The Gray Area

In the early 1990s, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami—then a graduate student studying linguistics in Los Angeles—found herself filling out administrative paperwork at the University of Southern California so she could teach Arabic and French to undergrads. She puzzled over a section that asked her to self-identify with one of a limited number of racial categories: American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black; Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander; and White.

Being an Arab Muslim immigrant from Morocco, she did not see herself in those categories. Was she white? Maybe: according to the, a book of essays, “both by the imperative to self-identify and by the narrowness of the categories on the list. Where would Moroccans fit in such categories?”