The Inferior White: Politics And Practices Of Racialization Of People From The Middle East In The Us

In this paper, I argue that racialization, as a process whose initiation and preservation requires collaboration between state institutions, elites, and citizens, can be better understood in relation to colonial histories and in the current context of colonial situation, and by transcending the corporeal conception of racialization. By looking specifically into the case of people from the Middle East in the US, an ethnically and racially diverse population which historically has been conflated with Muslims due to Orientalist notions of the region, this paper surveys the historical racialization of the categorical figure of Muslim as the ultimate civilizational 'other.' Considering that according to the US Census Bureau, people from the Middle East are racially white, this paper also examines how a legally white population in white America is pushed to the margins of civility and center of attack. I conclude that racialization processes in the US rely on a historical politico-legal and socio-cultural repertoire of old modes of othering upon which the foundations of the structurally racist system rest. This socio-cultural repertoire which started from the Spanish Inquisitions against Muslims and Jews, later was transformed and applied to indigenous populations in Americas and enslaved Africans. The current Global War on Terror is a return to that initial start.