“We share the same ancestry”: US Kurdish diasporas and the aspirational and ascriptive practices of race

Abstract

AbstractThe conflating of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region with Arabs is a common trope that also governs how we study West Asia and West Asian diasporas in the United States. I ethnographically highlight the lives of Kurds in mainly Nashville, Tennessee, and the northeastern United States while foregrounding their racial aspirations that disrupt essentialized depictions of the SWANA region and challenge the nation‐state's racial ascriptions. The use of the “Indo‐European” language family as racial classification in opposition to Arabs, the quotidian practices of racializing Kurds through the “Muslim‐looking” racial formation, and the everyday forms of solidarity with Arab Americans during this period of the global war on terror provide traction on the ways the ascriptions of race and aspirations to race influence Kurdish identity formation. Through evocations of “Indo‐European‐ness,” Kurdish Americans conceptualize transnational and transhistorical forms of whiteness/Europeanness/Aryan‐ness and racialized difference from Arabs, offer critiques of nation‐states, and accentuate dynamic forms of racial consciousness. Kurds simultaneously engage with ethnological understandings that are naturalized as racial difference at the very moment they must also manage the racial hysteria post‐9/11. With increased xenophobia and Islamophobia, Kurds challenge their racializations by embracing nonwhiteness that opens possibilities for coalition‐building with Arab Americans and various racial “Others.”