Arab Americans ask not to be counted as white in the 2020 census

Arab Americans are asking the US government to widen the ethnic categories in the US census, to be held in 2020, arguing that being classified as ”white” is detrimental to their interests.

Activists say that Arab-Americans are ”white without the privilege”. As far as they are considered white, community advocates say, the members of the minority lose some advantages such as having Arabic translations on ballot papers or being included in demographics studies by organizations like the National Institutes of Health.

Advocates are asking the government to widen the ethnic categories by adding a ”Middle East and North Africa” box, citing situations in witch even black Sudanese Arabs were labeled ”white” in the previous census.

The president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Samer Khalaf, said the lack of the ”Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) box leads to the marginalization of his community.

”Dearborn, Michigan – considered the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States – it is classified as a majority white city. Why? Because all the Arabs are considered white,” he said in an interview for the Middle East Eye.

According to the US election laws, if a language other than English is widely spoken in an area, it must be represented on ballot papers, Khalaf said.

”There is nowhere where Arabic translation is on the ballot because we can’t prove that we are a certain percentage in any one district,” he said.

Khalaf added that the census maps and their data on population and demographic features are used by government agencies and NGOs.

”By having no representation meant the community is invisible. For example, the National Institutes of Health had never conducted a study on Arab Americans because of the lack of demographic data on their communities.”

Khalaf added that the ”Middle East and North Africa” category and not ”Arab” was chosen to include smaller ethnic groups from the Middle East that do not consider themselves Arab, such as the Kurds, Berbers and Assyrians.

Amer Zahr: ”I’ll take what I can get”

Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian who produced a feature documentary titled ”We Are Not White”, said he would prefer the ”Arab American” category to MENA, but he would agree to any box as long as it it’s not ”white”.

He said the term ”Middle East” was imposed on Arabs by the west, adding that the different groups who come from the region, including Turks, Iranians and Israelis, do not share the same culture or language as Arabs.

”But look, I’ll take what I can get because I think the good from the box outweighs the bad. We don’t enjoy, obviously, any of the benefits of white privilege as they exist in America,” he said.

The executive director of ACCESS, Hassan Jaber, an Arab American social services organisation from Dearborn, said adding the MENA category on the 2020 census would have significant implications for the community.

”We can actually start to know the needs, the challenges, the makeup of the community. We can also start to address any issues of inequity when it comes to health, when it comes to employment, when it comes to small businesses,” he said.

But Jaber added that creating a new demographic category for the census is a complicated process, requiring multiple studies and focus groups before it could be adopted by the Office of Management and Budget.

The under-counting of Arab-Americans

According to the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington-based think-tank, the US Census does provide estimates on the number of Arab Americans, based on ancestry data, but the approach leads to major under-counting.

AAI estimates the number of Arabs in the United States to be 3.7 million, witch is more than twice the number calculated by the federal government.

”We have been invisible when it comes to much-needed programmes, services and research, but highly visible and targeted by government programmes that view us through a securitised lens. Both are untenable,” the institute’s director, Maya Berry, told Middle East Eye.

Ironically, the current desire to not be counted as white comes in contradiction to the desire of early Arab immigrants in the US, who once fought for the label.

In the 19th century, only ”aliens being free white persons” were eligible for naturalization.

Following the civil war, immigrants of African descent were also able to acquire US citizenship with the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1870, but the law banned Asian immigrants from becoming citizens.

This state of affairs left a major influx of Arabs who came to the United States in the early 20th century from the Levant, unsatisfied.

In 1915, George Dow, a Syrian immigrant, sued the federal government for turning down his request for naturalization.

The federal judge finally decided that ”it seems to be true beyond question that the generally received opinion was that the inhabitants of a portion of Asia, including Syria, were to be classed as white persons.”