Strange fruit? Syrian immigrants, extralegal violence and racial formation in the Jim Crow South

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2004 by Sarah Gualtieri

In a broader sense, the lynching of Nicholas Romey underscores how the racialization of Syrians made sense, or acquired meaning, in relation to a racialized other, namely African Americans. Romey's "whiteness" mattered to Syrians because his lynching summoned fears among them that they had become, in that instant, surrogate blacks. Understanding the link between the racialization of Syrians and blacks helps explain why the Syrians continually reaffirmed and invested in their whiteness. They did so in letters, court cases, newspapers, interviews, and, although it is much harder to document, in social relations. Like other immigrant groups (the Irish, Italians, and Jews) they "grasped for the whiteness at the margins of their experiences" (81) rather than challenge the premise that whiteness was a legitimate prerequisite for social, economic and political privilege. When confronted with violence and discrimination in the period of Jim Crow, their response often reinforced racist and even eugenicist discourse instead of challenging it. All this confirms what is unfortunately obfuscated in everyday discussion of race in the United States: that whiteness is not a biological fact, but a result of longstanding social structures and of choices made within a particular historical context. (82) The aftermath of the Romey lynching suggests that Syrians in the South increasingly supported and re-inscribed their position on the white side of the color line. There is evidence, for example, that they participated in one of the major processes of white confirmation, movement into neighborhoods that excluded non-whites in the post-World War II period. (83)

A great deal of work still needs to be done on the kind of choices made by Syrians and the implications of these choices for their relationships with other racialized groups. Why for example did influential Syrians get involved in assisting the naturalization of a South Asian immigrant, but not lend help to the NAACP anti-lynching campaigns? (84) The simple answer is that Syrians were a small immigrant community, lacking in power, and trying to make a difficult life better by defending their right to naturalize as citizens. As a marginal group in the segregated South, they had to "know their place," and not risk losing the security of their whiteness by voicing opinions that were contrary to the prevailing views of the white majority. But what would rejecting whiteness have implied for Syrians and for other groups at this time and at other historical moments? These are the types of questions that have not been asked in Arab-American studies, but that analyses of other cases of Arab engagements with race would answer.

In conclusion, this article is an attempt to use the Romey lynching to probe larger questions about race and ethnicity in the United States, and to analyze the ways in which Syrians positioned themselves within and understood racial classification in the first half of the 20th century. The lynching reveals the racially ambiguous status of first-wave Arab immigrants in the United States, but it also demonstrates how immigrants strove to resolve that ambiguity by affirming their whiteness. One of the legacies of their success in doing so is the racial classification of Arabs as "white" in federal statistics, including the Census. Arab-Americans are, however, increasingly dissatisfied with this classification because, as the record of discrimination in the post-1945 period makes clear, they continue to be racialized as "not-quite-white" or "inbetween" peoples, and to suffer discrimination because of this. Unlike Italians and Jews, with whom they shared earlier experiences of racialization, the whiteness of Arabs in the United States has proved to be profoundly unstable.