Three Proofs that Whiteness is No Longer a Privilege
This should be an obvious truth: People try to get privileges legally if they can and illegally if they can’t. When whiteness was a privilege in the United States, many people tried to pass as white or to change the law so they could be white. But today?
- No one tries to pass as white.
- Both Jews of European descent (who have always been legally white in the US) and Middle-Easterners (who had to go to court to win their whiteness) no longer want to be white.
- People who are defined as white try to pass as Indigenous, Hispanic, or black.
We don’t know the first person who tried to pass as white, but we probably know the last one. Six years after his death, the writer and editor Anatole Broyard was outed as black in a New Yorker article by Henry Louis Gates.
We also don't know the first Middle-Easterner who tried to pass as white, but we know the first who was legally white. In 1915, when Asians could not become American citizens, an immigrant from Lebanon named George Dow petitioned for the right of citizenship. The court agreed, saying, “the inhabitants of a portion of Asia, including Syria, [are] to be classed as white persons.” After that, light-skinned black people were able to pass as white by claiming to be Middle-Eastern.
Until 1965, the United States was obsessed with defining whiteness. Immigration and Jim Crow laws targeted people on the basis of race, but those laws raised more questions than their makers expected. Europeans were easy to categorize: Jewish, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Europeans had all the legal privileges of whiteness, though they did not have the social privileges of Protestantism. But when races intermingled, who was black? Where continents met, who was Asian, European, or African?
Before Jim Crow, whiteness for mixed-race people varied from state to state. In some states, being 3/4 white made you legally white. In others, you had to be 7/8. Yes, that meant you could step across a state line and your race would change with that step. (That does not mean a slave could be freed by going into a slave state with a different definition of whiteness. Being legally white did not free the children of slaves. Only their owners could legally free them.)
Racists resolved the question of whiteness by adopting the one-drop rule: one drop of black blood made you black. The first attempts to turn the one-drop rule into law were defeated. In 1895, when it was discussed in South Carolina, George D. Tillman said,
It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of… colored blood…It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed.
But in the 20th century, some US states adopted the one-drop rule. It lasted until 1964, when the Supreme Court struck it down as part of Loving v. Virginia, which ended state laws against interracial marriage.
After the civil rights era, many of us thought the color of our skin would become no more significant than the color of our hair. Instead, we live in a world where people who look “white” but consider themselves people of color will react angrily if anyone refers to them as white and insist they are only “white-presenting”, and people who are socially defined as white have been outed for trying to pass as people of color. When people like Jessica Krug, Ward Churchill, and Rachel Dolezal are outed as white people, they are thoroughly denounced, but people rarely talk about the privilege they were hoping to gain.
Some answers are hinted at in On Paper I Am White, But in Life I Am Not by Harvard student Dina M. Kobeissi. Over a century before Kobeissi’s time, Anita Florence Hemmings had to pass as white to become the first black woman to graduate from Vassar, but Kobeissi did not have to hide her Arabian ethnicity to attend one of the premier schools for the privileged. (Harvard’s average cost before financial aid was $75,000 per year in 2018.)
Kobeissi writes,
[In 1915, George] Dow cared that he be white because he wanted the benefits of citizenship. Today, our recognition as a minority in this country is essential to our access to resources. For decades, people have been advocating for the addition of a Middle East and North Africa category to the U.S. Census. While there is an option to select white and then fill in “Egyptian” or “Lebanese,” for example, this leads to undercounting which impacts access to collectivized data on Arabs in the U.S. This ultimately affects information on what kinds of resources our communities need such as federal funding, language assistance, and health research. Despite the fact that researchers at the Bureau released a report concluding that “it is optimal to use a dedicated ‘Middle Eastern or North African’ response category” on the 2020 Census questionnaires, the category was still actively excluded. The lack of MENA’s recognition also has implications that go beyond federal resources. Many scholarships with the mission of supporting minority students, such as the Gates Scholarship, are not open to MENA students because we are considered white. … The addition of a MENA category is essential to my community and is only the beginning of a long road to meeting our needs and shaping a better future where we are no longer labeled in a way that disserves us. MENA students are minority students and our experience in this country can no longer be ignored. We refuse to be whitewashed.
Kobeissi sees what some anti-racists deny: rejecting whiteness provides “access to resources” like race-based scholarships that are not available to white people, no matter how poor they might be.
In No, Jews Aren’t White, Liel Leibovitz makes an odd argument for why Jews are a unique race:
I, a ninth-generation Israeli whose ancestors arrived in Jerusalem from the backwaters of the Austrian Empire, can amble into the Slat al-Azama synagogue in Marrakesh, or the Beth Yaakov Synagogue in Geneva, or the Ohel Leah Synagogue in Hong Kong, look around and see faces that vary wildly, and yet rest assured that when services start we will all recite, in more or less the exact same fashion, the ancient words that Jews have spoken in daily prayer for millennia.
By that standard, Catholics are not white either.
To bolster his argument, Leibovitz, a Zionist, tells a lie by omission:
By any and all metrics at our disposal — archeology, history, theology, even DNA tests — Jews, if anything, are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.
History, theology, and DNA actually say all the children of Canaan, both Jews and Arabs, are the indigenous people of the Biblical “Land of Israel”. But even if you accept his claim that Jews are the indigenous people of Israel, that does not erase their whiteness. So long as Middle-Easterners are white, Israelis are too.
What unites Kobeissi and Leibovitz is not their Middle-Eastern heritage: it’s their desire to be people of color. Their ethnicity matters to them, but their current race only links them to people they don’t like. Kobeissi and Leibovitz appear to be very privileged—his family is described as one of Israel’s wealthiest and she is a student at a school for the US’s wealthiest. Privileged people love privilege. Now many of them are calling for the privilege of no longer being white.
As a universalist, I would love to grant that privilege to everyone. But people who define themselves as people of color are just as trapped in the illusion of race as people who insist they’re white. We cannot escape one racial constraint by demanding a new one. The only path to freedom is to reject the idea of race.
PS. In the comments, someone thought I was implying Judaism is only a religion. It is not. Ethnicities develop around all major religions, so someone can be an ethnic Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu without being religiously Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu.