Biden admin proposes 2030 Census changes: MENA category, combined race-ethnicity question
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Quote from: TheReckoning on February 03, 2023, 07:39:43 PM
“Latino” should be replaced with “mestizo” IMO
Why? Not all culturally Hispanophone Latin America diasporans in the US identify as mestizo, nor would their ancestors in the motherland (to say nothing of Tejanos or Hispanos). Judging from online discussion of 23andMe test results it seems most Latin Americans are a mix of three continental ancestries, not two.
Quote from: Хahar 🤔 on February 01, 2023, 11:53:55 PM
So Christian Arabs in this country have always been white. (I also haven't mentioned Jews, who have likewise always been white in this country.) The only Arabs who are regularly identified as something distinct from the white American majority are Muslim Arabs. When the NFL recognizes Robert Saleh as a minority coach even though nobody ever thought to do the same for Rich Kotite, that's because Saleh is Muslim and Kotite is not. This is an attempt to racialize the otherness felt by Muslim Arabs, and because Census guidelines can't make explicit reference to religion it also catches the vast majority of Arabs in this country: those not of Muslim ancestry. This would be a category that obscures (the observed whiteness of the enormous population of Americans of Christian Arab descent) far more than it illuminates (the observed non-whiteness of the smaller population of Americans of Muslim Arab descent).
The idea that Muslim Arabs are somehow a different race from Christian Arabs is as absurd as saying Pakistanis are racially Middle Eastern and not South Asian just because they have a different religion from their fellow Indo-Aryan speaking Hindu North Indians. Yes- race is a social construct and not necessarily based on national borders, geography, DNA, or language- but your average person probably wouldn’t consider Maronite Catholic and Sunni Lebanese to be of different races lmao. And they probably wouldn’t say Person A from Lahore is as physically or culturally different from Person B from Mumbai as they are from Person C in Ho Chi Minh City either.
I spent the winter writing songs about getting better:
I have a bit of theory that a lot of people think of Christian Arabs as different ethnically than Muslim Arabs because they often do have a different appearance....men are often shaven and women don't wear hijabs.
Of course this applies to some Muslims too. For example if you showed most people a picture of Rashida Tlaib who didn't know who she was I doubt most would expect her to be Muslim. Frankly my first impression of her is that she looks more Hispanic than anything else.
Similarly when Americans think of Iranians they usually immediately think of bearded ayatollahs and women in hijabs. But Iranian-Americans almost never have long beards or hijabs and at most are considered to look slightly "ethnic".
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