Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

One of the main ideas in this essay is that whiteness is a default category, representing racial dominance more than specific characterizations. This differs from other races and ethnicities, which are specifically acknowledged in examples like Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month. Lalami discusses whiteness in this way because white people have been held as a dominant group for so long that for many of them, the possibility of becoming a minority or needing to define whiteness is frightening and implies a demotion in the social hierarchy. Lalami cites this fear as the root cause behind issues of white supremacy and the discontent and racism that played a large part in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent presidency. Rather than develop whiteness further, white supremacy relies on a history of dominance to define whiteness as power. It does not acknowledge race as a mutable trait, one that can be misidentified or modified at will. Examples such as those of Eastern and Southern Europeans, who were once considered non-white, and Arab people like Lalami who were considered white until a dark-skinned Arab man named Ahmed Hassan applied for citizenship in the 1940s, show how the meaning of the white race has changed over time. She points out that only a few years later, when the US sought strategic alliances with nations in the Middle East, Arabs were redefined legally as white.

When Lalami states, “Race is a fiction” (112), noting that it was constructed “for political and economic reasons” (112) like free labor through slavery and easy access to resources in colonialism, she is referring to race as a social construct. While she points out that some aspects of race, such as “geographical variation in skin tone” and facial features, are observable (91), they are not biologically based or consistently present across any given race or group. The simplification of these traits into finite terms came into common practice around the 15th century to define interactions between Europeans and their potential colonies. By establishing a hierarchy of race, these countries were able to justify large-scale violence and oppression of the newly declared “inferior” races. This hierarchy explains why whiteness is defined largely as an absence of race; each other race is ascribed negative traits that contrast with the overwhelmingly positive opposing traits that are then attributed to whiteness. As a result, whiteness is less a visible category than a determinant of power, with the number of groups integrated into whiteness expanding and contracting according to political needs.

The power of whiteness is evident in the exemption of white people from scrutiny based on the actions of other white people. Lalami provides examples of a series of mass shooters, most of whom are white, noting that no white people or groups are questioned after the shooting on how or why “their people” do such things. However, when a person of color commits a crime, the issue is framed as in terms of race or as an issue within a specific racial community. When Lalami speaks in Arabic to her sister on the phone in the airport, the white man who eyes her suspiciously until she speaks English is performing this association, linking Lalami to the terrorists who committed the acts of 9/11 or those he might see depicted on television. Lalami even acknowledges that being aware of one’s surroundings is sensible but notes that white people often see themselves as “the custodians of public space” (106) who can “enlist the police to enforce its boundaries” (106). As the dominant group, white people often feel that they are the progenitors, or creators, of society as a whole, viewing people of color as visitors in their private, racially homogenous space.

Language, again, becomes a dominant idea in Lalami’s rhetoric, as she notes that “Ebonics,” or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is viewed as “foul” or “uneducated” by many white people. AAVE is a dialect of English predominantly spoken by African Americans. Most speakers of AAVE can codeswitch, or change between dialects, at will, which demonstrates that AAVE and education in what is considered standard American English commonly coexist. Negative views on AAVE are rooted in racist perceptions of its speakers: Since Black people must be held as inferior to white people, the dialect they speak must likewise be considered inferior. This discrimination extends beyond AAVE. Lalami laments that her daughter, who learned Arabic at a young age, gave up speaking it in public and with friends, as “she had somehow understood that the use of a different language in public space was a negative marker of difference” (108). Such discouragement is one of the ways in which racism delineates whiteness as a default, removing elements that would identify someone as not-white, rather than viewing cultural differences as enriching.