The history of Arab American identity is complex. The first major period of Arab migration to the U.S. began in the 1880s and coincided with rising nativism in the country, where Anglo-Saxons worried about "race suicide." The Naturalization Act of 1870 prohibited people of Asian or Native American descent to become citizens, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 limited immigration to U.S. after an influx of Chinese workers was blamed for declining wages and economic malaise in the West Coast. Not surprisingly, Arabs didn't wish to be categorized as Asian, which would make them ineligible for citizenship. The issue came to a head in 1909, when a Lebanese-born police officer George Shishim from Venice, California, came before Judge Hutton of the Superior Court of Los Angeles with his naturalization petition. Weeks earlier, his application for citizenship was rejected by an immigration officer, despite Shishim being established resident of L.A. and civil servant, on the grounds his "Arab identity" disqualified him from being white within the meaning of the statute." As noted in a NYU law journal, Judge Hutton initially seemed "persuaded by the Naturalization Examiner’s position, which deemed immigrants from the [Arab] region hostile to both American democracy and Christianity, and thus...[were] inassimilable aliens." Short on persuasive rebuttals, Shishim sought a "Hail Mary" to redeem his prospects for citizenship. He rose from his seat and declared: “If I am a Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land." Since Christianity ranked among the primary hallmarks of whiteness in the U.S. at the time, Judge Hutton accepted Shishim’s appeal that, although an Arab, he was not a Muslim and, in fact, a Christian. As a result, Shishim became "the first immigrant from the Arab World to be naturalized as an American and judicially ruled white by law.
There were many other important cases of course, including Ex Parte Mohreiz, where a district court in Massachusetts declared all Arabs to be white. But leave it to Arab comedian Sammy Obeid to provide the best recounting of the legal battles of early Syrian Americans in a funny bit that highlights the traditional narrative of Jesus' (perceived) whiteness to reconcile the country's racial and religious characters.
