In 1909, two court cases in America debated the racial classification of two Ottoman male immigrants, one Arab, the other Armenian. Both cases ruled that the men were classified as “white,” a relevant decision given that according to the 1790 naturalization law, citizenship was limited to only “free white persons.” This paper illuminates how American racial debates were not confined to only US history but created ripples in the fin de siècle Ottoman Empire, notably through the encounter between American missionaries and local Ottomans. In this context, the treatment of Arab and Armenian Ottomans did not reflect the court ruling: they were assigned to the category of “native” which was considered by missionaries not only as different to that of the category of “white,” but often as oppositional. Beirut is the geographical focus of this paper, where American racial classifications encountered, and were combatted by local notions of identity, particularly in the context of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC). Whilst the fin de siècle history of identities in the city so often focuses on confessional divides, this paper views masculinity as a politicized identity that worked to combat racial and ethnic prejudices. Proving or disproving manhood of different sorts became part of the power dynamic between missionaries and Ottoman-Beiruti intellectuals. The case of John Wortabet is a clear example of how race and notions of masculinity intersected politically. Wortabet’s identity was entangled, but not uncommon of Ottoman Beiruti upper-middle class men; he was an Ottoman-Armenian-Arab, a Protestant, a nahdawi intellectual, a doctor, and faculty member at the missionary-run Syrian Protestant College (SPC). More unusual was that he was the only native “Founding Father” and early faculty member of the college. Through sources gathered from the American University of Beirut archives, the missionary press, the local Arab press, and Armenian biographical secondary sources, this paper traces Wortabet’s career at the SPC, and reveals how his position there brought him up against American racism, highlighting the contradiction between American claims of racial equality of Ottomans, and the reality of racial power dynamics as they played out. This paper concludes that despite overlaps, Wortabet ultimately chose to align himself with Ottoman notions of manhood, that had local understandings linked to prestige and class. He embraced the term “native” as a positive, rather than negative, securing himself as an ´adabi man, who was working for the good of civilisation and progress of Syria.