No MENA in Census: In-depth Interview with Dr. Loubna Qutami

In recent months, the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question on the 2020 US census, has garnered significant controversy and media attention. For now the supreme court decide to bloc the question but the decision is not yet final.

The census is supposed to count all people living in the United States regardless of citizenship status, and is crucial for determining how federal funds are distributed and how congressional districts are drawn. The legal challenge to the citizenship question sites concern of an undercount, especially in immigrant communities.

But there are other critical questions left out of this conversation, like, why is the Trump administration refusing to add a box for the Middle Eastern and North African-identifying peoples on the upcoming 2020 census form?

Today, the exact number of people of Southwest Asian or Middle Eastern and North African background in the United States isn't exactly known. Arabs alone are estimated to be more than 3 million in the US, and according to a report in the LA Times, in the last census, about 80% of people from the MENA region were forced to self-identify as white because the census has no special box they can check.

The other option for these communities has been to choose "other", which many have resisted doing!

For years, the Arab and Middle Eastern community organizations have advocated for a special box, and they were close to getting one until the Trump administration came into power.

So, why is the census important? and why is it so important to Arab and Middle Easterners in the US? To get some answers to these questions, and to learn more about the history of racialization of this community, I spoke with Loubna Qutami. She is a post-doctoral fellow in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the former executive director of the Arab Cultural and community center in San Francisco.