Three Proofs that Whiteness is No Longer a Privilege

Con-struct, CC BY-SA 3.0

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?

1. No one tries to pass as white.
2. 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.
3. 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.