They had to check ‘white,’ ‘Black’ or ‘other.’ Now they have a new Census category

Emad Salem was a volunteer for the Census Bureau in 2020 to help minorities, specifically Arab Americans, register with the U.S. Census.

The 64-year-old Palestinian, who identifies as Arab American, lives in Euless and has also helped the Arab American Institute get the community involved in the political process by registering to vote. The last few years, Salem has worked with the group to push for the classification of Arab Americans in the Census.

Salem said many minorities, especially first generation immigrants, do not feel safe giving their personal information to the government.

“A lot of the communities were under-counted, and that’s really something that needs to be worked on, and continue to work on, to make sure that everyone is represented,” Salem said.

The Office of Management and Budget this year updated its federal standards on collecting race and ethnicity data, for the first time since 1997, by adding a category of “Middle Eastern or North African.” Changes will be made to the U.S. Census and other federal forms and surveys.

The new category has brought mixed emotions to those who identify with MENA.

It will allow for better representation, where before those ethnic groups had to identify as “white,” “other,” or “Black.” It will also help reveal health disparities and inequities in housing, income and employment, and will allow for funding to be better targeted toward projects addressing those issues. But some people fear being identified as MENA will increase discrimination in everyday life and in receiving resources.

U.S. Census Adds MENA

The Office of Management and Budget established the Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards to develop recommendations for improving the quality and usefulness of federal race and ethnicity data. The Working Group used 20,000 comments, 94 listening sessions and three public virtual town halls for its recommendations, which include the addition of the MENA category.

The MENA population is geographically based and includes Arabic-speaking groups, such as Egyptians and Jordanians, and non-Arabic speaking groups, such as Iranians and Israelis, and ethnic and transnational groups from the region, such as Assyrians and Kurdish people, according to the Census Bureau.

The Middle East, formerly called Near East, is a geopolitical region of countries encompassing the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula. It includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and Afghanistan.

Previously, people who trace their ancestry to the Middle East or North Africa checked “white,” “Black,” “ African American,” or “other” on the Census and federal forms.

The MENA category will be included in the next Census in 2030. But federal agencies are instructed to begin updating their surveys and administrative forms as quickly as possible. They are to submit a plan to comply within 18 months and have five years to carry out the plans.

The new minimum set of race and ethnicity categories on the census and other federal forms will be: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and white. The revisions encourage detailed race and ethnicity data collection beyond the minimum categories such as “Haitian” or “Nigerian” for those who check “Black.”

Another update will combine the topic of race and ethnicity on federal forms into one question that will allow people to choose multiple categories based on how they identify.

The 2020 Census, which included MENA as a write-in option, recorded over 3.5 million people who reported Middle Eastern and North African descent. Texas has the fourth largest share of the MENA population in the country, with most concentrated in Texas’s 24th Congressional District, which spans Tarrant and Dallas County, according to the Arab American Institute.

For some, the term Middle East is confusing, but a better option than white.

Shaimaa Zayan, 40, was born in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was 23. She lives in Austin and works for CAIR-Texas Austin & DFW, which protects civil rights, promotes justice, works to improve understanding of Islam, and empowers American Muslims.

She identifies as a Muslim, an Arab, North African, and Mediterranean, but is not always comfortable with identifying as the term Middle Eastern. The term is Eurocentric, or viewed in the perception of Europeans, and doesn’t account for the vastness of the area’s culture, language, or history, according to Zayan.

She is perceived by people as a foreigner with her hijab on, but on paperwork she marks “white” as her race. But if she sees paperwork with MENA as an option she checks it since it makes more sense than saying she is white.

Better federal data collection of MENA populations allows for federal funding to be better targeted to appropriate organizations, for better education opportunities from scholarship programs, and to better identify disparities in income, housing and employment.

“You feel like you’re in the middle,” Zayan says. “You’re not getting the privilege of the majority, and you’re not getting any privilege that sometimes is given to the minority groups.”

When Zayan came to the U.S., she says, she merged her culture with that of the United States as she learned more about the customs and traditions.

Health Outcomes

The potential benefit of having MENA as a category goes beyond just identification but may help address disparities and identify solutions for health care.

The grouping of MENA populations and white people into one category in the past has made it difficult to separate information about people who would identify as MENA. That leads to limited data on health outcomes for MENA populations and limited opportunities to get specific resources to address situations unique to those populations, says Tiffany Kindratt, assistant professor in the Public Health Program at UT Arlington.

Kindratt’s research focuses on comparing health outcomes between MENA individuals, both U.S. and foreign born, to white individuals. She has to use different large databases for her research because national surveys usually do not have a MENA checkbox.

Her research has discovered that MENA individuals are more likely to have low infancy birth weight, higher odds of reporting cognitive limitations and undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease compared to white individuals.

“When you compare the health outcomes of Black and Hispanic individuals to whites, that disparity could be greater if the white population did not include MENA individuals,” Kindratt said. “And so it just moves the science forward and allows us to really actually see what those differences are.”

Skeptical of MENA

Some are skeptical of the value of being able to identify as MENA.

Nadine Moharram, 47, lives in Frisco and says she worries how it could discriminate people, like herself, even more.

Moharram was born in Qatar and is Palestinian but always marks “white” on federal forms because other options don’t apply to her.

She worries that identifying as MENA could affect her in applying for jobs, loans, her children applying for schools and how people will treat her.

Despite her concerns, Moharram said she thinks adding MENA to the Census and other forms will add to the culture, history and sense of community in the United States.

“I’m really hoping that once this is added, it’s going to add education,” Moharram said. “People are going to get more knowledge about this category and who we really are.”

A MENA category would also help with growing businesses, said Salem, the real estate agent who works in Irving.

He says having the MENA category would help him be able to apply for government contracts as a minority owned business, which he currently is not able to.

Salem says the new category will help with businesses, education, health and more for MENA individuals, helping to put them into better position to be successful and ingrained into American society.

“Be proud of your origin and be proud of being an Arab American,” Salem said.