Armenian Americans and the Construction of Whiteness

It is also important to understand that most of us have little or no ability to choose our racial status ourselves.  Especially for marginalized peoples, race is determined from the outside. You cannot put your race on and take it off at will, as you would a hat or a garment.  Instead, racial categories are created and constantly reaffirmed by the legal, judicial, educational, and other social structures and processes that we encounter every day.  Those structures and processes shape or influence the consciousness of individual people, who then ascribe race to others based on the way they look, talk, behave, or worship.

It is easy to determine which racial category most Americans fall into. But for some of us – Armenian Americans as well as a number of other groups – it is not so clear. We seem to be not really people of color, but also not quite white, at least not in the way that most people mean when they refer to racial whiteness.  Consequently, it is not easy to understand how we fit into the racial economy of the US.

I became interested in thinking about Armenian Americans and race while I was a doctoral student in American Civilization at Brown University in the 1990s. Amongst a cohort of students and faculty who were thinking deeply about race and its complexities in the US, I began to interrogate my own racial position. We were also beginning to think about whiteness as a racial category (rather than a neutral or non-category), but what we understood about whiteness was entirely based on characteristics of Euro-Americans and reflected only parts of my experience. I wanted to understand how Armenian whiteness is different from Euro-American whiteness, and to do that I dove into the legal history to discover how and when Armenians came to be considered white.

The first big wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place during the first two decades of the twentieth century, which coincided with the period of the Asian Exclusion Acts.  Beginning in the 1880s, the United States passed a series of laws whose intent was to exclude or limit the immigration and naturalization as citizens of “Asiatic race.” These laws were aimed mainly at the Chinese, who had worked on the transcontinental railroads as laborers but whom the US did not want to settle permanently on American soil, thinking them “unassimilable.” Because Armenians (along with Lebanese, Syrians, and others) came from the continent of Asia and were generally darker-skinned than Americans of European descent, some argued that they too should be considered part of the “Asiatic race” and thus excluded from immigration and/or naturalized citizenship.

The claim that these Asian immigrants were not white resulted in a number of lawsuits in which the legal racial status of each group was adjudicated. Two of these cases concerned Armenian Americans, in re Halladjian (1909) and U.S. v. Cartozian (1925). Interestingly, in Cartozian Harvard anthropologist Franz Boas took the stand as an expert witness, testifying that race is entirely a social construct and that, therefore, there was no such thing as an “Asiatic race.” Had the judge accepted Boas’ argument, it could have led to the abolition of all racial designations under US law. But of course, this did not happen. In both cases, the judge found that Armenians were white, but their logic still relied on “common sense” understandings of race. The reasons Armenians were deemed white were that a) Armenians were thought to be more like Europeans than Turks were; and b) it was thought that they would assimilate into US culture, i.e. lose the marks of difference that make them look and behave like non-Europeans, through intermarriage, learning English, etc. This logic was based on the idea of the “melting pot,” the conception, popular in much of the early- to mid-twentieth century, that immigrants’ differences (in foodways, dress, speech, etc.) would melt away over time. In other words, you can be accepted here, as long as you agree to give up the distinctive practices of your culture. Religion and skin color were considered aspects of a person that would not melt, and so Muslims and people with very dark skin were considered unassimilable. The bottom line is this: the very discourse (the cases, the logic used in the cases) that granted Armenians legal whiteness was part of the discourse that excluded other Asian immigrants. Although we did not ask for this, our whiteness was established on the backs of others who were deemed not white.

So Armenian Americans are fully implicated in the politics of race in the US. The fact that our ancestors were not slaveholders, that most of our families weren’t even here until after Reconstruction, or that we are not descended from those who colonized this continent by committing genocide of its indigenous peoples, does not absolve us from responsibility for the privilege conferred by our legal whiteness.