Biden admin proposes 2030 Census changes: MENA category, combined race-ethnicity question

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

This should be done alongside White, Black, etc...
MENA is not a race, it's a broader regional identity that transcends race. Just like Latino.
I favor its inclusion on Census forms, but only as an additional thing separate from baseline racial categories.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Terrible move. Jews and Arabs are white, and the move to separate them comes from a desire to further fractionalize and divide the US. Hispanic and Latino shouldn't be a category at all.

This forum will not allow me to use the words I want to describe my rage at this. My mother didn’t get called sand n***** in school for people like you to erase her identity.

Racism and anti-semitism can occur without making someone non-white. Black people can hate black people, white people can hate white people, etc, without changing them from black to non-black or white to non-white.

Precisely.
Denial of this is just hysterical and historically ignorant, regardless of whatever quarters it comes from, and this push to narrow the scope of "White" is proven plainly silly the moment one ponders seriously the mere existence of the term "white ethnic".
If we're getting personal here:
Most of my blood comes from the Arab World, with most of the rest coming from Latin parts of Europe. On both ends, you have people on both sides of my family tree who have at some point or another have been "other-ized" by some segment of American society. Yet, most of them were pretty light-skinned, and I'm pretty light-skinned. In what world am I not White? I get that a large chunk of the modern intellectual class have a deconstructing fetish of sorts. Hands off my racial identity. Please keep your grubby hands away - this is where they don't belong.
P.S. You don't speak for me and you never will.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

So, Arabs and other Muslims can't be white?

Explain Bosniaks, then. European, Slavic, but also majority Muslim. Are they white or are they not?

Race is a stupid social construct that is totally meaningless and not helpful.

Bosniaks would still be considered white under these standards, as they are a European ethnic group. MENA is also not synonymous with Muslim or Arab, as there are multiple ethnic and religious groups in that region (i.e. Arab Christian groups like Maronites, Coptic Egyptians, various Orthodox denominations, etc., who make up a large part of the MENA diaspora in the US).

Not sure how this got interpreted as the Census Bureau adding a "Muslim category" instead of what it actually is as an added regional identity category for people from the Middle East and North Africa.

Edit: And not that it needs to be said, but anyone of any race/national origin can be Muslim (MENA, White, Black, Asian, etc.).

Of course it's a category for Muslims. The vast majority of Arab migrants to this country have been Christian, and they have always assimilated to whiteness, and so their descendants who make up the vast majority of this country's Arab population have always been white. I already brought up the example of Ralph Nader, who is very obviously white despite his Arabic name. I could bring up Johnny Manziel, a similarly white American with an Arabic name; his Arab ancestors lived in the segregated South and were never regarded as anything other than white. Looking at the Wikipedia page "List of Lebanese Americans" gives us such luminaries as Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka and Doug Flutie, and I haven't even brought up white Americans whose partial Arab ancestry doesn't show up in their surnames.

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).

In the future, you can bet people they don't know the first non-white candidate to get more than 1% of the vote for president and take their money every time when you reveal that the answer is Ralph Nader.

No, I would take your money for not knowing it was Barry Goldwater.

My apologies! I stand corrected. This is exactly what I mean: it's no longer obvious who's white and who isn't.

I never made the connection before. But yeah, Manziel is a name that at least sounds obviously Arab in origin.
Manziel=مانزيل. (To those who know how to read abjad, you will understand immediately)
Anka=أنكا.
Kotite is less clearly obvious how it's spelled, but I can see it.

I'll be frank here. We're so obsessed with "firsts", as a society at this point, that we're retroactively inventing them.