Earlier by Steve Sailer (2018) Trump Administration Wises Up on Census—No New Racial Categories
From the Washington Post opinion section:
Opinion: I am Middle Eastern. Not White.
Opinion by Dalia Azim
Today at 4:20 p.m. EDTDalia Azim is a writer in Austin.
Filling out the 2020 Census launched me into a bit of an identity crisis. Under the “race or origin” question, I saw myself, a person of Egyptian descent, defined as “White” for the first time. The Census Bureau just released detailed reports on its race and ethnicity data. While this census showed a drop in the White population, those numbers might have been lower still if the census had been conducted more fairly.
Of course, that leads to the question: What more can be done to lower the number of whites infesting America?
I’ve never considered myself White or been viewed as White by anyone else, to my knowledge, so it felt misleading and dishonest to check that box. When it comes to surveys such as these, it’s rare to find an option for “Middle Eastern or North African,” or MENA, though it kind of delights me whenever I do.
It’s that famous Middle Eastern and North African solidarity. Nobody is more deservedly celebrated for their neighborliness to their neighbors than are Middle Easterners and their close friends the North Africans.
… Between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses, the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama convened a working group to improve the quality of federal data on race and ethnicity. One of the group’s key recommendations resulting from their research was to add MENA to the standards for collecting data.
Not only was this advice discarded in the creation of the 2020 Census in the Trump administration, but Middle Easterners also were explicitly absorbed into the White category. “White” had never been defined in any previous census, but this time the form read, “White — Print [origin(s)], for example, German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.”
Seriously, no, the Office of Management and Budget has long defined whites as the peoples of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. It’s not something Trump made up.
Undoubtedly, there are many Arabs in the United States who would prefer to identify as White. Passing has always been an effective way to access power and privilege, an adaptation that lighter-skinned minorities have long practiced. …
I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, went to Stanford University and work at an art museum in Austin — which is to say that my dominant experience in this world has been as a person of color navigating majority-White spaces, usually keenly aware of my status as an outsider. As a child, I was frequently teased for being darker than my peers and for the last name on my birth certificate: Abdel-Azim. I became so ashamed of the “Abdel,” which clearly marked me as Arab, that I dropped it in college.
I’m trying to raise my kids to be proud of their Middle Eastern heritage.
“All for one and one for all” is the Middle Eastern and North African motto. Egyptian, Israeli, Libyan, Copt, Palestinian, Berber, Maronite, Druze, Sunni, Alawite, Bedouin, Yezidi, Kurd, Turk, Armenian — they are all pleased as punch to share the Middle East and North Africa with each other. But in America, the white man won’t let them express their MENA solidarity by checking a box that would let them get affirmative action.
But our contributions to diversity aren’t systematically tracked. We’re not typically who a company or university is looking for when seeking to diversify its staff, student body or faculty.
We’re lumped in with the white chumps, last in line for affirmative action goodies.
South Asians were stuck being white on the 1970 Census, and that kept them from getting racial privileges on government contracts and low interest minority development SBA loans like the Orientals got, so in 1980 they got to join the Orientals as a privileged race of Asians. Why can’t us Middle Easterners and North Africans get some of that nonwhite privilege too?
There are basically two racial categories in American law: Eligible for Affirmative Action and Not Eligible for Affirmative Action. Why should us Egyptians, who, after all, built America (we did, didn’t we?), be stuck with the losers in the Not Eligible category? C’mon, somebody, come up with the magic words that will guilt-trip naive idiot white people into giving my career a boost over that of their own relations. The Indians put it over on the dumb Americans back in the 1970s. Surely we aren’t less clever than they are?
When you’re part of an invisible minority, it can make you feel invisible, like your diversity doesn’t add value to the cultural table. Not to mention that invisible minorities cannot rely on civil rights and anti-discrimination protections afforded to recognized minority groups.
Aggregating people of Middle Eastern origin into the White category also falsely inflates the statistical edge of the alleged majority group.
Something must be done about the alleged majority group.
It’s like gerrymandering demographic data, redrawing the boundaries of race and ethnicity to the advantage of those in power. People who identify as White still constitute a majority of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau. But, then again, I’m identified as White on the latest census, and I’m not White.
Steps must be taken.
Seriously, I advised the Trump Administration not to accept the outgoing Obama Administration’s last moment attempt in January 2017 to create a new MENA category on the 2020 Census because:
A. Why create a new race that would immediately demand affirmative action at the expense of whites?
B. Nobody has even begun to think through the potential impact on America’s most influential and well-organized ethnicity: the Ashkenazi. If the federal government declares Israeli immigrants, including the many from Europe and the Soviet Union, to be officially Not White but instead to be members of MENA, how long until the many powerful Jewish-American organizations start demanding that regular Jewish-Americans whose great-great grandparents arrived from Lithuania and Galicia should no longer be stuck with the disprivileges of being officially white in 21st Century America? After all, the Bible says they started out in MENA.
And one thing that currently stands between the mounting hatred of whites expressed daily in the public square and open season on whites is that Jews are officially white. Nobody has discussed it, but MENA sure looked like it could have been an escape route, so Trump was smart to nix it.
