“No way, I am not white, we are not white, we are not anything exceptArab…”
A coalition of Arab-American cultural organizations inthe San Francisco Bay Area have launched a grassroots organizingcampaign designed to send a clear message to Washington: that they,along with every other Arab in America, are in fact Arab, and not white.(1)
At issue is the format of the 2010 Census form, which has boxes formore than a dozen different racial categories but no racial or ethniccategory for people of Arab descent.
In response, community activists have launched a grassroots canvassingcampaign to encourage Arabs living throughout the San Francisco BayArea to complete the 2010 Census by checking the “other” box in Section9 and write in “Arab.”
[snip]
“We don’t want to be subsumed under the category of white,” Qutamisaid. Arabs “don’t identify as white, and don’t identify as blackeither,” she added. “We’re still so misunderstood.”
“There is this idea that Arabs are refugees or new immigrants becausewe’re invisible,” she added. “There’s a distortion in our identity,that we’re camel riders, nomads, when in fact Yemenis were part of thelabor movement with Cesar Chavez.”
(1) And all this time we were told that ‘race is a social construct…’ — Ed