Choosing an option on a questionnaire is usually an easy task, whether it is taking a multiple choice exam for one of your classes or choosing which milk to add to your mobile ordered Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks. While getting a question wrong on an exam may feel like the end of the world, or you may claim your drink is “life-changing,” in reality, these types of choices aren’t meant to — and therefore don’t — represent fundamental parts of your identity. However, when you must make a choice that is meant to represent a fundamental part of your identity, but it doesn’t, the effects can be truly detrimental. 

This experience is the reality of many people of Middle Eastern and North African origin when filling out racial questionnaires — even those for the United States census. 

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The U.S. census (along with many other racial questionnaires, such as ones used for school and job applications) gives the race options of White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Some Other Race. Specifically with regard to the white racial category, the U.S Census Bureau defines white as “having origins in … Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa,” and by doing so, categorizes Europeans, along with MENA people, as white. 

USC also doesn’t provide a MENA racial category. In USC’s student demographics report for the Fall 2022 freshman class, USC only reported on the categories of Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic, White/Caucasian, Other and International. However, USC provided a Hispanic category, thereby deviating from the U.S. census. Considering USC’s Undergraduate Student Government finally recognized the Middle Eastern North African Student Assembly last fall, USC still not having a separate MENA category seems hypocritical. 

The National Human Genome Institute defines race as “a social construct used to group people … often based on physical appearance, social factors, and cultural backgrounds,” establishing that major differences in these factors are what distinguish racial groups from one another. In examining MENA people from this lens, it becomes apparent that their placement into the white racial category is ill-fitting as they are distinguishable from the majority of white people in each one of these elements. 

Many MENA people harbor different physical features from their white counterparts, with their appearance instead often being more analogous to features of other underrepresented races. Specifically, according to Brittanica, many Middle Eastern people “resemble African Americans or Africans in their skin colour, hair texture, and facial features” and are even “frequently mistaken” for them in the U.S.  

Skin tones, hair textures and facial features that can resemble Black people therefore distinguish many MENA people from the physical appearance of the majority white race, which has been historically and socially constructed as the antithesis of Blackness. 

The resemblance of MENA individuals to other underrepresented races also helps to contextualize social factors and cultural backgrounds, which continue to distinguish them from white people of European descent. 

Significantly, research from 2022 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that MENA people experience social inequalities and challenges that are more aligned with underrepresented racial populations of color than of white populations. For example, their research discovered that people in this group “are more likely to live below the poverty line” and “report rates of discrimination higher than Whites, and on par with other groups of color.” 

Beyond people of MENA descent often being viewed and treated as different or less than white, they themselves also generally view their racial identity as discernable from whiteness. 

Of the MENA people surveyed in the same study, “only 11% identified as exclusively White when offered a specific MENA category,” with most self-identifying as MENA when the opportunity was given to them. 

MENA peoples’ lack of self-identification as white when given the option to identify as MENA emphasizes how the people of this community feel: They do not belong in and are not truly represented by the white racial category. 

Continuing to categorize MENA people as white on questionnaires abandons this community and makes it vulnerable to further inequality and discrimination. Ultimately, this leaves MENA people misrepresented, unrecognized and essentially powerless. 

To combat this, organizations that administer racial questionnaires — including USC — should validate this group’s rightful and unique identity by establishing Middle Eastern and North African as its own racial category, separate from white.