Judge George H. Hutton peered across his bench in the direction of George Shishim. Shishim, a longtime resident of California and native of the Mount Lebanon Province (modern-day Lebanon) of the Ottoman Empire, had come to Hutton's court to petition for American citizenship. After living in Los Angeles as a resident alien and serving as a policeman for the LAPD, he was poised to finally become a naturalized citizen and a formal member of the country he served and for which he felt a great affinity. … Short on rebuttals, Shishim closed with the lone argument that he hoped would resonate with Judge Hutton and save his petition. It was a Hail Mary, a final plea. He rose from his seat, stood firmly with his LAPD badge glistening from his jacket, and testified, "If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land." Shishim was effectively stating that if Jesus were white, the court would also have to find him to be white, or render an admission that Jesus was not white—an admission that would undermine the construction of Jesus as a white man and of Christianity as a portal toward whiteness. Christianity was one of the primary hallmarks of whiteness in the United States in the early twentieth century, and Shishim's spirited appeal insisted that although he was from the Muslim world, he was not a Muslim but in fact a Christian, and therefore white. … Hutton, conditioned to believe that anybody who hailed from the Middle East was Muslim, struggled with this dissonance. But Shishim's brilliant appeal to Christianity managed to persuade Hutton, and Shishim became the first immigrant from the Middle East to be naturalized as an American citizen and judicially ruled white by law. "When the court finally determined Shishim to be a white person, thus allowing for his acquisition of citizenship," a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that "it made every feature of his dark, swarthy countenance radiate with pleasure and hope."

XREF: Echoes the racial constructionist literature on how Middle Easterners and other immigrant groups were legally classified as white/non-white based on cultural markers in early 20th-century naturalization cases.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 177