In 1979, Baldwin remarked to a crowd in Berkeley: “Our presence in this country terrifies every white man walking. They know they would not want to be black here. If they know that they know everything they need to know. And whatever else they say is a lie.”
Baldwin of course was referring to the long line of European immigrants in the United States who had “successfully” attempted to clone whiteness — which for Baldwin was an imitation of terror that claimed innocence. But I’m specifically interested in Baldwin’s claim in relationship to Arab immigrants, who, through the first part of the 20th century, had, like European immigrants, been successful in juridical claims to “whiteness,” thereby continuing in a long tradition of immigrants who had secured a racial affiliation that was decisively “not black.”[4] But as scholars like Nadine Naber and others have noted, this was no longer the case by 1980. Arabs could no longer claim whiteness in the public imagination (even if they could legally; most Arabs continue to mark “white” on US census reports). In short, by the last two decades of the 20th century, while Arab Americans certainly knew they did not want to be black here, they also knew that they could not be white here. (See Naber, Gualtieri, et al.)
As historians like Melani McAlister have noted, terrorism had been a “viable concern in foreign policy and an available plot device for films and novels in the 1970s,” but starting in the 1980s, “the discourse of terrorist threat developed in new and important ways” as a result of the Iran hostage crisis, whereby there was a “national narrative of victimization and longed-for revenge.” Arabs (though the Iranians were Persians, of course, not Arabs) were seen as a direct threat to American civilization, and cast in popular culture and public discourse as figures of terror.
After 9/11, African American and Arab comedians repeatedly joked that “Arab is the new Black.” Arabness took on the connotations of the “old Black” — as terrorist, deviant, and ubiquitous national and transnational threat. The joke intimated that Arabs had replaced, or at least joined, African Americans at the lowest rung of the American racial caste system. As Sohail Daulatzai notes, they were the “twin pillars of U.S. State practices, one domestically, one globally.”
In the midst of the Iran hostage crisis and the fall of the Shah, Baldwin was already writing about the intersections of domestic policies and American imperialism. For Baldwin there was no “old” and “new” black — there was something far more nuanced, far less obvious, and far more pernicious.