To fully understand the experiences of people of MENA descent in the U.S., Aziz and other researchers say an additional checkbox for "Middle Eastern or North African" is needed on forms for the once-a-decade head count. Tracking The Census: The People, Power And Money Behind The Data 2020 Census Will Ask White People More About Their Ethnicities A MENA checkbox may show up on the 2030 census Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties during former President Barack Obama's administration. "Over the past 20 years, people who are from the Middle East and North Africa have experienced a form of stereotyping that presumes that they are inherently prone to violence, that they are prone to being sympathetic to terrorism, that they are forever foreign," says Aziz, who served as a senior policy adviser for the U.S. In more recent decades, however, there's been a growing disconnect between the way the federal government officially categorizes people of MENA descent by race and many people's lived realities – a dissonance that was underlined after the Sept. society, Aziz adds, has helped drive many immigrants from around the world to try to "disassociate themselves from Blackness and try to associate as close to whiteness as possible." citizens had to be found white by law," she says.Īnti-Black racism in the media and other parts of U.S. "They argued they were white in court because the only immigrants that could naturalize to become U.S. There were several court cases where Syrian immigrants emphasized their Christianity because it was considered a European religion and, therefore, a marker of whiteness, says Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University Law School and author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom. National Biden Wants Census To See 'Invisible' Groups: LGBTQ, Middle Eastern, North African The new study tries to ascertain concrete numbers for some of the insights Maghbouleh gained through that book's qualitative research. Maghbouleh conducted extensive interviews with younger people of MENA descent for the 2017 book The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race. "This is a really big problem that kind of haunts a lot of social science research," said Maghbouleh, who adds that people of North African descent are underrepresented among the study's participants. Like the paper's co-authors, Ajrouch notes that research is limited by the challenges in finding large numbers of people with MENA origins to participate in studies. It's hard to do research about people of MENA descent in the U.S. "I think that's a very powerful finding, which I think anecdotally has been felt by most Arab Americans in their daily lives," says Kristine Ajrouch, a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University whose research on white identity and Arab Americans is cited in the paper. Meanwhile, a substantial percentage of white people who do not identify as MENA or Latino do not perceive MENA people as white either, the study also suggests. The paradox has been hard to show through data.īut a newly released study co-authored by Maghbouleh offers suggestive evidence that a majority of people with MENA origins do not see themselves as white. Younger people of MENA descent have "had a plethora of different experiences that made them feel that some of their experiences were actually closer to communities of color in the U.S.," says Neda Maghbouleh, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, who has conducted research on the topic. The federal government officially categorizes people with origins in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and other countries in the MENA region as white.īut that racial identity has not matched the discrimination in housing, at work and through other parts of daily life that many say they have faced. that has confounded many people of Middle Eastern or North African descent. But a new study finds many people of MENA descent do not see themselves as white, and neither do many white people. census to count people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa as white. Federal government standards require the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |