https://www.ancestry.com/dna/ethnicity/near-east
Mulatto, wikipedia, discusses Arabic Muslim and Moorish origins of the term, meaning mostly mixed race (not merely adopted!), but it totally leaves out altogether the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain heritage in its lists of mulatto nations and areas in its heading. Cf swahilis, Sowell.
https://izajodm.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40176-014-0020-9
For this study, America’s Arab and Islamic population consists of a heterogeneous group of people whose ancestral origins are mostly Northern Africa and Western Asia, but who also include sub-groups from Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Asia. Some are ethnic Arabs, but many are not. For example, most of the people of Iran are ethnic Persians. Some Arab and Islamic Americans have very dark skin shade, for example, North Africans and Pakistanis, but many much less so. Despite differences in ethnicity, nativity, skin shade, and religion, all persons of North African and West Asian ancestry are classified as “white” in the US Census (Office of Management and Budget [1997]). Further, all are subject to anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes - even those who are neither Arab nor Muslim. But, many members of this population do not self-identify as white and recent historical events may have had a substantial effect on racial self-identity.
During the 2000s Arab and Islamic American racial identity was subjected to three sets of large scale racializing events: 1) the public and private reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001 (“9/11”); 2) the US invasion of Iraq during March 19, 2003 - May 1, 2003, the controversial war that followed, and its discussion in the 2004 elections; and, 3) the racially charged US presidential election of 2008, where an African American Christian with a Muslim father and an Islamic name was elected President of the United States, as well as the congressional election of 2010. The Al Qaeda attacks were the initial exogenous events, clearly demarcating a period whereby there was a structural increase in the intensity of US stigmatization of persons with Islamic religious affiliation and Arab ethnicity. The political events of 2003-2004 and 2008-2010 reinforced the stigmatization ushered in after 9/11. This stigmatization created an exogenous reduction in the expected payoff to acculturation relative to non-acculturation. To the extent that self-identifying as white reflects Arab and Islamic acculturation into American society, we should observe a discrete reduction in the fraction of Arab and Islamic Americans self-identifying as white during the years following 2001.
The post-9/11 events are a natural experiment that corresponds closely to an exogenous reduction in the public’s willingness to accept Arab and Islamic acculturation into US society. This paper tests whether these racializing events altered the distribution of racial identities among Arab and Islamic Americans. We use nearly two decades of cross-sectional microdata (1996-2012) from the March Supplement to the Current Population Survey. Hence, we are able to examine Arab and Islamic racial self-identification for a substantial period before and after the epochal events of September 11, 2001. Respondent and parental nativity variables allow easy identification of a large sample of 1st and 2nd generation Americans. Although we cannot completely identify 3rd and higher generation Arab and Islamic Americans, language usage, religion, or skin shade, we do find that our results are robust with respect to ancestral origin. Separating the sample according to the timing of racializing events and comparing 2002-2012 to 1996-2001, there is a statistically significant decrease in the unconditional and conditional probability that Arab and Islamic Americans will self-identify as white.
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