In recent decades, historians of the Syrian mahjar (“place of migration” or more conceptually, diaspora) have corrected the popular narrative that emigration from Ottoman Syria was a response to sectarian violence targeting Christians in particular. Instead, they have shown how late nineteenth-century emigration was the result of structural economic forces as well as complicated personal motivations and trajectories. And while these same scholars have also highlighted the ways in which the institutions and mobilizations of the mahjar were often organized by and through sect, less emphasis has been placed on the ways in which this diaspora negotiated their civic and political subjectivities through sectarian belonging. Syrian-Lebanese of the mahjar spilled much ink over the divisive role sectarianism played in the diaspora, with Phillip Hitti claiming in his book The Syrians in America (1924) that: “The Syrian is a man without a country par excellence. His patriotism takes the form of family and sect.” Such reticence to examine the mahjar specifically through the lens of sectarianism is perhaps due to the above-historiographic corrective, as well as the field’s intervention that Middle East sectarianisms are not primordial but constructed and produced at specific historical junctures. This paper puts the rich historical sources of the Syrian-American press in conversation with French and American archival sources of the early twentieth century. Publications such as al-Huda, al-Bayan, and Mir’at al-Gharb—all newspapers published in New York—allow us to analyze the ways in which sect and sectarianism in the mahjar were key processes through which the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora exercised and negotiated transnational influence vis-a-vis homeland and one another. Yet sectarian sentiment was not a simple articulation of religious difference. Often times, Syrian-Lebanese writers used the discourse of racial difference to express their political disagreements with their rivals in the mahjar. With a focus on the diverse positions of the diaspora vis-à-vis political watersheds like the Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927, this paper investigates the unique slippages between sect and race. It argues that in order to fully understand diasporic politics and sectarianism, we must consider the racially charged landscape of the post-World War I United States.