Counting Arabs: A century of census activism in the US

For more than a century, the official racial classification of Arabs in the United States has been in flux. Sometimes members of the community have been categorised as Asian, sometimes as white, sometimes as Black, but a distinct ethnic category does not yet exist. 

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Arab immigrants quickly learned that in the United States, a country founded on white supremacist ideologies, achieving whiteness was the key to inclusion.

The community fought for decades to be considered racially white for the basis of citizenship, even as Arabs and other Middle Easterners were almost wholly treated as non-white and “other” in American media, political rhetoric, and popular culture.

The federal racial and ethnic standards for data collection, first formalised under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Standard Directive no. 15 in 1977, listed all persons having origin in North Africa and the Middle East as being part of the white racial category.

"Because Arabs and other MENA communities are counted within the white racial category on the US Census... there is an incomplete portrait of the community, its issues, and its needs"

Even though Arab Americans argued numerous court cases across four decades to be considered white in the eyes of the federal government, Arab American organisations in the 1980s began pushing for Arabs to be seen as separate from the white racial category, on the basis that Arabs and other Middle Eastern communities have distinct experiences, issues, and health needs from the larger white population.

With major changes proposed by the OMB in January 2023, the community is the closest it has ever been to being fully recognised as a distinct ethnic or racial category.

Because Arabs and other MENA communities are counted within the white racial category on the US Census and other federal data sets like health surveys and education data, there is an incomplete portrait of the community, its issues, and its needs.

We know from localised health studies and some smaller national surveys of Arab Americans that the community has distinct health needs, such as higher rates of cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders.

We also know, from the best available data (according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey), that the Arab American community has some dichotomies that belie the real social and economic disadvantages in the community.

For example, according to national ancestry data, Arab Americans are more likely than the white racial group to have a college degree, but also twice as likely as the white racial group to not even have a high school diploma. The assumption is this discrepancy is due to civil disruptions in the homeland, but without complete data on the community social service agencies cannot adequately address the issue.

How we got here

The Arab American Institute (AAI), a national organisation founded in 1985, led the charge for better inclusion of the Arab community on the United States decennial census, beginning with the 1990 Census.

In the early 1990s, other Arab American and Middle Eastern American organisations began pushing to have a separate box on the US Census and other federal surveys and forms. Essentially, they were asking to have those that identify as Arab disaggregated from the white racial category. The OMB declined but agreed to study the matter further.

By the 2010 decennial Census, the calls for Arabs to be better counted by the federal government were growing louder and the US Census completed a major national study of the efficacy of adding a box to better count the Arab community.

The focus, though, had shifted from Arab to a broader Middle Eastern or North African category (MENA), to be more inclusive of the growing community. One of the reasons that the OMB had denied the addition of an Arab box in earlier iterations was that the community was too small and was unable to coalesce around the Arab identity.

The US Census’s major National Content Test, conducted in 2015, showed decisively that the presence of a MENA box would not only result in better tabulations of Arab and MENA communities, but the increased options greatly reduced the number of individuals selecting the “Some other race” box, which meant better data on all communities.

Armed with this data, the Census Bureau submitted plans in 2017 to include a MENA box on the 2020 decennial Census, among other changes, but in January 2018 abruptly changed course without explanation, citing OMB standards.

Arab and MENA communities, led by organisations like AAI, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and Michigan-based ACCESS, continued to push at the federal level for changes to the OMB’s racial and ethnic classifications.

"The focus, though, had shifted from Arab to a broader Middle Eastern or North African category (MENA), to be more inclusive of the growing community"

Census officials are on board with the proposed changes, as are many scholars across the country, as well as public officials, research institutes, and other national organisations that serve racial and ethnic communities, like the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum.

In 2021, one of the first actions that newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden took was to create an Equitable Data Working Group that was tasked with examining the efficacy of the federal government’s efforts to collect and classify data on the diverse national population.

One of the results of this working group was to work with the OMB to consider updating the now 25-year-old racial and ethnic identity categories used across the federal government and, by extension, throughout agencies at the state and local levels. In January 2023 the OMB began accepting public comments on the proposed changes, which include the addition of a MENA box.

By mid-April, there were more than 12,000 public comments submitted in support of the MENA box, driven largely by the community engagement of ACCESS’s National Network of Arab American Communities (NNAAC).

Arab identity in context

As Arabs and other Middle Easterners are fighting to be disaggregated from the white racial category in order to be better counted and represented in US federal data and surveys, 100 years ago Arabic-speaking immigrants were fighting to be considered white in order to be eligible for citizenship.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, immigrants from what was then Greater Syria (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan) were dealing with an identity crisis at the federal level - were they members of the white race or were they considered “Asiatic” or Asian, and thus excluded from citizenship under US naturalisation laws?

They were, after all, immigrants from countries on the Asian continent and had, according to court transcripts of the citizenship cases, varied skin colours ranging from white to “walnut”.

In line with the Nativist movement in the United States in the early twentieth century, which led to racist and restrictive immigration legislation in 1921 and 1924, Arabs and other Middle Eastern groups were often maligned as inherently unfit for citizenship.

In 1904, in one of the more scathing attacks, a representative of the US Public Health Service blasted Syrian immigrants as “human parasites'' with “miserable physique” and concluded that the only redeeming quality of the Syrian is “that they form a comparatively small part of our total immigration”.

Because Arabic-speaking immigrants and other members of the Arab American community knew they were considered too foreign and too “other” to be worthy of full inclusion in American society, community leaders created an all-out assault to convince the general public, the courts, and politicians that Syrians, Arabs, and other Middle Easterners were, indeed, productive members of society and the bearers of an ancient and highly civilised culture.

There were newspaper editorials, radio programs, and public lecture tours that touted the grand history of Arabic-speaking peoples.

One of the lecture tours was the Behannesey brothers, Phares and Kaleel - Lebanese immigrants that travelled the United States wearing traditional garb and touting the greatness of Syrian history. Phares Behannesey would also become involved in one of the early court cases fighting for Arabs to be considered white, and thus eligible for citizenship, in 1909.

"The latest push for a distinct MENA box on the Census and other federal surveys is the culmination of more than 30 years of activism, advocacy and research"

Arabs and other Middle Easterners would battle localised cases for citizenship until the 1940s, when the US government finally included all Arabs and Middle Easterners as members of the white racial category.

The latest push for a distinct MENA box on the Census and other federal surveys is the culmination of more than 30 years of activism, advocacy and research by the Arab American community and the newest iteration of the century-long struggle for Arab and Middle Eastern communities to be fully included in the US racial and ethnic landscape. 

Matthew Jaber Stiffler is the Director of the Center for Arab Narratives (CAN), a new national research institution through ACCESS, the largest Arab American community non-profit in the country. He is also the Research & Content Manager at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI. Matthew received his PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2010, where he serves as a lecturer in Arab and Muslim American Studies.

Follow him on Twitter: @ProfStiff