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After more than four decades of organizing and advocacy by the Arab American community and nearly three decades of support for a MENA category, the Office of Management and Budget has finally acknowledged and issued the historic addition of a new “Middle Eastern or North African” (MENA) minimum reporting category, the use of a combined question format for collecting race and ethnicity, and the requirement of more detailed data collection by federal agencies beyond the minimum Standards in most situations to allow for greater data disaggregation.
Accurate data about the Arab American population has been a central part of AAI’s mission, beginning in the late 1980s when AAI first worked with the Census Bureau to ensure Arab Americans were accurately counted in the 1990 census. In the 1990s, AAI led the campaign for a category for persons from the MENA region in the lead up to OMB’s 1997 revision of the standards. Later, AAI helped launch the Ancestry Working Group to support the Census Bureau’s efforts to decrease systemic undercounting of Arab Americans and created the MENA Advocacy Network in 2011 after the elimination of the long-form questionnaire from the decennial census. In the last decade and a half, AAI organized Arab Americans and other MENA communities around the need for improved data, working with key stakeholders, the OMB, and the U.S. Census Bureau to make the MENA checkbox a reality.
AAI welcomes the new Standards’ improvements to data collection and the historic addition of the MENA category but is deeply troubled by OMB’s narrow definition of MENA communities and their unprecedented mandating of the detailed subpopulations groups (check boxes and write-in samples), the formulation of which is traditionally reserved for the Census Bureau based on research and testing. In a troubling move, the new Standards deny the racial diversity of the Arab American community by excluding Black Arabs and defining MENA without one of its largest populations, Armenian Americans.
The US has a long history of attributing race to ethnicities - at one point the term "free white person" was a pre-requisite to naturalization and voting. People of Arab and other Middle Eastern descent (as well as other non-European people) had to challenge their "whiteness" in court in order to obtain these rights. Among these court cases included Dow vs. US (Dow, a Syrian, had to appeal his citizenship, which was originally denied citing his status as 'not white') and US vs. Cartozian (where the US contested Cartozian's status as 'white' since he was Armenian).
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