Invisible on paper: How census erasure has shaped Arab American life
By Yara Reda
For most Americans, filling out the census every ten years is a typical civic duty. For Arab Americans, it has been a reminder of their invisibility. For more than a century, Arab Americans have been legally and statistically “White” on paper. This bureaucratic fiction has influenced nearly every aspect of their political, legal, and social lives. It was not until recently that the federal government announced that the 2030 Census will include a Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) category. While this is a long-awaited victory for community advocates, it does not undo the decades of erasure that have allowed millions of Arab Americans to remain uncounted, unprotected, and underrepresented. Understanding what that invisibility has cost is essential to understanding how the absence of a racial category has led to the absence of legal protections.
The story begins in the early twentieth century, when the boundaries of “whiteness” were contested in the U.S. courts. Between 1909 and 1944, a series of naturalization cases determined who could be legally classified as “White,” as only White persons were eligible to become U.S. citizens under the Naturalization Act of 1790. Many Arab immigrants who came from the Levant region fought to be recognized as “white” because they had Semitic origins and their Christian faith aligned them with Europeans. In cases like Dow v. United States, the judges ruled that Syrians and Lebanese would be recognized as white for naturalization purposes. These rulings were motivated more by anthropological accuracy and assimilating Arabs into the American racial hierarchy.
That judicial whiteness soon became bureaucratically fixed. When the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reclassified federal racial categories in 1997, it reaffirmed that people of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry were to be classified as White. The census questionnaire, on the other hand, did not have a box for “Arab” or “MENA”. Respondents could put either a check in “White” or write in their ancestry, but the write-ins were then included in the White category. This erasure has been symbolic but with actual legal repercussions. Since Arab Americans do not have a discrete category, they fall outside of almost all the legal models that safeguard racial or ethnic minorities in America.
The census controls how the government enforces its laws and protections. For example, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Title VII protections are all affected by the census. Their data stabilizes the ways courts define patterns of discrimination, how agencies allocate resources, and how advocates establish standing to bring claims of system-wide injury. As Arab Americans are statistically absorbed into whiteness, they are denied access to legal redress. During Michigan’s 2021 redistricting cycle, for example, Arab American activists in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights found it difficult to show that their community was a “community of interest” under the state’s redistricting policy. Because census data did not include Arab Americans as a group, there were no public means of quantifying their concentration or voting power. As a result, the districts were drawn in such a way that they broke up Arab Neighborhoods and diluted their votes. On paper, there was no minority split. In reality, the political voice of a whole community was diminished. This is the most clear example of how misclassifying the census explicitly takes away MENA communities from the legal protections afforded to minority groups through the Voting Rights Act.
The lack of an official status also weakens protections from discrimination. Federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) employ demographic data in order to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as well as to track discrimination based on racial and ethnic grounds in the workplace. For Arab Americans, for whom discrimination experiences are most frequently predicated on ethnic identity, the law’s racial framework provides little recourse. Legally White, they are not among the group of individuals protected by laws against racial discrimination. This structural failure mirrors the problem in DeGraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Division (1976), where the intersectional discrimination claim of Black women was denied because the law was not able to recognize them as a distinct class. Arab Americans suffer from a similar invisibility: their discrimination claims habitually fall through the cracks because the law cannot recognize “Arab” as a protected class. Without a specific category, even blatant patterns of anti-Arab discrimination, whether they are hiring disparities, school bullying, or housing discrimination, cannot easily be proven to be systemic under existing legal frameworks.
The consequence of this erasure was most clearly evident after the September 11 attacks, when the federal government and the local police agencies were responsible for wholesale profiling and surveillance of Arab and Muslim communities. In Hassan v. City of New York (2015), the NYPD was sued by a group of Arab American and Muslim plaintiffs for discriminating against them based on their religion and ethnicity alone. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals held that the plaintiffs did have standing and were entitled to bring claims that the surveillance was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. The ruling was a rare recognition that ethnic and religious profiling was actual constitutional harm. The decision also revealed the limits of legal protections of Arab Americans. Forcing them to pursue equality as individuals and not as a group recognized under civil rights law. Not being counted by the census means that there was no national tally of their collective victimization, no demographic data to put the scope of the harm in context, and no official acknowledgment that they constituted a vulnerable minority. The law recognized their harm, but not their identity.
This invisibility is transferred from the courtroom to the everyday administration of justice and allocation of resources. A majority of federal programs, such as housing, education, and health programs, are using census data to make projections of where the needs are lacking. When Arab Americans are counted as statistically White, their needs become invisible in the equations. Arab communities typically do not have interpreters or culturally responsive programs of care, not due to neglect, but because federal statistics report that there are no such communities as a distinct category. Similarly, hate-crime statistics collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system cannot properly measure anti-Arab violence because there is no administrative demographic baseline for comparison. The lack of separated data hides patterns of bias and conceals evidence proving allegations of discrimination on a larger scale. In a practical sense, Arab Americans are not only denied the protections of civil rights law but also the remedial bias of public policy based on knowledge and category.
Public health researchers have also warned that the lack of disaggregated data allows egregious gaps in information surrounding health disparities within MENA populations. Studies show higher rates of certain diseases related to stress, trauma of migration, and discrimination, but these conditions rarely make their way into federal or state budget appropriations. Health equity programs are based on measurable evidence; invisibility deletes need. The aggregate impact is a cycle, whether the absence of data justifies the absence of action.
Arab Americans are continuously trying to change this. Organizations such as the Arab American Institute (AAI) and the National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC) have advocated for a MENA category that would aid the government in collecting data that accurately reflects its population. In the 2010s, their advocacy took a new level when social scientists and demographers discovered that Arab ancestry write-ins were continually being undercounted. The Census Bureau did test for a MENA box before the 2020 census and discovered its positive accuracy and improved response rates. However, the Office of Management and Budget still denied its inclusion. Their decision was a devastating setback, and it ensured another decade of invisibility and exclusion for Arab Americans from the civil rights infrastructure that other minority groups rely upon.
The AAI took the OMB to court in Arab American Institute v. Office of Management and Budget, demanding records of how the racial categories were determined and why the MENA box was excluded. The lawsuit, though procedural in nature, highlighted a critical question regarding equality: who determines identity under federal law? The AAI argued that racial categorization is not about demography but about justice. Without recognition, Arab Americans face no enforcement, no accountability, and no access to rights.
When the Biden administration eventually announced in 2023 that it would include a MENA checkbox on the 2030 Census, it was a major victory. But this victory cannot undo the decades of legal and social erasure preceding it. Census numbers underwrite all significant civil rights regimes; their absence among Arab Americans means the law has no proper record of their marginalization. Courts and agencies can't recreate discrimination that was never recorded. The 2030 Census will allow for future safeguards, but it won’t restore what has been lost.
