News‘We exist’: New Middle Eastern or North African census category helps community members feel seen

‘We exist’: New Middle Eastern or North African census category helps community members feel seen

Swara Salih, a 32-year-old Kurdish American, has been reluctantly ticking “white” on federal forms his whole life. But that’s not what he sees when he looks in the mirror.

“My entire life I’ve been a brown kid, I’ve 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 Middle Eastern or North African category announced by the Office of Management and Budget on Thursday will help shed the cloak of invisibility draped on members of the community, like Salih, for decades, experts say.

The addition of this category to the OMB’s standards for race and ethnicity for the first time in U.S. history means that an estimated 8 million Americans who trace their origins to the Middle East and North Africa will no longer have to choose “white” or “other” on federal forms, including the U.S. census.

“We were forced to identify as something we were not, and in a way that erased the community and erased any data on 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 different community and we have not been able to — since we’ve been here — get an accurate picture of who we are.”

Census 2024.The new “Middle Eastern or North African” identifier.OMB

The new identifier will have six subcategories beneath it that include Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Israeli, which were selected to represent the largest population groups in the U.S., an OMB spokesperson said. The identifier will also include a blank space where people can write in how they identify if their ethnicity isn’t one of the subcategories.

While advocacy groups don’t think the geographical addition goes far enough to capture the diversity of the region, they say it’s a long-awaited step in the right direction.

Undercounted, underrepresented and unnoticed

The lack of an identifier for Americans from the Middle East and North Africa has left them undercounted, underrepresented and unnoticed in U.S. society.

MENA Americans can trace their origins 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, like Arab, Amazigh, Kurdish, Chaldean and more. Migration from countries in the region to the U.S. began in the late 1800s and picked up in recent decades largely because of political turmoil, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

The largest MENA group in the U.S. is Arab Americans, 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,

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