Loading ...“This Community Is Not A White Community”
After decades of lobbying, Arab-Americans may no longer be counted as white on the U.S. Census. Starting this month, the Census Bureau is testing different ways to allow people to identify as being from the Middle East and North Africa, or MENA.
Advocates are seeking changes to the census that accurately reflect the realities of life as Middle Easterners in the United States after the 9/11 attacks, and the fact that a growing number of young Arab-Americans identify as minorities.
“We’re being profiled, and we’re being targeted, but when we try to raise objections or file complaints, we get lost in the numbers,” said Samer Khalef, president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Younger Arab-Americans are much more likely to identify as non-white, said Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer who used to work for the Arab-American Institute. Roughly half of Abou-Chedid’s family is descended from Lebanese immigrants who came to the U.S. in the late 19th Century, while the other half has stronger ties to Lebanon. Abou-Chedid is light-skinned and comfortable navigating American culture: If she felt so inclined, she said, she could strive to be perceived as a white American.
And yet, like many of her younger relatives and friends, Abou-Chedid identifies strongly as Arab-American and considers herself a woman of color. This sometimes perplexes her older, more deeply assimilated relatives, whose reasoning Abou-Chedid described as, “Why would you want to make yourself different if — like Italian and Irish immigrants — you could pass as white?”
This generational difference, according to many younger Arab-Americans, has a lot to do with the discrimination Arabs in the U.S. experienced after 9/11. “When a certain part of your identity feels like it’s under attack, your response is to assert that part of your identity,” Abou-Chedid said.
Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, grew up the daughter of Palestinian immigrants in South Brooklyn. Although she always felt connected to her roots, she never wore a headscarf in her childhood or adolescence, and, she said, “could have been Italian, or Russian, or light-skinned Puerto Rican.”
Sarsour was 21 years old and had just begun to involve herself in community work when 9/11 happened, and the aftermath of the attacks came to have a permanent impact on her identity. She recalled having Middle Eastern women come to her office on a daily basis saying that men had come to their house and taken their husbands away, leaving behind only a business card. These business cards, representing a smattering of federal and local law enforcement agents, accumulated in a basket that Sarsour kept on her desk.
Meanwhile, following the 9/11 attacks, those perceived as Muslims or Arabs were soon targeted in violent hate crimes across the country that continue to this day. Middle Easterners in the U.S. have also been subject to intrusive state surveillance. Sarsour, for one, learned from AP reporters that, in 2009, the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance unit had tried to infiltrate her group’s board of directors.
In 2010, Sarsour helped lead a campaign called “Check It Right, You Ain’t White,” to urge Arab-Americans not to identify as white on the census. Most previous attempts to obtain recognition for Middle Easterners in the census were similarly spearheaded by Arab-Americans, driven largely by a defiant sense of ethnic pride, and sought a designation that was specifically Arab. But these efforts failed to persuade the Census Bureau, in part because there was intense disagreement about how to define the category.
Arab-Americans are also motivated by a strong sense of pride, said Khalef of the Anti-Discrimination Center. Khalef, who was born in Syria to Palestinian and Syrian parents, moved to Paterson, New Jersey, as a child. He lived in an Arab enclave, surrounded by similar pockets of immigrants — Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and the like — with whom he identified far more than with his white friends.
“You had all these ethnicities that were proud to be different,” he said. “They had their Puerto Rican Day parades, their Jamaican festivals. And we were the same way. We never thought of ourselves as white.”
Arab Americans may not have thought of themselves as white, but the census ensures that they are counted that way.
Germine Awad, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who was born in Egypt to Coptic parents and moved to the United States as an infant, recently met with officials from the Census Bureau. She learned that any time someone chooses “some other race” on the decennial census, then writes in an ethnicity or nationality from the Middle East or North Africa, they are promptly re-coded as white.
“That was so shocking,” said Awad. She understood that the Census Bureau has no choice — the government has classified Middle Easterners as white for more than a century — but this was a blunt metaphor for the erasure of her and her children’s identity.
“Being forced to put that down is not reflecting people’s truths,” she said. “People just want recognition.”
Source: www.buzzfeed.com