The Color of Choice

The extensive research literature on race has paid little attention to Armenians. Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were “free white persons” to ensure their naturalization in the United States, while in Nazi Germany they needed to document that they were stakeholders of the “Aryan race” to safeguard their existence. Vartan Matiossian’s book is the first comprehensive account of a mostly untold story of dehumanization and racism in Europe and America that enhanced the racial and moral profiling of Armenians as undesirables. The book frames this development within the context of the debates on whiteness and immigration in the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the xenophobic discourse in Germany before and during Nazism likening Armenians to Jews.