This paper will examine translations of race in Arthur Wormhoudt’s Diwan Antara Ibn Shaddan, Richard Burton’s One Thousand and one Nights and Ella Elliot’s translation of Idriss Ali’s Nubian novel Poor. I will look at what is lost when Wormhoudt, Burton and Elliott used Western words of race in their translations. While exploring examples of these limitations, the paper will argue that the translators used verbal analogies of race and blackness in these texts within the context of white supremacy and the Western biological view of race, which they projected into the Arabic texts, often doing disservice to these narratives. Such transnational analogies ignore the embedded nature of race, ethnicity, status and hierarchy and how they vary from one Arab region to another and mutate according to other social factors. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s essay “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” (2007) in which she states that whiteness is “an orientation that puts certain things within reach” (p. 126), I will argue that what “Abiad” (white) might have meant to Arabs is, in Ahmed’s words, a “likeness” with fellow members of society because of the “proximity of shared residence” (p. 124). In pre-Islamic Arabia, for instance, skin color was relative, and there was a variety of terms used in the context of describing skin complexion that were mostly used to differentiate what was familiar from what was “other.” My paper will provide close readings of selected passages from these texts to show how the translations conducted by Wormhoudt, Burton and Elliot ignored these factors when translating race in Arabic narratives.