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.
