of that makes sense to group Arabic people into "White". The only reason I can think of is if you want to say all the lands that were once ruled by Rome are now "white" but that still doesn't make sense as the people who lived in the Middle East then were mostly Copts.
Also you can be white and arabic at the same time. I always dread have to only check white on forms cause that is not all who I am. I look forward to the day where I can check both white for my dad's side and arabic for my mom.
With the definitions basically being what ever cultural groups are in acceptance being "white" and everyone else being "not white".
This is simply not true: the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization only to whites, the Census has always asked about race, and many historical laws discriminated on the basis of race, yet
in every instance certain cultural groups
not accepted (at least, in the sense that you have described of facing discrimination)
have been counted as white. For instance, Irish immigrants obviously faced at least some level of discrimination historically, but they were still clearly white, as evidenced by their being able to naturalize in the first place, being counted as white by the Census, and being able to vote and have equal rights even in times/places with discriminatory laws.
By those same standards, Arabs have also historically been considered white. For instance, although during the 1910s naturalization was still restricted to those of African or European descent, the 1920 census found 51,900 "Syrians" living in the United States. Now, in fairness, it must be noted that most of these "Syrians" (in quotes because the Syria referred to here was the Ottoman province of Syria, which was larger than modern day Syria), were mostly Christian, but there were also Muslim and Druze immigrants.
I won't argue with you about the merits of this characterization: I certainly think it accurate to call Arabs white, and I'd note that you forgot Jews as another group from the Near East (other than Copts and Arabs) to also be considered white, but your broader point is regardless wrong. Being white in the United States is not synonymous with being accepted or not accepted, and at least some Arabs have historically been considered white.
