Arab Americans, others of Middle Eastern Descent Say Census Forms Make Them Feel Invisible
SOURCE: HOUSTON CHRONICLE
BY: MASSARAH MIKATI
When Randa Kayyali reached the race and ethnicity portion of the 2010 Census, she stared at the form for a while.
Her options were white, Hispanic and/or Latino, black/African-American, Asian, Native Hawaiian and American Indian. She didn’t see a category for herself on the survey: Arab American. So she checked “Other.”
Kayyali is among millions of Middle Easterners living in the U.S. — hundreds of thousands in Texas and Houston — who are severely undercounted because they don’t have a precise category to denote their background on census surveys, researchers and advocates say.
Currently, the bureau defines “white” as those of European, Middle Eastern or North African descent. But many people of Middle Eastern and North African origins and descent argue otherwise— saying their background, culture and overall experience in the United States makes it clear that they are not white, nor viewed as white.
The U.S. Census Bureau came close to including a “MENA” category (for Middle East and North Africa) in the 2020 Census, recommending it as an optimal addition in a 2017 study. But in 2018, the bureau announced that it would not include the category at the direction of federal budget officials.
The communities have responded in frustration, fury, and in some cases, lawsuits. Not only are they being rendered invisible, but advocates fear they are losing out on political representation and services for their unique economic, health and educational needs. According to the 2020 Census website, the survey results determine the distribution of over $675 billion in federal funding.
“It’s really unfortunate,” said Hassan Jaber, who is president of the Arab American nonprofit organization ACCESS and previously served on the Census Advisory Committee for six years. “All the research for the past six years indicated that if it were available, communities from MENA backgrounds would choose MENA instead of white.”
Marginalized and made invisible
A half-century ago, though, George Shishim had to fight to be classified as white.
Until 1965, non-white immigrants were not eligible for citizenship in the U.S. That initially included Shishim, a Syrian-Lebanese immigrant who had been classified as Asian, along with a large wave of predominantly Arab Christian immigrants at the time. But Shishim successfully challenged his racial classification in court in Los Angeles in 1909, and Middle Easterners have been considered “white” for census purposes ever since.
“They clearly, like all immigrants who came to this country, understood the racial hierarchies,” said Ussama Makdisi, chair of the Arab Studies department at Rice University.
They also were coming from a very different world than their counterparts who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s and later.
In the late 1800s, nation-states hadn’t existed in the Middle East yet — it was still the Ottoman Empire. Colonialism had not hit the region, resulting in a “pan-Arab” movement that spread like wildfire across the Arab world, encouraging the colonized to be proud of their identity. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict had not begun.
And so when the next major wave of Arab immigrants started coming to the U.S. after the 1960s, there was a different dialogue, idea and identification of what it meant to be Arab.
“These people are shaped very powerfully by that context of the Arab world,” Makdisi said. “And that’s why they’re acutely aware of what it means to be Arab in a way very different from the early immigrants.”
By the 1980s, and with the establishment of a myriad of organizations advocating for Middle Easterners, those new immigrants wanted to be taken out of the white category.
The Arab American Institute, a nonprofit organization, has been advocating for the bureau to add a MENA category to the census since the 1990s alongside other groups, to no avail.
Through the last census, the only way Middle Easterners could denote their background was if they were chosen to complete a long-form survey, which included a question about ancestry — leaving major discrepancies in the estimated number of Middle Easterners in the country.
In a footnote on one of their recent reports, the Arab American Institute said the sparsely-dispersed long form surveys cause an undercount of Arabs by a factor of about three.
“Reasons for the undercount include the placement of and limits of the ancestry question (as distinct from race and ethnicity); the effect of the sample methodology on small, unevenly distributed ethnic groups; high levels of out-marriage among the third and fourth generations; distrust/misunderstanding of government surveys among more recent immigrants, resulting in non-response by some; and the exclusion of certain sub-groups from Arabic speaking countries, such as the Somali and Sudanese, from the Arab category,” the footnote reads.
According to the group’s estimates, there are 3.7 million Americans of Arab descent. The census had estimated just 1.9 million. Texas has the fourth-largest Arab American population in the country at over 124,000, according to the Arab American Institute.
A Houston Chronicle analysis of long form census data found that the Middle Eastern population — which includes people from Turkey, Iran and Israel — was over 281,000 in Texas for 2013, and over 98,300 in the Houston metro area. However, the limited data yielded margins of error of 24,400 and over 27,700, respectively — decreasing the data’s reliability.
“There are many segments of our community that don’t recognize themselves on the existing race/ethnicity questions, and this could provide more encouragement for them to participate,” said Helen Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute. “It’s extremely important because many local, state and county governments rely on census data to provide services to their immigrant and foreign-speaking populations, and one of the ways those services can be allocated appropriately is if there is official data counts from the U.S. Census.”
According to Jaber, some of the issues unique to the Arab community in the Detroit area — which has the largest Arab population in the country — include higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, diabetes, smoke addiction and unemployment.
“These are the things that are especially challenging to Arab Americans, but it doesn’t show in the white population as Arabs,” Jaber said. “We could at least understand the needs better, and make a better argument for funding.”
‘A tangled scheme of yarn’
Within the Middle Eastern community itself, not everyone agrees on the merits of identifying as white or not. Researchers, academics and community members have observed divides along generational, and even religious, lines.