ABSTRACT
Inextricably intertwined with the rising tide of discrimination facing persons of Middle Eastern descent is the mythology surrounding racial construction and related religious and sociocultural perceptions. For prior generations, Middle Eastern Americans came closer to matching our constructed notions of whiteness. They were largely Christian; they came from an exotic but friendly, romantic, and halcyon foreign land imagined to contain magic lanterns, genies, flying carpets, and belly dancers; and they served as a chief vessel of the philosophical and cultural heritage of the West. Thus, in previous generations, people of (what we now call) Middle Eastern descent were, more often than not, blended into the white category. When the Levant was perceived as a desert hinterland, irrelevant to Western interests, its people were not collectivized into a Middle Eastern taxonomy. But once the region took on geopolitical and economic significance, the Middle East leaped into existence as a concept imbued with social meaning. As James C. Scott has argued, the naming process is intricately related to exercise of power. Specifically, the creation of synoptic categories represents an essential step in a state’s nation-building process in that it advances the government’s ability to track and control both its 220subjects and those who might pose a threat from without. Race comes into existence only when a group grows sufficiently large, in terms of both numbers and power, as to become a threat.
