From "Filthy Arab tramps" to "Arab Americans"

The Arab immigrants who came to the United States as part of the great migration wave from the second half of the nineteenth century until the restrictive immigration acts of the 1920s assimilated within two to three generation into mainstream ‘white’ society. In explaining this, most scholarship on early Arab American migration and assimilation history has focused on internal factors such as modes of labor, social mobility and bottom-up acculturation. However, the extremely radicalized fabric of American society in the period under study, which manifested itself not only in cultural barriers for acceptance of ‘non-whites’ but also in severe statutory restrictions for assimilation and citizenship, merits the postulation that internal analysis does not suffice to explicate the rapid assimilation of early Arab Americans. Thus, the main analytical theme of this research is ‘external’, that is, the interplay between race, assimilation and host society perceptions c.q. the public image of Arab immigrants during the period under study. The main research question of this thesis is: in what way did the mass media shape the public image and assimilation process of early Arab immigrants and their immediate descendants. Since newspapers were the main mass medium in the period under study, the research was effectuated by conducting a historical newspaper analysis through a database search, which yielded approximately 9500 results articles related to the relevant search words. This thesis proposes that there is a direct link between newspaper narratives on Arab immigrants and their cultural and, hence, legal acceptance into the domain of ‘white America’. Whereas earlier narratives on Arab immigrants were consistently negative, from the 1910s onward there is a dramatic shift discernable towards positive framing of Arab immigrants in American newspapers. This was precipitated by a government sponsored mass relief campaign for the, Armenian and Arab, Christian victims of Ottoman massacres. Only after mass media narratives, and, consequently, the public image shifted did legal attempts by Arab immigrants to prove their ‘whiteness’ become successful. Thus, the results of this study demonstrate a need for rethinking the assimilation process of Arab Americans.