Swara Salih, a 32-year-old Kurdish American, has reluctantly marked “white” on federal forms his entire life. But that’s not what he sees when he looks in the mirror.
“My whole life I was a brown kid, I had darker skin than my white friends,” Salih told NBC News. “I was very culturally confused in that way as a kid, like, ‘What am I supposed to be?’ I’m not white, I’m not black, I’m not Latino.”
The new category of Middle East or North Africa the Office of Management and Budget announced on Thursday will help lift the cloak of invisibility that has shrouded community members like Salih for decades, experts say.
Adding this category to OMB’s race and ethnicity standards for the first time in U.S. history means that about 8 million Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent will no longer have to select “white” or “other in federal forms, including the US Census.
“We were forced to identify as something we weren’t, and in a way that erased the community and erased all data about the community,” said Abed Ayoub, the national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). one of the first advocacy groups to push for an identifier for MENA Americans. “We’re a diverse community and we haven’t been able – since we’ve been here – to get an accurate picture of who we are.”
The new identifier will have six subcategories under it that include Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Israeli, which were chosen to represent the largest population groups in the US, an OMB spokesman said. The ID will also include a blank space where people can write how they identify if their nationality is not one of the subcategories.
While advocacy groups don’t think the geographic addition goes far enough to capture the region’s diversity, they say it’s a long-awaited step in the right direction.
Undercounted, underrepresented and overlooked
The lack of an identifier for Middle Eastern and North African Americans has left them undercounted, underrepresented, and overlooked in American society.
MENA Americans can trace their ancestry to more than a dozen countries, including Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Turkey and Yemen. The region is racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, and people from there can be white, brown, or black, as well as identify with an ethnic group, such as Arabs, Amazigh, Kurds, Chaldeans, and others. Immigration from countries in the region to the U.S. began in the late 1800s and has increased in recent decades largely due to political unrest, according to the Immigration Policy Institute.
The largest MENA group in the US is Arab-American, according to data collected by advocacy groups. The new identifier came days before the start of Arab American Heritage Month on April 1.
Tariq Ra’ouf, 33, a Palestinian American, described feeling like his identity was being erased when he had to write “white” on job applications.
“When I fill them out they’re like, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ because I’m not white,” Ra’ouf said. “And then if I say I’m white, I might lose opportunities to companies that want to hire culturally and ethnically diverse employees. Who knows how many applications people may have lost because they’re forced to pay a race that doesn’t represent them.”
MENA and white communities are different in many ways, including culturally, socio-economically and politically. A MENA ID will help federal agencies collect critical data that will in turn improve policy decisions, said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute (AAI). The lack of an identifier meant that research on the community was largely anecdotal and led to its members missing out on federal resources such as health and social services.
“This class is how we address that our community has been rendered invisible in the data for decades,” Berry said. “There’s immediate damage when communities don’t have the kind of information they need, anywhere from the issues we saw during the Covid pandemic, the way congressional districts are drawn, health research for ours, until our protection. civil rights.”
Even the 8 million MENA Americans that advocacy groups estimate live in the U.S. may be an undercount, Ayoub says.
“We will have clear data on the number of people from the region that are in this country, where we live — everything from our spending habits to health issues to education,” Ayoub says of adding the identifier. “In this day and age, you need real data to be a strong advocate for your community. And that will allow us to get a better picture of who our community is.”
Rauf is excited that he will no longer have to fake himself.
“I think the time has come,” he said. “It’s a bit disappointing that it’s taken so long to get to this point. But mostly, I think it’s just exciting because we’re really going to be able to get a greater sense of how many of us there are in this country and get better representation.”
A decades-long effort
Getting a MENA ID on the census has been a decades-long effort by groups like ADC and AAI.
The Census Bureau already tested the category in 2015 and found gave data that provided better insight into the MENA community. The charge was dropped when the Trump administration took office.
OMB announced the long-awaited update more than a year after the Federal Interagency Technical Task Force on Race and Ethnicity Standards It is recommended to add the identifier as a new category. This is the first time OMB has updated the standards for race and ethnicity since 1997. Prior to this change, there were five categories for data on race and two for ethnicity: American Indian or Alaska Native. Asian; Black or African American? Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. White; Hispanic or Latino? and non-Hispanic or Latino.
OMB issued guidance to all federal agencies “to begin updating their surveys and administrative forms as quickly as possible,” according to a statement. Federal agencies have five years to bring all data collection into compliance with the updated standards, meaning Americans can start seeing this update in documents within that time frame.
Berry says we may see a ‘ripple effect’ in which nongovernmental institutions, such as hospitals and universities, adopt OMB’s new standards.
“Let’s say I’m a hospital and I want to apply for federal research grants. I would absolutely make sure I matched federal standards,” Berry said. “I can’t think of a single aspect of our society — corporations, health institutions, universities, companies — that won’t want to align with federal standards.”
It’s not a perfect solution
Experts warn the category isn’t quite the fix they’ve been advocating and could lead to another undercounting of the diverse community in the U.S.
Countries such as Somalia and Sudan are among the 22 countries that make up the Arab-speaking world, according to the ADC, and many who come from these nations identify as Arabs as well as Africans. But OMB’s new category does not include a way for Afro-Arabs to identify themselves, a sticking point for experts weighing the change.
“Let’s say I’m Sudanese – I check MENA because I identify ethnically in the MENA category and I write ‘Sudanese’ in the space,” Berry explained. “I’m not sure they’ll still be coded in MENA because the code for Sudanese now is Black or African American.”
Before there was a MENA category, many MENA Americans checked “other” on the census, wrote down their identities, and were included in the white community anyway — Berry worries that the same will happen to Afro-Arabs.
“And like before, we didn’t want to be all white. Moving forward, we cannot have a category that excludes Afro-Arabs from being part of MENA, if that is how they want to identify themselves,” Berry said.
While people are free to check more than one box, it’s not clear how MENA hyphenated identities will be counted, Berry said.
Ayia Almufti, a 25-year-old Iraqi-American, disputes the use of the term “Middle East” for the category, which was coined and used by European officials in the 19th century for the region according to its proximity to Europe.
“I prefer SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) any day,” he said, adding that the new category is still an upgrade.
Ayoub also cautioned against lumping Armenian-Americans into the MENA category, many of whom were forced to relocate to Middle Eastern countries during the Armenian Genocide and may identify ethnically as Middle Eastern.
One way to avoid that would be to let the Census Bureau, which conducts the race and ethnicity statistical survey, formulate the category question based on its findings, Berry said.
In a statementthe Census Bureau said it is following the standards set by OMB and will develop plans to apply it to censuses and surveys, such as the annual American Community Survey and the decennial census.
Both Berry and Ayoub say they will continue to advocate for better community representation.
For now, Ra’ouf hopes this update will give future generations what they didn’t have growing up.
“The feeling of being able to really control who you really are is a feeling that I don’t think any of us have really experienced,” Ra’ouf said. “And I think for the kids, and for everyone who grows up and fills those boxes in the future, I hope it adds some sense of pride.”
While not a perfect category, Salih says there is no need to identify as white without benefiting from the privilege it affords, especially in the context of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment.
“I think it allows us to assert our identity in a society that by and large wanted to avoid us, to ban us from coming here,” Salih said. “But now we can more formally say, ‘No, we’re here. We exist.”