Not Quite White: Arab Americans and the Boundaries of Racial/Ethnic Similarity

Abstract

Across four studies, we examined the implications of shifting racial designation of Arab Americans. The studies primarily concerned multiple factors influencing the ways that Arab and European Americans respond to categorization of Arabs as White (or not). Study 1 (N = 1,001) showed that Arab Americans were more likely to identify as Other (vs. White, their legal racial category) the more they reported discrimination, the darker their skin, and if they were Muslim (vs. Christian). Study 2 (N = 90), with an Arab American college student sample, showed that higher American identification predicted perceived subgroup respect when participants could self-categorize as “Middle Eastern or North African” (vs. when such an option was unavailable). Studies 3 and 4 addressed the question of ambiguous Arab racial categorization among White participants. Study 3 showed that cultural and biological definitions of race moderated participants’ likelihood of considering an Arab as similar to their own group: cultural essentialism negatively predicted Whites’ perception of Arabs as similar, particularly when told that Arabs are categorized as White (vs. categorized as MENA); in contrast, biological essentialism positively predicted perceived similarity when Arabs were categorized as White and negatively when Arabs were categorized as MENA. In Study 4, participants generally supported categorizing Arabs as MENA rather than White, and perceived similarity qualified this effect: similarity was positively related to support for a policy that categorized Arabs as White, but negatively related to support for a policy that categorized Arabs as MENA. Beyond perceptions of outgroups and racism per se, this investigation of race and racial categories benefits from a dialectic study of how the constructed nature of racial categories influences perceptions of self and (negotiable) others.