If you are of North African or Middle Eastern descent, you are now, for all intents and purposes, white—at least according to the new federal ethnicity data survey.
Now, members of some campus groups are dismayed to see their complex ethnic identities boiled down to a simple box, one they say is both demeaning and inaccurate.
Under new federal regulations, diversity data at educational institutions are to be gathered using new categories, according to a University-wide e-mail sent last week.
The campus Arab students’ organization Turath expressed dismay with this new set of guidelines and Yasmina Raiani CC ’12, the group’s secretary, sent a personal message replying to University survey requests, saying she would not participate in a classification system that she found both insulting and inaccurate.
“It clumps individuals of North African and Middle Eastern descent into ‘white,’ which is not only superficially inaccurate—in that the actual skin tone range of North African and Middle Eastern peoples is more akin to that of Hispanics/Latinos than it is to Caucasians—but also historically insensitive,” Raiani wrote to the University. “To identify Arabs as ‘white’ is to disregard our history as members of the colonized world and to dismiss all acts of racial discrimination against our community.”
The U.S. Department of Education now requires annual reports from institutions of higher education on the racial and ethnic composition of their student bodies, and categorical options for race and ethnicity identification have changed.
Under new requirements, race and ethnicity data must be collected with a two-part question. Students are asked whether they are Hispanic, and then to identify their race from one or more of five categories: American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian; black or African American; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; and white, according to a press release from the University.
Columbia admissions applications already include questions and categories to reflect this change. Columbia does have race data for most current students, as collected through the optional self-identification area of admissions applications, but it was collected under the old categories. The University began to re-survey students under these new standards on Nov. 6, 2009. Faculty and staff will be re-surveyed in 2010.
The University plans to send each student three e-mails inviting them to take part in the survey, though participation is voluntary.
While Raiani said that she was speaking for herself and not her group, her statement was circulated among Turath, and members were encouraged to respond to survey requests with a formal refusal.
“We’re not intending to represent the views of all Arabs on campus,” Raiani said in an interview.
Still, she says, the group objects “to any identification system that requires people to fit themselves in a category that they cannot be defined according to their individual experiences.”
The fact that this new survey does not include a category for Middle Easterners, she said, further underlines the fact that Arabs have not been granted minority status in the United States, which is much debated among Arab and non-Arab groups. While this means that Arabs do not receive some of the rights government-recognized minorities do, some fear that identifying themselves as Arab will make them government targets.
The Turath executive board has not yet decided how to move forward on the issue. The race and ethnicity tallies at Columbia are a University-implemented governmental requirement, and not a policy created by the school. Raiani said she believed it would be important for Turath to formally object.
“Most of my Arab friends have had problems with this for a very long time,” she said. “The main problem is, beyond superficial inaccuracies, it implicates Northern Africans and Arabs as agents of white history when, in fact, our communities and our countries have often been the victims of white power and not its agents.”
“Ideally, we would like to see the University circulate an ethnicity survey that allows each individual to define their own race and ethnicity according to their own experiences,” Dueaa Elzin, BC ’11 and president of Turath, said.
And Raiani stressed the need for nuance.
“The issue is not so much that classifying Arabs as ‘white’ is factually inaccurate, because race does not exist as a biological fact, only as a social construct,” she said. “As a construct, it is packed with historical and experiential nuances any strict category cannot adequately encompass.
“Since some form of identification seems to be necessary given the reality of racialized power, we would prefer a category that more aptly represents the Middle Eastern/North African experience than does that of ‘white,’” she added.
Columbia spokesperson Robert Hornsby said that the University did not plan to issue a comment.
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