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

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

(10.) Helen Hatab Samhan, "Politics and Exclusion: The Arab American Experience," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), p. 16.

(11.) The LA-8 is a group of 7 Arab-American men and one Kenyan woman (wife of one of the men) arrested in Los Angeles in 1987 on "terrorism" charges. The INS claimed that their distribution of pro-Palestinian literature constituted a threat under the provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act, and has fought for their deportation ever since. See Akram, "Targeting Arabs and Muslims in America," pp. 70-72. Nadine Naber, "Ambiguous Insiders," pp. 47-48.

(12.) I refer here to Campus Watch set up by Daniel Pipes. See www.campuswatch.org

(13.) This is Nadine Naber's term in "Ambiguous Insiders," p. 52

(14.) Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, "Maintaining the Faith of the Fathers: Dilemmas of Religious Identity in the Christian and Muslim Arab-American Communities," in The Development of Arab-American Identity, pp. 61-84: Yvonne Haddad (Ed.), The Muslims of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

(15.) Submission to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Testimony of James J. Zogby, 12 October 2001, in Arab American Institute, "Healing the Nation: The Arab American Experience after September 112" (September, 2002), p. 27.

(16.) "Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab Americans: The Post-September 11 Backlash," Hussein Ibish (Did.), (Washington: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 2003), p. 65.

(17.) This literature is influenced by critical approaches to race which stress its social construction, and is also a reply to earlier scholarship that stressed the benefits of assimilation, including (although implicitly) within whiteness. See, for example, Soheir A. Morsy, "Beyond the Honorary 'White' Classification of Egyptians: Societal Identity in Historical Context," in Race, Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (Eds.), (Rutgers, 1994), pp. 175-198: and note 5 above.

(18.) Suad Joseph "Against the Grain of the Nation--The Arab", in Arabs in America, p. 268 and Kathleen Moore, "A Part of US or Apart from US? Post-Semptember 11 Attitudes Toward Muslims and Civil Liberties," Middle East Report 224 Fall 2002 (p.33)

(19.) Ronald Stockton, "Ethnic Archetypes and the Arab Image," in The Development o/Arab-American Identity, p. 138.

(20.) Ibid.

(21.) Nancy Faires Conklin and Nora Faires, "'Colored' and Catholic: the Lebanese in Birmingham, Alabama," in Crossing the Waters, Eric J. Hooglund (Ed.), (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), pp. 69-84.

(22.) Thomas C. Holt, Unpublished "Response to George Sanchez's 'Foreign and Female'," Dean's Symposium, University of Chicago, 7 November 1997, p. 7.

(23.) A brief discussion of how Syrian and Greek whiteness facilitated their move into the niches of groceries and restaurants in the Carolinas can be found in Paula Maria Stathakis, "Almost White: Greek and Lebanese-Syrian Immigrants in North and South Carolina, 1900-1940," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1996. Soheir Morsy and Kathleen Moore have hinted at the problems associated with claiming whiteness, namely that it has promoted racialist, even eugenicist criteria to construct identity and affiliation with the dominant social group, but more thorough investigations on the implications of these choices are needed. See Morsy. "Beyond the Honorary "White" Classification of Egyptians" and Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: America, Law am/ the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 43.