SOURCE: MICHIGAN LIVE

ANN ARBOR, MI – Middle Eastern and North African students at the University of Michigan are calling on the university’s administration and Board of Regents to recognize their identities on its forms and surveys that collect demographic data on campus.

After receiving support from UM’s Literature, Science & the Arts Student Government earlier this fall calling on the university’s administration to add the Middle Eastern/North African (ME/NA) identity category to its applications, a number of students and faculty members organizing under #WeExist spoke during the meeting on Thursday, Dec. 7, urging the Board of Regents to do the same.

UM senior Jad Elharake said ME/NA students have raised the issue to the university for more than a decade, but their concerns were not prioritized or acted upon. With the additional support of a resolution passed by UM’s Central Student Government in February,he believes it is time for UM to act.

“Not identifying ME/NA students, faculty and staff is problematic for a number of reasons that impact campus climate, including, but not limited to: Student recruitment and retention efforts; identifying trends in the hiring of faculty, staff and administration; and even bias incident reporting,” Elharake said.

“Given that we live in a state with the largest concentration of ME/NA individuals, outside of the Middle East and North Africa, UM has a unique regional responsibility to implement the ME/NA identity category,” he added. “…We are not ‘other.'”

The #WeExist group – consisting of students from all three UM campuses – circulated an online petition to faculty and staff at UM to garner support for the effort, collecting more than 700 signatures.

In the past year, the UM Islamophobia Working Group identified the ME/NA identity box as a central Diversity, Equity and Inclusion concern in its report to the University. In that time, more than 12 student governments at UM have passed a resolution or written a statement of solidarity with the #WeExist movement, the petition states.

“ME/NA students, constrained by Census categories, are expected to check the white identity box,” the petition states. “However, many people of Middle Eastern and North African descent do not identify with or have the lived experiences of being white in the U.S., especially in a post-9/11 environment of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. In addition, the lack of an identity box for UM’s ME/NA students perpetuates the erasure that many marginalized communities experience.”

UM doctoral student Yahya Alami Hafez said he was part of a similar effort to have the identity added across the University of California System as an undergraduate. It was implemented by the UC System four years ago. 

“This is already starting to attract scholars, students and donors for the unique access to data that this is providing,” he said. “We have a unique opportunity here to be competitive with the UC System by expanding the demographic data collection beyond undergraduate admissions and financial aid to all demographic data collection.”

Having to check a box on forms identifying themselves as “white” or “other” is problematic, UM student Sara Alqaragholy said.

To be lumped in with people who have different histories and with those “who are viewed in the eyes of American society as more supreme than us,” disregards the identities of students, faculty and staff whose families have origins in the League of Arab States, she said, which consists of 22 different nations.

The Arab American Institute estimated that nearly 3.7 million Americans trace their roots to an Arab country. According to NPR, after years of advocacy groups pressuring the U.S. Census Bureau to create a separate geographic category for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent, the bureau is recommending that MENA be added to the 2020 census.

Alquaragholy said she would like to see UM implement the change sooner than that.

“We do not know how well our students are doing financially or socially,” Alqaragholy said. “Are we being disproportionately affected by hate crimes? How do we know our special needs? What are our graduation rates? We cannot address these needs if we don’t know how many of us there are.”

After hearing the concerns of students and faculty, Regents Mark Bernstein and Andrea Fischer Newman offered different opinions on whether the university should proceed in implementing the ME/NA identity on its forms and applications.

“I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t do this,” Bernstein said. “I just want you to know, based on the conversations that we’ve had and with other students, I strongly recommend or at least urge the university to consider this in a very serious way.”

Newman encouraged the board to look into the request more thoroughly before moving forward.

“I do have some concerns, and would like to have that discussion before coming to a conclusion,” she said. “I just want to make that clear that there is a difference of opinion, potentially.”