No Box to Check: When the Census Doesn’t Reflect You

Egyptian, Iranian, Lebanese, Amazigh, Arab, American.

These are just a handful of ways that thousands of people who responded to a New York Times callout described themselves. The answers were as diverse as the group of individuals behind them. People with roots in the Middle East and North Africa, often abbreviated as MENA, represent a multitude of cultures, religions and languages. And they all have different viewpoints about how they fit into the American mosaic.

Accounting for MENA identity in the United States has become particularly relevant this year. The 2024 presidential election could hinge on a handful of swing states like Michigan, where Arab American voters turned out decisively for President Biden in 2020. But Mr. Biden has faced mounting frustration from Arab Americans and others within his party for his support for Israel in the war in Gaza.

While people of MENA heritage are by no means monolithic, they do share one common experience in the United States. On official forms, most don’t see themselves represented among the check boxes for race or ethnicity. With few good options, many end up being counted as “white.”

A decades-old federal guideline defines “white” as anyone with origins in Europe, North Africa or the Middle East. In the 2020 census, “Lebanese” and “Egyptian” were offered as examples for the “white” box on the race question. The other categories were “Black or African American,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander” and a variety of Asian ancestries.

While the Times survey and follow-up interviews — conducted from September 2022 through August 2023 — do not represent all Middle Eastern and North African voices, a vast majority of respondents agreed that the current race categories are at odds with how they identified.

Community leaders have been advocating for Middle Eastern and North African to be included as an official category for years.

The Biden administration last year proposed removing MENA from the “white” definition and adding a “Middle Eastern or North African” box as part of a larger overhaul to combine the question of race and ethnicity on federal forms.

Take a look at a proposed example of a form. The MENA addition is highlighted.

The revisions, currently under review, would give official recognition to a large and growing portion of the U.S. population. They would also ripple through the nation’s statistical universe and have numerous practical implications for the MENA population, especially around health care, education and political representation.

“We spent 30-plus years trying to get to the point where the census would address the massive undercount of our community,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute.

Some experts worry, however, that the addition of more check boxes, along with a write-in option, might confuse respondents and make the census form too complex to generate accurate data. After all, there’s no agreed-upon set of countries or ethnicities that would fall under a Middle Eastern and North African category.

“This would be the first time since the 1970s that a completely new race or ethnicity category has been added, and that’s a very significant change,” said Margo J. Anderson, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of “The American Census: A Social History.” “You’re asking people to answer in a much more complicated way, and MENA is just one piece of a much bigger need for testing all of these changes between now and the 2030 census.”

The Census Bureau recently announced that 3.5 million people listed a MENA origin in the 2020 decennial census, but the numbers included only those who first identified as white.

Most of what demographers know about the MENA population now comes from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey, which asks respondents about race, ethnicity and also their ancestry. The most recent data, from 2022, shows that nearly four million U.S. residents — just over 1 percent of the population — listed a Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.

Those figures can also be combined with other survey questions to help demographers broadly understand the MENA population in terms of size, location and economic status, but these statistics have no legal standing. Only the categories included in the decennial census dictate how people are classified across a broad spectrum of statistical agencies.

For example, while there is robust research into the public school achievement gap between white and Black students, less is known about the performance of Middle Eastern and North African students because they are not officially tracked in federal education statistics.

When policy makers redraw political boundaries every ten years, there is often much debate over whether the new congressional districts fairly represent various minority groups. But people of MENA descent are not officially part of this conversation because they don’t exist in the data used to draw the lines.

Medical researchers can better detect elevated health risks for certain groups if they gain access to more granular race data, researchers from Cornell University recently found. During the first year of the pandemic, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was able to detect the high risk of Covid among Native Americans in large part because Native American, unlike MENA, is an official race category. Dr. Tiffany Kindratt, a health researcher at the University of Texas at Arlington who has reached a similar conclusion in her work, noted that the designation is crucial to securing funding for studies.

With so much missing information, The Times decided to conduct its own survey to learn more about those of MENA descent in the United States.

In the Times survey, respondents were asked several multiple choice questions about their racial and ethnic identity.

When asked to choose from a list of race options that did not include “Middle Eastern or North African,” nearly half of the 5,300 survey respondents chose “another race” and about a third picked “white.” When a MENA box was added, the change was drastic — nearly 90 percent chose either MENA alone or MENA along with one other category. (Unlike the census form, which prompts MENA individuals to identify as “white,” the Times survey did not.)

“A lot of MENA people don’t perceive themselves as being part of the majority population in the United States,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior demographer at Pew Research. “Some of them perceive themselves to be subject to discrimination because of their origins.”

Nadine Naber, a professor of Arab American studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the lack of a MENA box made it difficult to track instances of racism and discrimination, both for law enforcement and in workplaces and universities.

At the same time, people of Middle Eastern and North African descent are often “hypervisible” and subjected to racial profiling, and stereotypes associating Muslims and Arabs with terrorism persist with pernicious consequences, Dr. Naber said. And there may be some reluctance to self-identify as Middle Eastern and North African on official forms for that very reason, she added.

“People lack access to resources and are being discriminated against, but we can’t respond because we don’t have the data,” said Dr. Naber, who is an author of a study of Arab Americans in Chicago released last year called “Beyond Erasure and Profiling.”

A small share of those surveyed did choose “white” even when a “Middle Eastern and North African” option was offered — showing how difficult it is to find universal agreement on views around identity within such a diverse population. But when MENA was an option, a much larger share of respondents chose it in addition to “white.”

Several survey respondents acknowledged the privilege that comes with the perception of appearing or presenting as “white.”

The addition of a Middle Eastern and North African box would impact demographic data for all groups in the United States, and would almost certainly result in a decrease in the number of people counted as white. After all, the Census Bureau has included most MENA individuals in that category for as long as it has counted them.

The debate over how to classify people of Middle Eastern and North African descent is not new. In the early 1900s, Arab immigrants — who were mostly Levantine Christians — fought to be classified as “white” to circumvent rules that allowed only white immigrants to become U.S. citizens.

The matter became the subject of several court cases — and set in place a legal precedent that would last for decades.

The federal government issued guidelines in 1977 that defined people from the Middle East and North Africa as white. A box for this population was on the agenda when the race and ethnicity guidelines were updated in 1997, but there was not enough consensus to implement change.

Extensive research continued under then-President Barack Obama, but it did not result in any changes to the race or ethnicity categories. In 2022, the Biden administration picked it back up and asked the public to weigh in.

Thousands of people submitted feedback, which a working group is now reviewing, before final recommendations are submitted to the Office of Management and Budget. Revisions to the race and ethnicity statistical standards are expected by the summer.

The largest group of respondents to the Times survey said they were of Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iranian or Syrian descent. Among these identities, those from Lebanon and Iran were more likely to call themselves “white.”

Respondents whose families immigrated to the United States before 1960 were also more likely to identify as “white.” For those with families arriving in more recent decades, “another race” was the most common response.

The survey also revealed differences along generational lines. While those over the age of 50 were more likely to choose “white,” respondents under 30 were less likely to do so.

Many people told The Times that they regard Middle Eastern and North African as an ethnicity, not a race. For several decades, the Census Bureau has made a distinction between the two categories. It has captured information about race for people who are white, Black, Asian or Native American. And it has inquired about Hispanic and Latino heritage as a matter of ethnicity. Under the new system, the distinction would disappear, and Middle Eastern and North African would be added to a new combined question that asks for race or ethnicity.

Some respondents took issue with the term the “Middle East,” which is generally used to refer to Arabic-speaking countries as well as others like Iran, Israel and Turkey. The term became widely used in the 1900s, when it was employed by world powers, and its borders have long been subject to debate. There is also no consensus on which countries and territories constitute the Middle East.

Particularly among younger people and academics, a different term has been adopted — SWANA, or Southwest Asia and North Africa.

It’s not an easy task to incorporate a wide swath of the world with many countries, languages, ethnicities and religions into a single box, but proponents say MENA is the most inclusive option and a good place to start.