Sikh swordfight in Queens

[Hauldren Collider]

Alby, why are you so keen on constantly posting stupid pictures no one cares about from wikipedia?

[Al B. Sure!]

Alby, why are you so keen on constantly posting stupid pictures no one cares about from wikipedia?

Those stupid pictures prove my point. 19th and early 20th century white supremacists categorized Arabs as white.

[Barnabas]

No one cares about the census except for Bureaucrats and those ethnographic excerpts you posted never affected popular view of Arabs.

Basically, the original social construct of the "white race" that emerged in the enlightenment never included Southern Europeans, Arabs, or non-Christians for that matter. Before the enlightenment and colonization, there was no concept of an encompassing white race or even black race. People were divided intro tribes and nations.

While, what constitutes being white has been expanded to include southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans because of a need to assimilate immigrants groups, Arabs still seem to be regarded as an "other" even today and its only been reinforced by the media and the wars in Iraq and Libya. Sorry dude, Arabs never had the status of being 'white' and still don't to the average person on the street. It may change in the future.

Are you sure the concept of white was not invented first by the Spaniards who were the first ones to have a global empire?

[Al B. Sure!]

Are you sure the concept of white was not invented first by the Spaniards who were the first ones to have a global empire?

Yeah but those same Spaniards no longer have white status in the USA. Like I said, white apparently means Non-Spanish Western European Christians.

[Barnabas]

I don't think XVI, XVII, XVIII centuries were seen as non whites in Europe, European history was quite centered around Spain and its posessions for 2 centuries, and in the XVIII century the Spaniards were the lapdog of France and would wear faggy wigs like the Frenchmen.

I think they could be seen as non white from the XIX century British concept of wog, and from the American confussion of Spain with Mexico.

[loinburger]

Those stupid pictures prove my point. 19th and early 20th century white supremacists categorized Arabs as white.

White supremacists are inconsistent??? Please keep posting more evidence of this, I'm sure somebody gives a ****!!!!!

[Al B. Sure!]

I don't think XVI, XVII, XVIII centuries were seen as non whites in Europe, European history was quite centered around Spain and its posessions for 2 centuries, and in the XVIII century the Spaniards were the lapdog of France and would wear faggy whigs like the Frenchmen.

I think they could be seen as non white from the XIX century British concept of wog, and from the American confussion of Spain with Mexico.

This is what wikipedia says:

The term "white race" or "white people" entered the major European languages in the later 17th century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish Empire. While first a social category, it has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of scientific research, which culminated in scientific racism, before being widely repudiated by the scientific community. According to historian Irene Silverblatt, "Race thinking … made social categories into racial truths."[12] Bruce David Baum, citing the work of Ruth Frankenberg, states, "the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves (and sometimes some other peoples) as members of a superior 'white race.'"[13]
According to Gregory Jay, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,
Before the age of exploration, group differences were largely based on language, religion, and geography. ... the European had always reacted a bit hysterically to the differences of skin color and facial structure between themselves and the populations encountered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (see, for example, Shakespeare's dramatization of racial conflict in Othello and The Tempest). Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans began to develop what became known as "scientific racism," the attempt to construct a biological rather than cultural definition of race ... Whiteness, then, emerged as what we now call a "pan-ethnic" category, as a way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single "race" ...
—Gregory Jay, "Who Invented White People?"[14

And as for 19th and 20th century thinking:

There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard (1920) excluded the populations of the Middle East and North Africa as well as those of Central Asia, classifying them as "brown", and counted as "white" only the European peoples.
Some authorities, following Huxley (1870), distinguished the Xanthochroi or "light whites" of Northern Europe with the Melanochroi or "dark whites" of the Mediterranean.

The Caucasoid peoples were usually divided in three groups on linguistic grounds, termed Aryan (Indo-European), Semitic (Semitic languages) and Hamitic (Berber-Cu****ic-Egyptian).
The postulated subraces vary depending on the author, including but not limited to Nordic, Mediterranean, Alpine, Dinaric, East Baltic, Arabid, Turanid, Iranid and Armenoid subraces.
19th century classifications of the peoples of India considered the Dravidians of non-Caucasoid stock as Australoid or a separate Dravida race, and assumed a gradient of miscegenation of high-caste Caucasoid Aryans and indigenous Dravidians.
By contrast, Carleton S. Coon in his 1939 The Races of Europe classified the Dravidians as Caucasoid as well, due to his assessment of what he called their "Caucasoid skull structure" and other physical traits (e.g. noses, eyes, hair). In his The Living Races of Man, Coon stated that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasian racial region". Sarah A Tishkoff and Kenneth K Kidd state: "Despite disagreement among anthropologists, this classification remains in use by many researchers, as well as lay people."[10]
There was no universal consensus of the validity of the "Caucasian" grouping within those who attempted to categorize human variation. Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870 wrote that the "absurd denomination of 'Caucasian'" was in fact a conflation of his Xanthochroi and Melanochroi types.[11]

In 1920, H. G. Wells referred to the Mediterranean race as the Iberian race. He regarded it as a fourth subrace of the Caucasian race, along with the Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic subraces

[Riesstiu IV]

Are you sure the concept of white was not invented first by the Spaniards who were the first ones to have a global empire?

Hmmm, could be but I'm not familiar with Spanish history. When did the Spaniards start implementing that absurd racial hierarchy system with the hundreds of categories?

[Al B. Sure!]

The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 gave Indians naturalization rights which were removed in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) (Justice Sutherland found Thind "was not Caucasian in the 'common understanding', so he could not be included in the 'statutory category as white persons'") but there doesn't seem to have been any cases or laws passed granting Arab Americans naturalization rights.

Would an Arab American in the early 20th century been able to vote? That's the issue.

[Al B. Sure!]

Apparently yes.

http://arabamericanhistory.org/archives/11-department-of-justice-affirms-in-1909-whether-syrians-turks-and-arabs-are-of-white-or-yellow-race.html

The following article was published in the Los Angeles Herald, November 5, 1909:
"Assured, temporarily at least, that the mantle of citizenship placed on their shoulders by Uncle Sam’s naturalization officers will not be removed, 17,000 Syrians scattered throughout the length and breadth of the land will breathe easier when they hear of the decision rendered yesterday by Judge Hutton of the superior court, to whom the first challenge to reach the test stage was submitted a month ago. Judge Hutton holds that Syrians are eligible to citizenship, and if a different construction is to be placed on the meaning of the law it is for Congress to so declare. The test case was made on the application of George Shishim of Venice, Los Angeles County, California, for citizenship papers by Fred Jones, naturalization examiner, who, acting in accordance with instructions from Washington, opposed the application on the ground that Syrians belonged to the Mongolian race and should therefore be excluded. Judge Hutton’s decision, which has been eagerly watched for in all parts of the country, was as follows:

‘This is an application by one George Shishim, a Syrian, to be admitted to citizenship. The federal government, acting through the department of justice, objects to his admission, basing its objection on the sole ground that he is not a member of the white race in contemplation of section 2169 of the revised statutes of the United States.

‘The court has listened to arguments of counsel representing the Department of Justice and counsel representing applicant and various friends of the cause who have appeared in the case, and has read their briefs with much care and great interest. If this were a new question, I might agree with the government, but as it is by no means new. I am convinced that this court would not be justified in resolving a question of such doubtful construction contradictory to the rulings of other courts throughout the United States that have for many years admitted to full citizenship thousands of Syrians in the same position as applicant at bar. The courts of this nation, both state and federal, have, whenever called upon for more than a century, construed the term "white persons," or members of the white race, to include Syrians. If at this late date a different construction is to be placed upon the meaning of this very doubtful statute Congress should so declare. The objection of the government is therefore overruled.’

"Shishim, with his attorney, Byron Hanna, and a number of Syrian friends were in the courtroom when the decision was read. He had already shown himself qualified for citizenship in other respects and the oath of allegiance was administered.

So yeah Arabs were white and had citizenship rights, which were validated in that 1909 court ruling, which did not seek to contradict previous case law.

[Al B. Sure!]

More information which sheds light on when Arabs were 'minority-ized'... the late 1960's...

http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=socs_fac

While the early Arab American experience (1880–1930) was largely similar to that of white ethnics as measured by residential, employment, and marital patterns as well as land ownership, voting, and naturalization rights (although there are some localized exceptions), the Arab American experience since the late 1960s has been decidedly different. After that moment in time, dominant themes of the Arab American experience have been exclusion, prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and selective policy enforcement, themes evidenced in scholarly research on Arabs produced during this period.

In the late 1970s, pollsters Seymour Lipset and Martin Schneider found attitudes toward Arabs “close to racist,” and in the early 1980s Shelly Slade concluded that “Arabs remain one of the few ethnic groups that can still be slandered with impunity in America.”
18

Late 1960's... isn't that the time of the emergence of terrorism and the PLO? The Munich Olympics were in '72.



So we were white until Arabs started getting all explode-y and hostage-y


Goes to show you how transient race is in the public consciousness.

[Tuberski]

It would also have to do with the rise of the Nation of Islam here in the states.

ACK!

[Combat Ingrid]

Meyers Blitz-Lexikon, a German encyclopedia published in Leipzig in 1932 presents the eight subtypes of Europaid:

#1 is white, the rest are a bunch of smelly darkies

[OneFootInTheGrave]

#1 is a penguin lost in the north

[Dinner]

Are you sure the concept of white was not invented first by the Spaniards who were the first ones to have a global empire?

I would have thought the Portuguese came up with the idea of white vs black/colored since they were the first to sail south of the Sahara and colonize stuff. I'm sure the origin goes back to ancient times though probably in a place like Egypt to describe the physical diferences between the people north or south of the cataract.