Silk Road Rising Releases NOT QUITE WHITE Documentary

Silk Road Rising's Not Quite White:  Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of ContesTEd Whiteness (24 min., 8 sec.), directed by Jamil Khoury and Stephen Combs, explores the complicated relationship of Arab and Slavic immigrants to American notions of whiteness. To view the documentary, CLICK HERE.

Not Quite White expands the American conversation on race by zeroing in on whiteness as a constructed social and political category, a "slippery slope" that historically "played favorites," advantaging Northern and Western European immigrants over immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and the Middle East.

Inspired by Jamil Khoury's short play WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole, Not Quite Whiteintegrates scenes from WASP alongside interviews with Arab American and Polish American academics who reflect upon "contested" and "probationary" categories of whiteness and the use of anti-Black racism as a "whitening" dye.

Not just for white people, and not just for Arabs and Slavs, Not Quite White proceeds from the assumption that whiteness affects all our lives and that we all need to critically engage whiteness. In the history of American whiteness, several groups of ostensibly "white" people have, at different times and for different reasons, been assigned a "conditional" or "partial" white status. AppalachIan Whites and poor whites were two such groups. Greek, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants also endured periods of "transitional" whiteness, consigned to a sort of white purgatory.

The academics featured in Not Quite White include:  Roxane Assaf, Adjunct Faculty, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ann Hetzel Gunkel, Director of Cultural Studies, Columbia College Chicago; John Tofik Karam, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, De Paul University; and Dominic A. Pacyga, Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago.