Written in bland and unassuming language, newly released policy changes to how the U.S. government and Census categorizes some racial and ethnic groups could have an immeasurable impact on Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent, and other minority groups, say immigrant advocates.
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget published on March 28 a set of revisions to “Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity.” This revision added “Middle Eastern or North African” as a new race and ethnicity category; the race and ethnicity checkbox for “Hispanic or Latino” will be combined with other race and ethnicity categories into one question; and the revision also removes words such as “Negro” and “Far East” that are regarded as pejorative and derogatory.
Along with the other changes, words such as “majority” and “minority,” which fail to reflect the complex racial and ethnic diversity in the country, were also removed from federal forms. Prior to this revision, the Census contained five categories, which the Census terms “minimum race categories,”: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white – and the minimum ethnic categories were grouped in a separate question as Hispanic or Latino or not Hispanic.
People of Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian and other Middle Eastern backgrounds had been previously encouraged to identify as white; people of North African descent, however, did not have a clear individual category. Momentum for changing the race and ethnicity categories grew during the Obama administration in the mid-2010s.
The Census Bureau in 2015 attempted to include the MENA (Middle Eastern or North Africa) category with the testing of the inclusion of the MENA category and the determination that the inclusion will improve the data-gathering process and will accurately reflect societal diversity. But the effort was dropped by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Hispanic people were considered an ethnicity, separated from race. In the 1930 Census, there was a one-time inclusion of race category of “Mexican”; later in the 1970 Census, there was a question regarding individual’s origin or descent – check boxes available included Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, and Other Spanish – on one of the two long form questionnaires that were sent to a portion of the population rather than the short form questionnaire that every individual was expected to answer, attempting to appraise the size of the Hispanic population within the entire nation.
In the 1980 Census, the question regarding whether the individual was of Spanish or Hispanic origin or descent was moved to the short form questionnaire. The Hispanic origin question remained identical and separated from the question about race with the inclusion of the term “Latino” until the revision on March 28. After updating the standards for federal race and ethnicity data, the new set of categories which will be included for the next Census will contain 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. Meanwhile, Asian is now defined as “individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of Central or East Asia, Southeast Asia or South Asia, including, for example, Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese;” Black or African American is now defined as individuals with origins in Africa, including, for example, African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian and Somali.
In addition to the advocacy for a new Middle Eastern or North African category and a combined race and Hispanic origin question, many people have also requested agencies to gather data to better understand descendants of enslaved people originally from Africa and to use “American Descendants of Slavery” or “American Freedman” to describe the group. The Office of Management and Budget has announced that it has decided to not move forward with these requests since further research is needed.
Another reason for this decision was opposition to this proposal from civil rights groups and others because of concerns, including over verifying that identification is accurate, the usefulness and necessity of the data, and the potential exclusion of other groups of historically enslaved people.
The fact that major racial and ethnic groups have been left out of the demographic collection has been criticized for years. Hispanics are, as of July 1, 2022, the largest minority group of the nation with a population estimated to be 63.7 million. That amounts to about 19.1% of the total population.
Advocates have been pushing to combine the race and Hispanic origin questions, and they have pointed out the confusing categorization used in these questions that leads to a lower response rate from Hispanic respondents. This could, they argue, result in a potentially lower overall estimation of the Hispanic population. This issue was supported by the data that demonstrated the non-response to the two-part question has increased since 1980. Furthermore, this issue was substantiated by a test in the 2010 Census by the Census Bureau, which showed that combining the questions regarding race and Hispanic origin yielded higher response rates.
The Middle Eastern and North African populations have been estimated to be approximately 3.5 million, according to results from the 2020 census, which asked respondents to elaborate on their backgrounds. The two largest groups of people who elaborated on their backgrounds and identified themselves as MENA, either alone or in combination with another group, in the 2020 census were Lebanese, with more than 685,000 people, and Iranian, with more than 568,000 people.
Middle Eastern Americans on ‘Receiving End of Bad Policies’
Nevertheless, many people believed that the results from the 2020 census might undercount and fail to estimate the MENA population. Many residents might be confused by the extra step of elaborating on backgrounds or might feel unnecessary or too rushed to go through this extra step to write down respondents’ detailed backgrounds on the census questionnaire, leading to the possible failure to represent the entire MENA population. Not identifying some major racial and ethnic groups separately has caused numerous issues.
According to Abed A. Ayoub, who is the national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, throughout history, MENA Americans have been “on the receiving end of bad policies” like surveillance programs and watch-listing with no way to study those practices, because there is no definitive population data. Furthermore, the lack of such precise and definitive population data has made it difficult to understand and to research on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the MENA community. Similar issues persist for certain other minority communities.
This revision, which is the first change to race and ethnicity categories since 1997, has spurred many reactions across the nation. Some pointed out that this revision will also have long-term implications for legislative redistricting, civil rights laws, health statistics, and possibly even the field of politics as the number of people categorized as white is reduced. Nevertheless, grouping people of different backgrounds together into a single race and ethnicity category, such as Japanese and Filipino in the Asian classification, often masks the disparities in income or health, and fails in accurately representing the different groups in the United States and the societal diversity. Furthermore, many considered this revision to be reflective of the changes in social attitudes, immigration, societal diversity, as well as a wish for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves included in the numbers produced by the federal government.
Racial Diversity Among Hispanic, Latino Americans Not Properly Counted
For the Latino or Hispanic community, although this revision might be able to provide more accurate data of the Latino population, some in the Afro-Latino or Black-Latino population have expressed their concerns that the combining of the questions would dilute their visibility, reduce their numbers and representation, and erase their lineage in the federal race and ethnicity data. The Afro-Latino Coalition responded to the revision with the statement that “by listing Latino ethnicity as co-equal with racial categories, Latinos are inaccurately portrayed as a population without racial differences, despite all the research showing how Black Latinos are treated differently from other Latinos.”
The Afro-Latino Coalition presented preliminary research of the combined question as presented in the 2024 Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, showing that there were decreases in Afro-Latino population counts under the combined question and both the Black population numbers and the Latino population numbers are negatively impacted by the combined question. According to the Afro-Latino Coalition, while the census population data suggests an estimate of 2.2 million Afro-Latino population, independent estimates conducted by Pew Research suggest an estimate of close to 6 million. The Afro-Latino Coalition continued by pointing out that the estimated 6 million population was used by the White House as well to “underscore the importance of the Afro-Latino community.”
The Afro-Latino Coalition urged the Census Bureau to conduct thorough tests to ensure that marginalized groups especially Black Latinos and Black Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico are not disproportionately affected by the revision. The Afro-Latino Coalition pointed to a research done in 2016 which showed that a significant portion of Puerto Ricans who when presented with the two-part race and Hispanic origin question identified as Black as well as Latino or Hispanic and yet when presented with the combined question identified solely as Latino or Hispanic. This suggests that if the 2030 census will use the combined question, the Afro-Latino population might be undercounted and underrepresented. The Afro-Latino Coalition also highlighted the need for community outreach regarding the significance of elaborating on every respondent’s background and selecting at least one racial category and one ethnic category as well as the need to highlight and clarify the difference between race and ethnicity in the question format. The Afro-Latino Coalition called for further “revisions to coding practices that contributed to misclassifying Latinos who chose a racial category as being of Two or More races” as well as “increased transparency regarding how race and ethnicity data are coded.”
The Census Bureau responded by showing through data from previously conducted research that significant differences among the Afro-Latino responses when the race and Hispanic origin questions were asked separately or combined were not identified and Afro-Latino populations estimates were in fact slightly higher with a combined race and ethnicity question, which also provides detailed checkboxes and write-in fields for respondents to elaborate on their backgrounds, suggesting that this revision would not reduce the representation of the Afro-Latino population in the data. Simultaneously, similar to the Afro-Latino Coalition’s stance, the Office of Management and Budget has emphasized that individuals, when answering the census questionnaire, are highly encouraged to choose more than one answer even when the race and ethnicity questions are combined.
People have been advocating for collecting MENA information separate from the “white” category for more than 30 years. Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, whose parents are from Iran, told the Associated Press that “it feels good to be seen. Growing up, my family would check the ‘white’ box, because we didn’t know what other box reflected our family. Having a representation like that, it feels meaningful.”
Nevertheless, while the revision to include Middle Eastern and North African categories was supported by many, some worried that the revision may simultaneously touch on and reopen unresolved issues and tensions over borders that are not agreed upon in the Middle East and North Africa. Thus, the Office of Management and Budget has been criticized for the decision of which groups should be represented in the checkboxes under the racial and ethnic categories on the census questionnaire.
Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Israel do not completely represent the full racial and geographic diversity of the MENA communities in the United States, for example, which some considered to be discouraging for a portion of the respondents and could possibly dissuade respondents from selecting the MENA checkbox.
The Office of Management and Budget announced that it would create a new task force to regularly review the collection of race and ethnicity data for future changes to better reflect the changing demographics of the country. The U.S. Census Bureau stated that “the U.S. Census Bureau commends the scientific integrity and collaboration with our fellow federal statistical agencies and departments throughout this process. These efforts aim to improve federal race and ethnicity statistics and ensure data more accurately reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. population. As the Census Bureau follows the race and ethnicity standards directed by the Office of Management and Budget, we will begin the process of reviewing the updated Statistical Policy Directive No. 15. We will keep the public informed and determine a regular cadence for communications as we develop plans to implement the changes in our censuses and surveys.”
