Racialization as a Strategic Orientation: Arab Organizations and the Construction of Ethnic Identity in the Cold War Era

Abstract

Arab Americans are fertile ground for scholars interested in studying processes of racialization and race-making. The ambiguous, or “in-between,” racial status of this population has caused some obstacles for scholars attempting to theorize the source and persistence of discrimination against this group. This article attempts to address these paradoxes by examining the history of Arab ethnic and racial activism in the civil rights/Cold War period and uses this empirical case to argue for an historical interpretation of Arab racialization. Specifically, this article asks two questions: “What international and historical contexts shaped the development of Arab ethnic identity in the United States?” and “How do these historical mechanisms inform and amend current theories of Arab racialization?” To answer these, the article employs a “theoretical frontier” analytic architecture to analyze archival sources documenting Arab ethnic advocacy and organizing strategies during the critical civil rights/Cold War period. The article finds that prominent Arab organizations and their leaders navigated a hostile American public that levied both politically and ethnically motivated attacks against their advocacy, and argues that this historical context in turn shaped later Arab organizations’ approach to formal recognition as an ethnic and racial group. Ultimately, the article argues that racialization—in this case, the decision by Arab organizations beginning in the mid-1970s to pursue a project of Arab ethnic advocacy disarticulated from its political origins—was an historical development that requires reckoning with within the theoretical literature on Arab ethnic formation.

Keywords

Arab racialization racial formation ethnic politics ethnic organizing

Introduction

Prejudicial and discriminatory treatment toward Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern populations based on a notion of essentialized difference has been documented both in everyday existences and in forms of media and popular culture (Cainkar 2009; Haider 2020; Maghbouleh 2020; Selod 2015; Yazdiha 2020; Zopf 2018). Yet the ambiguous, or “in-between,” racial status of this population has caused some obstacles for scholars theorizing the source and persistence of discrimination against this group (Gualtieri 2009; Husain 2019; Maghbouleh 2017). Both by virtue of shifting and ambiguous legal classifications in the early twentieth century in the United States and by more politically charged geopolitical developments in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Arab and Middle Eastern Americans have experienced both sides of the color line—at times effectively assimilating as White Americans, while in other moments remaining hyper-visible as outsiders.

As such, theorizing ethnic or racial group formation—while not remotely a new field of enquiry—has nonetheless remained largely underdeveloped for the Arab and Middle Eastern community. Studies of panethnicity, typically focusing on the case of Asian and Hispanic Americans, have not as readily taken up the case of Arab and Muslim ethnic formation (Bozorgmehr, Ong, and Tosh 2016; Lopez and Espiritu 1990). In an effort to remedy this gap, scholars have proposed potential alternative framings that more directly identify racialization or racial projects as explanatories for increased discrimination and harassment (Brown and Jones 2015; Sánez and Douglas 2015; Selod 2018). Racialization scholars argue that to properly theorize instances of discrimination and harassment against Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) populations, we should locate their occurrence within an expanded literature of race theory that considers vectors of ostracization beyond phenotype and pigmentation to examine how multiple factors such as language, labor migration, nationality, gender, and especially religion can interact to produce deleterious discriminatory effects (Cainkar and Selod 2018; Husain 2017; Selod 2015; Selod and Embrick 2013; Zopf 2018).

To advance knowledge on Arab and MENA populations’ racial and ethnic identity formation, this article presents an historically oriented and contextual account of the factors involved in Arab and Middle Eastern racial and ethnic formation in the United States. This article argues that racialization—more commonly deployed as a theoretical framework for explaining persistent Arab racial and ethnic exclusion—should rather be conceptualized as a distinct historical and empirical meaning-making project embarked on by Arab ethnic leaders. Even more pointedly, I argue that this project of racialization was a strategic response to the threat of political exclusion caused by paranoia regarding Soviet and Communist encroachment in the Arab region, a geopolitical axiom pervasive in the United States during the long civil rights era. I argue that this political context should be theorized as consequential and analytically significant in shaping the style and content of Arab ethnic leaders’ advocacy for the Arab ethnic community in the United States. In arguing for this intervention, I seek to substantiate undertheorized mechanisms of Arab group formation in the United States by broadening the analytic scope to include the influence of international politics and the role of domestic organizations in contributing to the salience of Arab American identity, two specific areas scholars have identified as needing further investigation in the study of group and category formation (Fleming and Morris 2015; Yazdiha 2021). As such, this article supplements the small but growing body of literature on Arab and MENA group formation, helps concretize the contingent historical factors of Arab/MENA racial identification, and advances the theoretical and analytical significance of theories of racialization as they might be applied to Arab and Muslim groups.

Literature Review

Racial Formation and Ethnic Boundary Making

Studies regarding the role of racial and ethnic identity and formation represent some of the core disciplinary objects of study within the sociological discipline (Du Bois 1903, [1935] 1992; Park 1926; Weber, Roth, and Wittich 1978). Early studies on the topic, often designated the Chicago School of race relations, sought to understand the role that racial and ethnic difference played in social life by locating the cycles of racial assimilation (Park, 1926), and proposing broad and general theories about the structure of relations between racial and ethnic groups (Lieberson 1961. Later work moved in a decidedly constructivist direction, criticizing these earlier works for their ontological and even ideologically constructed objects of study (Steinberg 2007). This disciplinary shift, best exemplified by works like Racial Formation, which reoriented the field examined how racial and ethnic differences are constructed along cultural, social, economic, and political dimensions that change over differing historical circumstance and time (Lamont 2000; Omi and Winant 2015; Roediger 1999, 2005).

Contemporary scholars have pushed the field further, moving beyond the primordialist and constructivist debate to explore in more detail the mechanisms—institutional, economic, and political—that can explain changing racial and ethnic boundaries and category formation (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Brubaker et al. 2004; Loveman 1999). Recent studies have explored the relationship between institutionalized racial categories and state-making, have identified the influence of shifting domestic and international social fields on race-making, and have even synthesized these theories to produce typologies of racial and ethnic formation processes (Mora 2014; Paschel 2016; Wimmer 2008, 2013). Despite such progress, some scholars have continued to call attention to the need of “a research design that grapples with the emergence, change, or dissolution of boundaries over time” (Loveman 2015:1229).

Immigration and Assimilation

Literatures of immigration and assimilation are positioned well to address questions regarding changing racial identity and racial categorization, especially with regard to how these changes relate to the experience of immigrant populations in the United States. Whiteness studies—the broad moniker for a field of study that includes works from historians, political scientists, and sociologists—seek to explain the slow and eventual adoption of whiteness by various immigrant groups (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 2005). Critical legal scholars also employ a similar argument to explain the malleability of White identity—how it has been adapted and adopted by different groups at different times to provide legal and material benefit (Haney-López 2006; Harris 1993; Roediger 1999).

While whiteness and critical legal theories can speak to the connection between adopting a White category and gaining some kind of material benefit in specific instances in the early part of the twentieth century, these theories have also been criticized for their lack of explanatory power across broader historical time (B. J. Fields 2001; Fields and Fields 2014; Johnson 2019; Reed 2017). These critics have argued that the “wages of whiteness” paradigm—itself a theory that re-emerged in the post-Regan era as an explanatory for the rise of the new right—lacks an ability to deal with the historical contradictions of cross-racial class solidarity and mobilization (Johnson 2019). Moreover, the post-civil rights resurgence of increased ethnic activity along with renewed projects of ethnic identification exemplify a development that runs counter to explanations offered by the literature on whiteness.

Panethnicity and Ethnic Identity Movements

Theories of panethnicity can be leveraged, at least in part, to fill the explanatory gap left in studies of whiteness. Specifically, scholars of panethnicity study the emergence and proliferation of new ethnic categories and ethnic identity movements in the post-civil rights era that mobilized individuals from different nationalities, cultures, religions, and even languages under one panethnic banner. Most studied in panethnic literatures have been the efforts of Asian and Hispanic/Latino groups in mobilizing and pursuing political action based on a shared panethnic association (Espiritu 1992; Okamoto 2014; Padilla 1985). Several structural factors, most notably political and economic incentives like the distribution of social services and increasing employment opportunities for officially designated minority populations, have been identified as encouraging and promoting panethnic group formation (Espiritu 1992; Okamoto and Mora 2014).

Contemporary critiques of panethnicity, however, cite several conceptual issues that have halted the theory’s analytical promise. Critics argue that theorists of panethnic group formation either rely on reified and essentialized understandings of race and ethnicity (Brown and Jones 2015) or else myopically examine cases of Asian and Latino ethnic formation while disfavoring the study of other ethnic groups (Bozorgmehr et al. 2016; Brown and Jones 2015). In an effort to remedy these issues and expand the analytic lens to bridge literatures on immigrant racial formation and theories of structural constraint, scholars have proposed the concept of ethnoracialization (Brown and Jones 2015). Hana Brown and Jennifer A. Jones argue that ethnoracialization—which reintegrates theories of racialization into literatures of panethnicity—allows for a conception of group formation that is dialectal, wherein identity and group formation involve both projects of ascription, typically put forward by institutions or power structures, and identification processes, initiated and enacted on by individuals. This conception of ethnoracialization, they argue, can also serve as a more robust analytic for otherwise discounted ethnic groups, like Arab Americans.

Racialization and the Arab Case

Theories of racialization have been dominant in articulating the discrimination faced by Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims in the United States and beyond. With some exceptions,¹ these theories focus on the demographic shifts of the mid-twentieth century along with increasing projects of state-led targeting during the civil rights period as sources of Arab and MENA racial formation in the United States. A shift from relatively poor Christian Arab emigres in the pre-1965 era to the post-1965 arrival of increasingly educated and professional classes is argued to have led to growing engagement and ethnic identification among the Arab population (Kayyali 2005; Pennock 2017). This resurgence also coincided with the U.S. state’s active and hostile campaign of harassment and targeting of Arabs for purported threats to domestic national security—in turn, consolidating Arab identity by force of external identification (Cainkar 2009; Cainkar and Selod 2018; Hagopian 2004; Pennock 2017).

Projects of state harassment against MENA individuals have largely been theorized using the concept of racialization. Scholars explain that MENA populations are subject to a “racial project that ideologically deploys an essentialized narrative of ‘terror threat’ working in tandem with state and civil society macro and micro practices of control” (Cainkar and Selod 2018). This essentializing tendency, by way of forcible identification, collapses and conflates people into one amorphous and un-welcome “other.”² As such, racialization has been proposed as a way to help theorize the mistreatment and discrimination faced by religious or ethnic minorities while also providing a needed language to explain immigrants’ myriad experiences with Islamophobic depictions or conflations of Muslim or Arab individuals as religious threats or terrorists (Cainkar 2018; Husain 2017; Karaman and Christian 2020; Selod 2015; Yazdiha 2020; Zopf 2018).

Undoubtedly both sets of explanations—demographic and orientation shifts of newcomers, and increased U.S. state harassment—illuminate the broader context and important mechanisms that have contributed to the revitalization of ethnic identification of Arab immigrants during the civil rights era, and into the present day. Yet it is also the case that both the operationalization of theories of racialization and the conceptualization of the theory itself have merited prolonged critique and debate (Barot and Bird 2001; Hochman 2021; Murji and Solomos 2005; Rattansi 2005; Uyan 2021). Some have argued, for example, that racialization is often conflated as both a descriptive concept and an analytic theory—a conflation that is liable to halt the productivity of the concept’s social scientific application (Rattansi 2005; Uyan 2021). While much of the current literature on Arab racialization has descriptively documented the occurrence of events of harassment and stereotyping, it has also somewhat presumed this descriptive accuracy to reaffirm the existence of racialization. That is, by concerning themselves with the consequences of a racialization whose descriptive reality they affirm, studies of Arab racialization have tended not to highlight particular agents and organizations as key historical mechanisms in mobilizing and effectuating a racialized Arab identity as such.³ This lack of engagement represents a lacuna in the literature that scholars have identified as in need of critical investigation (Yazdiha 2021).⁴

Remaining Gaps: The Need for Historical Analysis

A historically oriented study of the case of Arab ethnic formation can address several of the theoretical and empirical concerns. Broadening the conceptual lens of study beyond the domestic sphere to focus on the relational and interactional nature of domestic and global developments can help scholars identify stronger mechanisms of group and category formation (Bozorgmehr et al. 2016; Cristina Mora and Okamoto 2020; Fleming and Morris 2015; Suzuki 2017). Previous investigations have approached similar tasks on multiple levels: Some have examined the influence of international spheres on the particular articulation of ethnic identity groups in the United States (Cristina Mora and Okamoto 2020), while others have looked at how broad ethnic movements themselves have been shaped and constrained by the international political sphere in both the United States and abroad (Dudziak 2000; Paschel 2016; Skrentny 2002; Von Eschen 1997). More recently, scholar Tasheen Shams has synthesized the effects of place and politics in ethnic identity formation by conceptualizing the tri-dimensional factors of homeland, hostland, and “elsewhere” that effectuate ethnic and racial identity for Muslim immigrants (2020). Attuned in many ways to Brown and Jones’ call for the bridging of racialization and immigrant literatures, and for studying identity formation dialectically, Shams’ work operationalizes the multiple and intersecting factors in ethnic identity formation serves as an exemplar of the type of study needed to identify mechanisms of both politics and place, and the interactional effects of each of these axes.

This article attempts to execute a critical historiography in this vein, which takes seriously the interactional dimensions, domestic conditions, and international geopolitics affecting group and category formation for Arab Americans. To do so, the article precedes fourfold: (1) First, it examines how the Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) served as a site of contested identity construction; (2) second, it analyzes the effects of a significant anti-communist letter campaign waged on the AAUG; (3) third, it looks at how this Cold War paranoia constrained internal organizational strategy; and (4) finally, it reviews how Arab advocacy organizations established after the AAUG positioned themselves as a result of these political constraints. The article ultimately argues that “racialization” was a decision by Arab organizations beginning in the mid-1970s to pursue a project of Arab ethnic advocacy disarticulated from its political origins. As such, it makes the case that racialization should be conceptualized as a distinct empirical and historical development, rather than its common current use as a theoretical analytic. A reconceptualized understanding of racialization also alerts scholars studying ethnic and racial formation of the need to investigate specific historical mechanisms without reifying racial and ethnic identities as teleological or causal entities themselves.

Methodology and Data

This article relies on primary documents relating to the organizational function of the AAUG preserved in an archive collection at the Halle Library at Eastern Michigan University. The AAUG was chosen as the primary object of study for two reasons: First, the AAUG was one of the first and largest organizations involved in Arab advocacy in the United States during the civil rights era, and second, due to the detail and depth with which a record of their organizational activities has been preserved (Jabara 2007). Many of the subsequent Arab Advocacy organizations that were founded in the 1970s and 1980s included people either who had been due-paying members of the AAUG or who had casual involvement with the organization in voluntary or consulting capacities. Scholars have argued that the effect of the AAUG has been crucial in driving a resurgence of pan-Arab identification in the United States, especially after the dwindling of such identification abroad in the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli-Arab War (Kayyali 2005; Pennock 2017; Yaqub 2016).

From the entire archival collection, an original set of 2,247 pages of documents was acquired relating to the AAUG’s internal structure, its internal and external correspondences, its documentation of mail and correspondence, membership correspondences, and internal reports. These materials were scanned for OCR text recognition and compiled into Atlas.ti qualitative analysis software to facilitate coding and organization. Materials were initially selected based on deductive inferences about the historical background of Arab organizing during both the civil rights and the Cold War periods. A “flexible-coding” approach was utilized that involved both deductive and inductive coding where documents were read through to identify and code for themes relating to political and ethnic activism, inter- and intra-organizational conflict, and geopolitical/transnational political context, and analyzed via the use of narrative summaries and analytic memos (Birks, Chapman, and Francis 2008). The analysis of different types of data—from newspaper excerpts, to annual meeting agenda minutes, to internal organizational memos and letters—allowed for an analysis sensitive to the ways actors may have pursued strategies when information was produced for internal organizational purposes, as opposed to when materials were either compiled for external release or produced to be outward-facing. In addition, materials were scrutinized for disconfirming evidence or counterfactual historical moments to ensure credibility of the historical narrative and argumentation advanced by the article (Bateman and Teele 2020; Deterding and Waters 2021).

As a work that bridges both historical and sociological methods, this article implements a “theoretical frontier” analytic architecture in its structure and argumentation (Mayrl and Wilson 2020). The “theoretical frontier” analytic architecture is characterized by the use of both primary and secondary historical evidence and is thus comparable to conventional historical methodologies. It differs, however, in its theoretical orientation to the research field: Specifically, the article utilizes archival and secondary historical sources to make advance on an insufficiently theorized social phenomenon—in this case, the concept of “racialization.” By attempting to identify empirically the mechanisms that can help account for the historical development of Arab ethnic identity in the United States, it seeks to reinsert the strategic orientation and activist work of Arab ethnic organizations in the civil rights era/Cold War era as analytically consequential to explanations of Arab ethnic formation.

Arab Ethnic Organizing and the Cold War Era

Defining Identities: Politics, Race, and Ethnicity

The AAUG served as a key organization that helped galvanize a community of professional Arab Americans to get involved in advocacy efforts against Arab discrimination and suppression both at home and at abroad. In addition to serving as a venue for deliberation and exchange between members of the Arab community, the organization also served as a hub from which activists would articulate the terms by which Arab ethnic identity and activism would and should be defined. Whether through the course of internal memos and strategy suggestions, intra-organizational communications, or at annual meeting conventions, members of the AAUG would construct and contest the myriad political, racial, and ethnic dimensions involved in defining Arab identity.

One anchoring dimension of Arab activism was the politics of Palestinian sovereignty—often serving as the linchpin issue circumscribing different regional and national identities under one collective and common Arab cause. It was also the case that the plight of Palestinians was often likened to, and discussed in conjunction with, matters of racial discrimination and persecution. As evidenced from the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s presidential address delivered at the organization’s second annual convention, the AAUG described Israel’s motivation for actions in Palestine as at least in part due to its indiscriminate racism against Arabs:

Just as Israel made no distinction between one Arab and another and launched its aggression against all of them simultaneously, no distinction has been made in this country as to the relative incompetence or worthiness of one type of Arab or another. The systematic denigration of the Arab, his culture and his achievements—whether in the Arab countries themselves or in the United States—has been total in scope. Christian and Moslem, Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian, progressive and conservative, all have been denied their human worth. This could not have been otherwise considering the racist basis of the anti-Arab assault.⁵

Here, Abu-Lughod’s positioning of the Arab cause as a righteous racial struggle that crosses boundaries of religion, nationality, and even political ideology emphasizes a shared ethnic experience—one in which all Arabs have a vested interest in fighting against racist stereotyping and essentializing. In his characterization, discrimination and racism are understood to motivate Israel in the international realm, and a hostile American reaction to the Palestinian perspective in the domestic realm. Building the connection between Arab experiences and issues of racism, Abu-Lughod goes on later in the same speech to reference a conversation with Black civil rights activists. In particular, he makes a connection between the Arab ethnic struggle with the fights of Black Americans against racism in the domestic sphere:

I have no doubt that, no matter how long it will take, how difficult it will be and the severe trials that we will undergo in the process, that ultimately, as a Black Brother once said, “We Shall Overcome”. When the history of the struggle and its successful consumation [sic] is finally written, your contribution to its success will be noted. (See Note 5).

The consequences and implications of Arab sovereignty, in this instance, are expanded to connect to struggles of racial injustice in general and the struggle of Black Americans in particular. In positioning the Arab organizations’ efforts as consequential to both Third World battles for liberation and independence and the evergreen battle for Black civil rights, the AAUG likens the Arab struggle with the Black freedom struggle by way of racial solidarity.

And yet at other times, the AAUG would articulate its own struggle and advocate for Arab issues as a struggle distinct from that of other racial and ethnic groups. This bifurcation of politics and race is evidenced by how Abu-Lughod mentions an important caveat in the very same presidential speech referenced above: Immediately after mentioning that he is “heartened by the support of the Black community,” Abu-Lughod goes on to argue that despite the shared racial and ethnic solidarity between Arab American and Black Americans, the Arab community is targeted for politically distinct reasons:

It is evident, however, that many as these [supportive] groups may be, critical power and influence are in the hands of our bigoted and exclusivist opponents. These will go to any length to cripple us and harass our supporters . . . That the internal revenue service, acting through a Mrs. Wechsler, saw fit to deny our educational and cultural association tax exemption status while granting it to the Israel Emergency Fund, suggests that collection of funds for the purchase of Phantom bombers can be construed as a philanthropic act while sponsorship of a book on The Arab Americans: Studies in Assimilation is a political one. (See Note 5)

Abu-Lughod strikingly compares the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) granting of tax-exempt status to the Israel Emergency Fund with the Service’s refusal to grant the same to Arab book publishing. What interests Abu-Lughod is the service’s rationale for doing so: According to the IRS, the sale of weapons of war to Israel was an “apolitical” act while the publishing of a book on Arab Americans was deemed an inherently political, and so an action not qualified for tax exemption. That is, the State, through the administrative decisions of the IRS, deemed Arab advocacy, itself, political. Here, Abu-Luhgod’s use of the phrase “however” immediately following his discussion of racial solidarity signals a perspective that Arab activism and its particular threats to the U.S. state were not perceived to entirely stem from a shared experience of racism, but instead from a distinct political positionality on issues of Arab sovereignty as they pertain to Palestine.

The construction of Arab identity as at times racial in nature and at other times political is displayed in further ambiguity in internal deliberations of the AAUG organization. For example, when a researcher and early member of the AAUG asked for a list of contact information for current members, the organization did not relay the contact information, explaining that “There are so many [members] that have communicated their fears regarding their affiliation with this organization vis-à-vis their institutional affiliation. There are many who feel vulnerable in their institutions should they become identified even as being pro-Arab Arabs” (quoted in Suleiman 2007). This statement, made in the aftermath of the 1967 War, reflects the deep and embedded hostility toward any position sympathetic to the Arab cause. The rationale also carries an important implicit confirmation of the complex nature of Arab identity, in which political ideology—as in pro-Arab sympathy—rather than ethnic origin, required the protection of anonymity. In other words, Arabs already affiliated with institutions (typically university positions or professional offices) required protection not because of their ethnicity, but rather for their allegiance to an ideology that was deemed beyond the pale. They required protection as pro-Arab Arabs, and not simply as Arabs.

These singular and passing references anecdotally highlight the multi-faceted dimensions of Arab advocacy: Advocacy for Arab civil rights straddled a difficult and at times ambiguous tension between Arab identity as either predominantly political or ethnic in character. This disarticulation of Arab identity as predominantly ethnic or predominantly political is further evidenced by how the AAUG understood its activity as having a dimension in which advocacy for the Arab cause was accomplished on two fronts: both for Arabs and as Arabs. By virtue of filling a gap in accurate information about the Arab people for an uninformed U.S. electorate and administrative regime, and by virtue of their own embodied professional status, the AAUG directly countered stereotyped depictions of Arabs as backwards or unintelligent (Jabara 2007). By providing serious and scholarly support for an underrepresented perspective, these activists hoped to balance the hegemonic media narrative that bolstered U.S. support of Israel at the expense of Palestinian sovereignty. The project of convincing elite opinion leaders, then, also required a decidedly elite orientation. While activists stated the goal of educating the general populace, it was also clear that they believed this work could only be conducted and mediated by those most educated and knowledgeable. The medium of their advocacy and its intended audiences—academic conferences, scholarly publications, and university lectures—were all circumscribed by their location within established and respected institutions of academia and reflected their elite orientation. Moreover, this orientation was structurally consequential, as membership in the AAUG was banned for anyone without a college degree (Pennock 2017).

Cold War Paranoia: Arab Organizations Endure Campaigns of Harassment

Targeting of Arab Americans in the civil and post-civil rights eras would increase, and it would be at times difficult to discern whether these acts of discrimination were based on an association between Arabs as having a particular ideological commitment at odds with U.S. national security interests, or whether Arabs were faced with the pernicious forces of ethnic and racial forcible identification. Arab Americans working at the AAUG in the years after its founding would have been very aware of this unique predicament—at least in part due to the persistent communist associations and smears they would receive in mail from U.S. citizens.

One of the AAUG’s first public ventures of advocacy was the procurement of newspaper ads in several regional and national publications of note. In the years 1969 and 1971, the organization put out at least two separate ads. The first, a “Nixon Doctrine” essay, offered an alternative U.S. position to the Israel-Palestine dispute; the second, an ad titled “The Silenced Majority of the Middle East,” implored journalists and citizens to reach out for more information about the under-recognized Arab perspective on the Israel-Palestine dispute.⁶ These ads reflected the educational and advocacy role of the organization and attempted to balance the lopsided American coverage of the deadly confrontation between Israel and Palestine. The ads called out the large and one-sided sale of weapons to Israel and the destruction Israel had committed in Palestine and neighboring refugee areas through campaigns of bombing and terror. Overall, the ads sought to convince the American public and governmental administrations to pursue a more balanced and moderated stance on this dispute.

To defray the cost of these ads the AAUG provided an address where donations could be mailed to the organization. What they may or may not have anticipated is just how many readers would take the opportunity to flood the AAUG offices with typed and handwritten notes, filled with vitriolic and racist stereotypes and animus. Preserved in their archive are at least 84 letters in response to the ads over the course of 1969 to 1971, 49 of which were negative in nature.⁷ Of those 49 pieces of mail that included negative or disapproving responses to the ads, 20—or 41 percent of them—had references or smears that attempted to identify the organization and its members as either communist themselves, or as tools of communism and the Soviet regime. The significant portion of hate mail that attempted to smear the association as communist often also included racist and derogatory language that made assumptions about the nature of Arab people and their political interests. For example, one individual sent in a typed message along with a clipping of a derogatory editorial cartoon (depicted in Figure 1). The cartoon features a wounded Egyptian President Nasser with the U.S.S.R. personified as his cornerman in a boxing match, supplying him with aid and gloves. The letter frames the conflict between Arab support of Palestine as guided by Russian and communist interests. Aligning Israel against Russia, they write,

I feel that The Great State of Israel is the only country in The Middle East that stands up to Russia and all that communism stands for. If you Arabs were against communism then it would be different . . . so go back to your communist country and leave us alone.

Here, Arab interests are construed as meaningful only in their relation to communism and within the larger dispute between communist forces and the United States. The theme of reading the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the singular lens of Soviet aggression is found in several negative notes sent to the AAUG. Another note (displayed as Figure 2) makes a similar characterization, this time warning Arabs that they should be more concerned about the threat of the Soviet Union in the region than of Israel’s aggression against Palestine (Figure 2).

At other times, letters to the organization simply insinuate and insult the organization as having a communist affiliation. In one particularly vulgar letter signed by “A John Birch Member,” a writer simply uses extreme profanity to call Arabs “Nothing but a bunch of Mother F***ing Red Communists.”⁸ The letter writer’s membership in the John Birch Society—an anti-communist organization founded in 1958—exemplifies a hostile American public response to Arab advocacy during that era.⁹ In yet another handwritten note, a writer questions the loyalty of the organization: “Who the hell are the American University graduates you mention? Arabs? Communists? Nazis?”¹⁰ The parallel construction of the final sentence accomplishes the goal of once again associating Arabs with communists, and even tries to associate them with a Nazi ideology. And in yet another striking example, a letter from someone who identifies herself as an eighth grader asks for clarification of the organization’s position. After making the case against the AAUG’s characterization of the Israel-Palestine dispute, she writes toward the end of letter: “You have the support of practically every nation. Then why bother with feeding Americans foolish propaganda? It’s a wonder, that with all this name-calling these days, someone doesn’t call you a Communist!!”¹¹ What is particularly striking about the final example is that this perspective comes from a relatively young person. Given that an eighth grader would likely be only 13 or 14 years old, her awareness of an association between Arabs and communism signals the pervasive and widespread nature of such associations.

The frequency and intensity with which these negative letters identified Arab activists and individuals with communism cannot be dismissed as simply a correlation of two concurrent animosities of the same period—that is, the concurrent presence of animus against both Arabs and communists in the civil rights/Cold War era. A key counterpoint to this claim is evidenced through one letter categorized as part of a collection of positive responses to the AAUG’s ads. The writer commends the AAUG for their campaign of raising awareness regarding Palestine’s plight, but insists that the organization strategizes and sends leaders to the Nixon administration for the purpose of disavowing their potential communist associations.¹² The writer encloses a copy of a letter he sent to Nixon that outlines his belief that the President should act in favor of Arab interests so as to ward off Soviet gains in the Arab region. In attempting to convince the President, the letter writer emphasizes Arabs’ political alignment with the President, thus hoping to convince him to act in favor of the Palestinian cause to ward off any communist sympathy in the region (see Note 12).

Clarifying Allegiance: Disarticulating a Racial and Political Arab Identity

The contestation over how best to illicit a sympathetic American public response to the plight of Arab and Palestinian sovereignty was paramount for the AAUG organization. But the appropriate strategy over how exactly that mission would be achieved was up for debate internally. As can be from meeting minutes with the organization’s board members, the American public’s disapproval and displeasure about the perceived alignment of communist interests with the Arab cause were a central consideration of members as they strategized how best to advance their advocacy efforts. In discussions relating to the establishment of the organization’s mission statement, there was explicit disagreement over the extent to which the AAUG should associate with “Third World” liberation movements, given American’s negative association with such movements. For example, one member was recorded as being “critical of (the) mission statement as being ‘Marxist’ and reminded Abdeen that when (the) Association began, it was with no ideological commitments, and that should continue.”¹³ This member was “for withdrawal of the motion,” on the grounds that he “felt it would create dissension in the membership (see Note 13).” At least several others agreed, arguing that support for the Palestinian Revolution could stand on its own merits, without legitimating broader Third World revolutions.

Ideological differences, along with the need to appeal more sympathetically to the American public, were also among the reasons members cited in a bid to moderate and tone-down what was seen as an overly radical mission statement. One member argued that the original statement as it was read out did not accurately reflect the “pluralistic nature” of the organization as evidenced by the internal dissension in the meeting, and so argued against its adoption in current form. Several others argued that the organization needed to “address ourselves to the local U.S. audience,” with the implication that an interpretation of the organization as possibly in alignment with a more radical stance would render the organization ineffectual in the American context (see Note 13). This sentiment is perhaps most strongly emphasized by the reaction of one particular member who opposed the original statement. His comments were summarized as follows:

This group [is] filled with intellectuals and [the] rhetoric reflects Arab rhetoric and intellectuals. Drop this, because we are in America and how can we help Palestinians within our new environment; that is our goals (sic). Public Relations are important in the American environment. (See Note 13).

Here, the speaker makes both an explicit corollary and an implicit distinction, both of which help highlight the effects of communist associations on Arab advocacy during the Cold War era. First, his comments signal a desire to advocate Palestinian in a specifically American context, one in which any association between Palestinian rights and radical or “Marxist” sympathies would render such advocacy mute; and second, he conflates the desire for an embrace of the Third World movements within the sphere of Palestinian advocacy as overtly “Arab” in nature. This remark somewhat reinforces conflations present in earlier messages received by the AAUG from critics—that the perception of Arab interests, despite the evidenced diversity within the movement, meant an implicit acceptance of communist doctrines or ideals. As such, this member’s comments encapsulate both the contested dynamic within the AAUG in its early founding and the organization’s keen awareness of how Arab identity was understood by the American public: There remained a difficult tension in the group as they strategized on what advocacy for Arab identity meant, and how they might construct such an identity as they sought to gain more sympathy among an American public that was increasingly influenced by the anti-communist rhetoric of the Cold War era. In the end, the disagreement was designated as a “minor wording problem,” that would be revised in the final mission statement, and which historians have recovered as one which eventually more broadly—and vaguely—referred to Arab interests without explicit mention of any ideological affiliations or associations.¹⁴

Seeking Institutionalization: A Shifting Landscape for Arab Advocacy

The contestation over how to position the AAUG’s organizational orientation would both set the stage for and foreshadow future battles by Arab activists. Later eras of Arab ethnic organizing would be marked by efforts to not simply seek civil rights protections, but also to gain acceptable footholds into mainstream American domestic politics. While the AAUG would remain active and operative through the late 1990s, it was also the case that within a few years of its founding certain political disagreements and opportunities would spawn the creation of several new organizations—often populated or later joined by former AAUG members themselves. For example, the announcement of a new Arab American advocacy organization, the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA), prompted an introspective evaluation of the AAUG and its broader goals and mission. The NAAA was incorporated as a non-stock corporation in Virginia in 1972, with a letterhead address on K Street in Washington, D.C.¹⁵ Decidedly more political in orientation, the organization’s goals were “to provide moral, financial and political support to those Americans of Arabic heritage who seek political or public office, regardless of party affiliation,” and “seek a more balanced U.S. policy in the Middle East.”¹⁶

News of the NAAA’s creation prompted response and a strategizing call from the AAUG President, who asked to convene a meeting to discuss the implications and areas of potential fundraising and mission overlap. Given that “the emergence of the NAAA as an Arab ‘ethnic’ political organization” was capable of “filling a very specific and very felt void vis-à-vis some segments of the Arab-American community,” the AAUG needed to regroup and reorient.¹⁷ With potentially growing overlap and fundraising conflicts and competition between shared members, the AAUG would have to decide on what grounds it would continue its project, and in what ways that decision would shape the content and style of their advocacy. Those deliberations, especially as they turned on the question of ethnic as compared to political advocacy, were reiterated by the Chairperson for the Committee on the Future of the Association:

A considerable amount of attention was directed to the extent to which the Association should either engage in or support others who engage in “ethnic politics.” “Ethnic politics” here was defined as attempting through the electoral and political process of petitioning for redress of grievances to obtain gains for or reduction of the grievances of a specific ethnic group. Here a clear distinction was made between being political and being ethnically political, the latter being characterized as attempts to obtain either a portion of or a larger portion of the American political pie as is distributed to those groups who can wield power. Adoption of a strategy or orientation of ethnic politics was seen as a radical change from the current posture of the Association. (See Note 18)

While the tension between Arab as an ethnic and as a political identity had marked the AAUG’s internal discussions since the civil rights era, the NAAA’s explicit endorsement of an “ethnic politics” was noted as a distinct departure from the type of work that the AAUG had pursued to date. This type of engagement and advocacy was not distinct in geography, but rather in ideological orientation: The NAAA had explicitly sought to work with members of the State Department and other governmental agencies across ideological orientations.

The AAUG understood this orientation to be evocative of an “ethnic politics,” pursuing an explicitly more American-friendly—and critically less politically antagonistic—orientation. Internal members articulated as much, evaluating that the United States would likely never accept the “progressive elements” of Arab advocacy, especially those that advocated for “the indigenous, quasi-indigenous, and pro-communist elements or regimes in the Arab world.”¹⁸ Yet these elements of Arab advocacy were often at the core of the AAUG’s early mission: to articulate the immense and intertwined nature of ethnic and political discrimination that these groups faced had been an important anchoring principal for the organization. In an increasingly hostile Cold War climate, however, it was a mission that was difficult to advance should any of that Arab advocacy impinge on more expansive American attitudes toward anything that could be conceived or associated with communist ideals or interests. In the end, the AAUG decided to help other groups, including the NAAA, but only as long as that help “would not in any way compromise the belief as an association that the breach between the United States and the countries of the Arab Middle East fundamentally emanates out of a systemic defect in the relationship.”¹⁹

Racialization as a Strategic Reorientation

Growing organizational and political tensions, especially as they related to an increasingly anti-communist and politically hostile American context, set the stage for how Arab advocacy would shift in the coming decades. Historians of Arab American activism have identified the more politically conservative orientation of organizations that followed the AAUG, pointing to their desire to exist within the mainstream American political framework. Pamela Pennock explains, for example, that the NAAA was itself dominated by prominent Arab American businessmen and members of the Republican party, and positioned itself as more politically moderate than the AAUG.²⁰ Salim Yaqub (2016:84) makes a similar argument, explaining that the NAAA, which established itself with explicit ties to military personnel, saw “patriotism, moderation, and awakened duty” as touchstones of their organizational mission.

The NAAA’s more explicit focus on a politically feasible form of advocacy—one not associated with a communist tilt—was later mirrored by at least two other Arab organizations, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) founded in 1980 and the Arab American Institute (AAI) established in 1985. The ADC and the AAI, with membership growing out of, but ideologically apart from, the AAUG, would advance a decidedly less radical style of advocacy as shown by both their desire to advance political candidates of any ideological orientation so long as they were of Arab ancestry (Pennock 2017; Yaqub 2016). While these organizations would be strong advocates for a fair and balanced approach to Palestinian rights, their advocacy focused more explicitly on the American realm, and as such lacked a distinctly radical political or “Third World” orientation, to say nothing of a communist one.²¹ This shift, given the evidence examined above, should be conceptualized by scholars as a strategic and conscious choice to carry on Arab activism in ways more acceptable and amenable to the American political context. This meant that future organizations—the NAAA, the ADC, and the AAI—would continue an advocacy for Arab ethnic interests, so long as an articulation of these interests was not to be confused with an endorsement of a radical political ideology.

The evidence of shifting organizational strategies as imposed by a politically hostile Cold War era requires a reconceptualization of racialization as not just a theory explaining anti-Arab discrimination, but more so as a distinct empirical project pursued by Arab advocates and organizations for the strategic purpose of avoiding political ostracization. Racialization—or the decision by Arab organizations in the mid-1970s to pursue a project of Arab ethnic advocacy disarticulated from its political origins—was a historical development attributable to the interactional factors of international pressures of Cold War anti-communism, along with domestic pressures of discrimination and prejudice. Introducing the Cold War era and its political constraints on Arab organizing in the late 1960s through the early 1980s helps contextualize an important and undertheorized mechanism of Arab ethnic formation, namely how projects of Arab ethnic advocacy were active projects of ethnic identity construction pursued in response to a politically hostile anti-Arabism. Without identifying the critical and consequential impact that considerations of political anti-communist prejudice played in the content and style of Arab ethnic advocacy, scholars cannot wholly and accurately conceptualize the case of Arab racial and ethnic identity formation.

Moving Forward: Implications for the Broader Field

This article finds that Arab organizations, subject to increasing geopolitical pressures in the Cold War era, strategically articulated their advocacy to be more legible and acceptable in the American context: Namely, they sought to advocate for Arab identity as an ethnic identity disarticulated from its political associations. This finding is in line with previous scholars who have identified the impact of international spheres on the domestic U.S. context of ethnic identity formation, but also differs from other studies of Arab racialization on account of its method and theoretical orientation. By using historical archival data of organizational operations, this article identifies historical pressures, mechanisms, and organizational actors that have contributed to the development of Arab identity as racial or ethnic in character, rather than affirming the veracity of the racial/ethnic identity as such. In other words, rather than accepting “racialization” as both a description of and explanation for Arab discrimination or ostracization, this article locates “racialization” as an empirical and historical development, and one consciously and strategically pursued by Arab organizations.

This finding makes clear the need for a reorientation of racialization more broadly, subjecting the theory itself to further historicization. Racialization, as it may be used by scholars of race and ethnicity, should be reconceptualized as an empirical and historical phenomenon rather than an amorphic causal or descriptive concept. As has been argued, the term’s most common use in contemporary sociological literature—and especially as it is applied to recently formed or forming ethnic and racial groups—is liable to teleology: Racialization has often been deployed as a concept that is not only causative of racial identification, but also said to be caused by racial identification (Uyan 2021). A reorientation, as described above, shifts the object of analysis to the historical processes, agents, and organizations that produce race and ethnic identity, rather than affirming outcomes already formed.

As with any study, there are limitations and areas that require further analytical development. This article’s primary focus on the AAUG would be enriched by supplementing the actions and strategies of other Arab organizations operative during the Cold War period and beyond. Furthermore, a comparative or rich historical relational analysis of other ethnic advocacy organizations could help demystify the multiple mechanisms and contingent conditions that can spur projects of race-making. As such, future studies on the development of racial and ethnic identification should embark on the historically grounded project of investigating not just the making of race, but perhaps more importantly how, and why, the race-making process occurs within historical time and space. Such an orientation will ensure for a richer analytical landscape that stretches beyond Arab Americans or other racially “ambiguous” groups to continue the discovery of historically situated mechanisms contributing to racial formation more broadly.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their critical and incisive scrutiny of earlier versions of this work--the final paper was improved on account of their suggestions. I would also like to thank Zine Magubane, Stephen Pfohl, Ali Kadivar, Derek Brown, Annika Rieger, Ashley Parry, Elise Largesse, Jaclyn Carroll, Jessica Bolin, Gaelle Bargain-Darrigues, and Natasha Sarkisian for their patience in reading, editing, discussing, and supporting the research and writing of this work.

ORCID iD

Deniz Uyan

Notes

Author Biography

Deniz Uyan is a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at Boston College. She contributes to the fields of race and ethnicity, political sociology, and social theory. Her current research project studies the historical antecedents of the contemporary movement to add a new Middle Eastern and North African race category to the US Census.

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