Arab Americans have been targeted by government surveillance programs, racial profiling, and other forms of discrimination, but the Census Bureau still does not count them as a minority group.
By Abdallah Fayyad
(BOSTON GLOBE) When I first moved to the United States as an adult, I had to start filling out forms that asked about my race. But I didn’t really know what my race was in the American context. All I knew, having grown up in Jerusalem, was that I’m Palestinian and Arab, and that didn’t seem to fall under any of America’s five official racial categories: American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, white, Black, and Asian American.
“White,” to me, meant European, and I had only ever seen or heard of Arabs referred to as “brown people,” be it on AmericanTV or in conversation. So it was to my surprise to learn that the US Census Bureau expects Arabs to check “white,” which it defines as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”