Are West Asians / Middle Easterners White?

So it's come to my attention that people from the Middle East tick "white" on their job applications.

On any job application it apparently claims caucasians are the original people from "Europe, Middle East or North Africa"

1. This is impressive - I have rarely ever heard my Persian colleagues complain about not having their "own" category like Indians or Asians. Chad mentality.

2. Is this accurate? The confusing thing, is the Middle East seems to be quite racially diverse initself, so it's hard to blanket an entire region. I've seen Saudi Arabians who look like black people, yet seen Iranians and Armenians who easily pass for Italian or Greek. Without hesitation.

I suppose this is interesting because of all the uproar the Indian and Asian communities have made about not having "special status", yet the likes of Turks, Georgians, Iranians, Armenians, Lebanese etc haven't complained at all. Maybe the science shows these people are in fact "Dark Whites", no different to a Sicilian or Greek, but it came as a pleasant surprise to me.

Thoughts?

30 Comments
 

Aryans are actually certain groups of people from Iran, Nepal, and a little bit of North India.

The colonists actually misappropriated the term to justify their actions by calling themselves superior. Blondes are not Aryans, Hitler used it wrongly to justify the massacre.

 

Iranians/Turks/Armenians/Georgians are not Arabs though.

It gets tricky. At the same time, Is someone from Lebanon really the same race as someone from deep in Saudia Arabia? 

To my limited understanding, no. Scientifically, this designation is tricky and officially, it's usually just 'caucasian'.

 

Yes you are right. Lebanese are technically no real arabs but you know how it is. Of course we are not the same as Saudis.

We speak arabic, live in the middle east etc. we call ourselves Arab. Although there are some nationalist Lebanese who insist on being called „Phoenician“ (probably the correct term for Lebanese). Tbh, I don‘t really care.

 

they actually were making a middle east and north africa designation decades ago but then at the last minute jews wanted to be included in it for diversity bonuses (this was when AA first started) and the arabs basically said they’d rather not have their own category than be lumped in with the jews, so everyone just stayed as white. actually kinda amusing

 

Your comment makes no sense at all. Jews are not one race or a singular race and are not treated differently as per quotas. They're already lumped into the same category as those from the Mid East (which is not just Arabs). As far as I know, religion is not asked on job applications for IB/PE (although we all know certain last names help, and I'll stop there before I get banned).

Theoretically an Iranian Jew (Sephardim/Mizrahi) would tick caucasian for example. Their race is Persian. An Ashkenazi Jew is Caucasian too (Poland/Lithuania etc etc). Unless you're an Ethiopian Jew, you would tick Caucasian regardless. 

It's not just Arabs who I am referring to either.

Middle East and Caucuses includes a ton of non Arab countries.

Nothing ironic about it. I think you're slightly confused and trying to make a political joke for some reason.

 
Most Helpful

The reason Arabs are considered white is due to immigration policy during the first large wave of immigration to America. Arab Christians wanted to escape persecution in their home countries but wanted to skirt around US anti-Asian (historically categorized as “Mongolian”) immigration policy. So, they petitioned the government to be considered White. It also has judeo-christian roots/precedent: if Jesus was white (as it was believed) then the people who descend from his lands must also be white. There’s another angle of the US continuously expanding the definition of white from solely Anglo-Saxon to also include Arabs, Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans etc so as to inflate the total number of white people in America and maintain a majority as well. In 2020, Arabs actually petitioned to make a new census category for MENA and I am sure it is bound to happen pretty soon. Also remember that this is just a social category, even within the MENA region there are a plethora of ethnicities and skin tones some of which may pass as white while others wouldn’t and they all (or mostly) call themselves Arabs (a social categorization in itself).

 

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