The Color of Choice, The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945), Vartan Matiossian (hardcover)

This 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 between the two world wars. They had to prove that they were “free white persons” to ensure their naturalization in the United States, where they went twice through the courts in 1909 and 1925. In Nazi Germany, they needed to document that they were stakeholders of the “Aryan race” to safeguard their existence. The book frames these developments within the context of the debates on whiteness and immigration in the United States that culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which established a quota that reduced to a minimum the number of immigrants from eastern and southern eastern Europe and western Asia, including Armenians, and the xenophobic discourse in Germany likening Armenians to Jews before and during Nazism.