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Roya Rahmani (born May 1978) is an Afghan diplomat who has served as Afghanistan's first female ambassador to the United States and non-resident ambassador to Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic since December 2018. From 2016-2018, she served as Afghanistan's first female ambassador to Indonesia, first ever ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and non-resident ambassador to Singapore.

Previously, she worked for Afghanistan's Ministry of Education as a Planning and Evaluation Advisor (2011). She later joined Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first as a senior advisor to the Deputy Foreign Minister (2011), then as Director General of Regional Cooperation Initiatives (2012-2016).

Before entering government, she worked for several nonprofits that primarily focused on women's rights and education. She received a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from McGill University in 2003 and a master’s degree in public administration and international law at Columbia University in 2009.

Early life and education[edit]

Rahmani was born in Kabul in May of 1978, a year before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. After the Soviets left in 1989, the country descended into civil war. Her school was closed for months at a time due to the missiles hitting the city. She said "As I was growing up in Kabul, I never thought of visiting any other province because it was simply too insecure”. Making most of quote

In 1993, her family fled to Pakistan. She recalls “Starting in the ’90s, there was famine and drought, and during the 1992-96 civil war, we were literally pushed out of our homes. I remember our family hugging each other, thinking this would be the last night of our lives”. Once in Peshawar, she attended a Saudi-funded school for refugees, where she later recalled studying on the roof for an entire school year due to overcrowding. Rahmani commented on her experiences saying that "As an Afghan woman, very early on, like the rest of my cohort, we learned that you have to try to make the best out of what you have. So uncertainty was what dominated most of our lives." She says the experiences of her youth led her to the lifelong motto of "doing the best with what you have".

When Rahmani returned to Kabul in 1998, she returned a city changed by the Taliban. She says she "could forget about the university. As a woman, you weren’t even allowed to go to school. This is how things went from bad to worse." Ghost city quote. While living in Kabul, she refused to leave the house rather than put on a burqa as the Taliban required.

In 1999, she received a scholarship from the World University Service of Canada and went to McGill University, completing a bachelor's degree in software engineering. After graduating in 2004, Rahmani returned to Afghanistan and worked for a Canadian non-profit organization dedicated to women's education. She worked for other human rights nonprofits before moving to the United States to attended graduate school. She says "It became like a mission in my life that if I could do anything, anything, to stop a bomb from going off and killing people, or even a person, if I could do that, my mission in life is completed." MOVE

She completed a master's degree in public administration and international law at Columbia University in New York in 2009. She was a Fulbright scholar.

Career[edit]

After graduating with her bachelor's degree in 2004, Rahmani returned to Afghanistan and worked for several Canadian nonprofits focusing on human rights, women’s empowerment, and education. She also worked part-time as a subject matter expert with the NATO Joint Forces Training Center, and a consultant to the New York Department of Education, the United Nations Secretariat in New York, the Department of Trade and International Affairs of Canada, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, Women Living under Muslim Laws and other INGOs. During this time Rahmani worked on a marriage document that secured equitable rights for the family and contributed to data collection at a national level. She received the Best Human Rights Activist Award from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in 2007 for her work on this document.

She joined the Afghan government in 2011, working in the Ministry of Education and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

From June 2016-December 2018, Rahmani served as Afghanistan's first female ambassador to Indonesia, non-resident ambassador to Singapore, and first ever ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. She was the second woman appointed as an ambassador by President Ashraf Ghani, after he vowed to give women more leadership positions. She said Muslim women should be recognized as "good negotiators" because they could "embrace people more effectively and tenderly".

On 14 December 2018, Rahmani was appointed Ambassador to the United States by President Ghani, the first woman to hold the position. She took up the post just as President Trump announced his intention to withdraw troops from her country. She said, "women have been treated like a minority, but they are not a minority. Together, the women and the youth are actually a majority, and they are not willing to give up their rights. They are not willing to compromise their human rights and go back to the old days." She replaced Hamdullah Mohib, who had resigned three months earlier to become National Security Adviser.

In May 2019, Rahmani criticized the Trump government after Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad engaged in direct talks with the Taliban, who have rejected engaging in talks with the Afghan government, saying "They are not our government, they are not our representatives" and that ending the war "should be decided by the people who are most affected by the process."

Personal life[edit]

Rahmani is married and has one daughter, born in 2014. She is a Muslim.

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Legislation until the American Civil War and Reconstruction

The census

When the first census was conducted in 1790, there were three racial categories: free whites, blacks, and all other free peoples. Over time these categorizations evolved to reflect a more complex understanding of race, although the development of new categories often served a political purpose. Certain issues like the true whiteness of Southern European immigrants could not be addressed in the census, but anti-black and anti-Native American sentiment were supported through racial categorization.

Americans feared that mixed race citizens would be able to reap the benefits of being white and instituted laws to prevent this. Mixed race citizens could legally categorize themselves as white because of their ability to self-report race to the census bureau, the requirement of choosing only one racial category, and the ability of those who were only marginally black to appear white. By 1890 people were required to report any degree of African or Native American ancestry. The idea that a single drop of African or Indian blood qualified someone as officially black or Native American was a generally obeyed legal principle, although the “one-drop” rule was never codified federally. This qualification meant the mixed race individual in question could never obtain the benefits of being white.

Legislation during the nadir of American race relations

Racial construction and immigration

According to Benjamin Franklin at the time of America’s founding, the only true white people were the English and the Saxons, a common sentiment of the era. During the first major waves of immigration, groups modernly considered unquestionably white were not considered such at the time, including Southern and Eastern Europeans. The new populations came from eastern and southern Europe and were Catholic and Jewish, as opposed to the majority population in the United States of northern European and African American Protestants. The popularity of eugenics as well as the perception that these groups were undermining American culture and values led to their classification as nonwhite. This gave the government the opportunity to attempt to curtail the immigration of these specific groups using the National Origins Formula.

Two factors contributed to the eventual acceptance of these groups as white. Firstly, they proved their racial distinction from and superiority to blacks by supporting slavery and engaging in violence toward free blacks. This behavior is especially noted among the Irish. Secondly, they participated in the Civil War, demonstrating their patriotism, commitment to America, and ability to be a part of American society.

Importantly, this period also saw the Yick Wo v. Hopkins case in 1886, which was the first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that was race-neutral on its face that was administered in a prejudicial manner was an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause. Although the law itself which banned wood laundries did not specify a certain race, it resulted in specifically radicalized impacts, and Yick Wo's lawyers discovered that the Chinese were singled out within the recorded minutes of the meeting. This not only established that a law with unequal impact is discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional, but strengthened the equal protection outlined in the 14th Amendment.

Counter-narratives

Although much of the scholarship on studies of whiteness argues that Southern and Eastern Europeans were treated as nonwhite by earlier immigrants, there is also a substantial body of scholarship countering this narrative, most notably White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 by historian Thomas Guglielmo. He and others contend that Italians were in fact considered white and were able to reap the immediate benefits that status conferred, such as a right to citizenship, despite the fact that they were somewhat discriminated against for their nationality. He specifically attempts to differentiate between “color” and “race”, claiming that while Italians were racially Italian, when considered in a more binary manner they were still white in color. This undeniable classification as phenotypically white allowed them, along with other Southern and European immigrants to obtain all the benefits that being white conferred. Historian and anthropologist Patrick Wolfe makes a similar argument, saying that the experience of the European immigrant is simply incomparable to that of a black American, making the evidence of their whiteness indisputable.

The National Origins Formula

The 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and then the Immigration Act of 1924, restricted immigration according to national origins. While the Emergency Quota Act used the census of 1910, xenophobic fears in the WASP community lead to the adoption of the 1890 census, more favorable to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population, for the uses of the Immigration Act of 1924, which responded to rising immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia.

One of the goal of this National Origins Formula, established in 1929, was explicitly to keep the status quo distribution of ethnicity, by allocating quotas in proportion to the actual population. The idea was that immigration would not be allowed to change the "national character". Total annual immigration was capped at 150,000. Asians were excluded but residents of nations in the Americas were not restricted, thus making official the racial discrimination in immigration laws. This system was repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. However, currently implemented immigration laws are still largely subject to national origin-based quotas.

The "Yellow Peril"

The 1868 Burlingame Treaty encouraged Chinese immigration to meet labor needs, especially on the railroads in the West. However, only a few years later the need for foreign labor declined as more Americans moved West. As gold mining became less fruitful, hostility toward Asian competition increased. Violence against Asians was prevalent, leading to the largest lynching in American history, the Chinese Massacre of 1871. Consequently, a barrage of legislation was passed in order to restrict Asian immigration, a group that was now characterized as the "Yellow Peril". The enforcement of this legislation required a more concrete formation of what Asian as a race entailed and the courts were used to construct this.

Key Legislation

Legislation	Description
Page Act of 1875	The Page Act had two primary provisions. The first cracked down on coolie labor practices where Asians would be transported to the United States against their will and forced to serve an indenture. The second had much more far reaching implications. It strictly prohibited the immigration of prostitutes, especially from Asia. This led to the de facto barring of all Asian immigrant women as they were almost always accused of being prostitutes, a claim that is almost impossible to disprove. Although the law was unsuccessful in curtailing the immigration of Asian men, the flow of women stopped almost entirely.
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882	The Chinese Exclusion Act replaced the 1868 Burlingame Treaty. It provided that Chinese living in the United States would be able to live there free of religious persecution, but
Immigration Act of 1917	This created an "Asiatic Barred Zone" under nativist influence.
Cable Act of 1922	The Cable Act of 1922 guaranteed independent female citizenship only to women who were married to "alien[s] eligible to naturalization". [2] At the time of the law's passage, Asian aliens were not considered to be racially eligible for U.S. citizenship. [3] [4] As such, the Cable Act only partially reversed previous policies, granting independent female citizenship only to women who married non-Asians. The Cable Act effectively revoked the U.S. citizenship of any woman who married an Asian alien.
National Origins Quota of 1924	The National Origins Quota of 1924 also included a reference aimed against Japanese citizens, who were ineligible for naturalization and could not either be accepted on US territory.

Asian Immigration and "Whiteness"

Discriminatory laws were mostly enacted according to national origins, but also involved racial typologies developed by scientific racism theorists. While those who were racially Asian were excluded from obtaining U.S. citizenship, immigration from Asian countries was not entirely barred. A small quota allowed for the emigration of white residents from these countries. These racial naturalization requirements necessitated the more concrete ideation of the category of “Asian” as distinct from white so immigrants could be rejected on the basis of race instead of national origin. This need was quickly supplied by a plethora of judicial rulings and pieces of legislation focused primarily on classifications based contradictorily on phenotypic features, scientific objectivism, and “common knowledge”, depending on the case. The two most important cases are Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923).

Japanese-born Takao Ozawa applied for citizenship after living in the United States for 20 years, but his application was denied because he was not considered white. Ozawa argued that he was physically whiter than many people considered “white” and thus should also be considered such. The courts rejected this, claiming that Japanese were not considered scientifically to be a part of the Caucasian race since they were not from the Caucasus region.

The following year, Indian Bhagat Singh Thind argued that since he was both technically Caucasian and Aryan he should be considered white. Indian Americans were not classified as members of any race until the end of the 19th century. Prior to this case, Indians were sometimes granted citizenship on this premise, but Thind's citizenship was in the process of being revoked for the second time when he sued the United States. The Supreme Court altered its approach and said that while he may be technically Caucasian, common knowledge does not equate Caucasian with the general understanding of "white". Justice George Sutherland delivered the opinion on the unanimous ruling, stating that the "white" race must be interpreted "in accordance with the understanding of the common man from whose vocabulary they were taken". This ruling, which officially classified all Indians as non-white, retroactively stripped Indians of citizenship and land rights. The decision was intended to placate racist Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) demands, which were growing in proportion to increasing outrage at the Turban Tide / Hindoo Invasion [sic] alongside the pre-existing outrage at the "Yellow Peril". While mid-20th century legislation has removed much of the statutory discrimination against Asians, no case has overturned this 1923 classification. Hence, this classification remains, and is still relevant today because many laws and quotas are race-based.

The civil rights movement and later

Hispanic immigration

Year	Legislation	Description
1848	Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo	This treaty signed at the end of the Mexican-American war established Mexicans as white and thus as eligible for U.S. citizenship.
1924	Immigration Act of 1924	The first major restrictions on immigration are announced and the term "illegal alien" is introduced to American's vocabulary.
1942	Bracero program	This program allowed Mexicans to work in the United States seasonally to fill the labor shortage in agriculture caused by World War II. From 1942-64, the program brought in approximately 200,000 braceros a year.
1965	Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965	This is the first instance of immigration from the Western Hemisphere being restricted. Despite the termination of the Bracero program and a low number of visas available for unskilled Mexican workers, Mexican guest workers were still sought after leading to an increase in illegal immigration. This is the first time this immigration is classified as illegal.
1986	Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986	As the Cold War reached Central America and the Mexican economy disintegrated, Latin immigration to the United States increased. In response, IRCA was passed, which simultaneously provided amnesty to all illegal immigrants already in the United States and severely penalized anyone who employed or assisted an illegal immigrant in any way.
1996	Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996	The primary purpose of this law was to increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who commit crimes while in the United States. This was intended primarily to decrease alien smuggling and the use of false documents. Undocumented immigrants could now be summarily deported for committing either a misdemeanor or a felony. The border was also increasingly militarized at this time.