“Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South”

“Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South”

In this article Sarah Gualtieri uses a combination of newspapers, government data, journals, reports, court cases, and primary accounts as her historical backing for this article. She illustrates the unique position Arab-Americans have had since the Jim Crow Era, a racialization which has shifted and continues into modern times (especiallt post 9/11). In this piece she focuses on Arab migrants' perceived "whiteness" and despite how they may have "looked white" on the outside, they were still subject to discrimination and violence throughout American history. She writes that Arabs were "a minority without minority status" and "the most invisible of the invisibles". She traces the 1929 lynching of Nicholas and Fannie Romey and how because he lacked roots in the southern community and "belonged to a suspect immigrant group", he was subject to exclusion from white controlled spaces. She also writes that the untimely deaths of Nicholas and Fannie "form part of the sediment on which later racialization projects were, and are, being built."

Sarah Gualtieri, “Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no 3 (Summer 2004): 63-85.