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Not Quite White
 
 
Not Quite White

Type:
Documentary

Director:
Jamil Khoury, Stephen Combs

Year:
2012

Time:
24 minutes

Produced by:
Jamil Khoury

Written by:
Jamil Khoury

Language:
In English
    "A bold and dynamic examination of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the US...a useful tool for teaching students that race is more complex than what meets the eye." —Michelle Yates, Ph.D., Columbia College

"Zeroes in on whiteness as a constructed social and political category...that historically 'played favorites,' advantaging Northern/Western European immigrants over those from Eastern/Southern Europe and the Middle East." —PRNewswire


Inspired by Jamil Khoury’s short play WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole, Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness is a thought-provoking documentary that explores the complicated relationship of Arab and Slavic immigrants to American notions of whiteness.

The film integrates 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.

In Not Quite White, Jamil Khoury (Artistic Director of Chicago's Silk Road Rising) draws upon his own Arab (Syrian) and Slavic (Polish and Slovak) heritage as the lens through which to investigate the broader issue of immigrants achieving whiteness and hence qualifying as "fully American." The film advances society’s on-going conversations about the meaning of whiteness and efforts at redefining whiteness.

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. "Whiteness has everything to do with melanin and pigmentation and it has nothing to do with melanin and pigmentation," Khoury observes. "Whiteness is about power and borders and authorship. And whiteness can, and does, change."

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; Dominic A. Pacyga, Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago.

Watch the trailer:



DVD includes:
On Whiteness, a 16-minute video essay in which writer and co-director Jamil Khoury discusses the themes and ideas presented in his film.

Jamil Khoury's short film both/and is also available from AFD.

This film is available with a Digital Site License (DSL), which allows colleges, universities, or libraries to encode, locally host, and stream the film to their community on a closed, password-protected system.

Rental Information
This film is available from AFD for public screenings and television broadcast. For information regarding rental rates and formats, please contact [email protected] for institutional/non-theatrical screenings, or [email protected] for theatrical, festival, television, or other bookings.

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