When None of the Options Fit
When Youssef Ibrahim left his family behind in Egypt to enroll last year at Yale University, he found that he gravitated to others who shared his love for traditional Middle Eastern food and music. Many, like him, were feeling homesick in their new surroundings, missing the close family ties they grew up with.
Yale’s four cultural centers, for Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American students, offer programming to provide students with this sense of belonging. None, to him, seemed a good fit.
Creating a cultural center for Middle Eastern and North African students has become a priority for Ibrahim and others at campuses across the country, where pressure is building to acknowledge their distinct racial and ethnic identity, sometimes abbreviated as MENA. It’s part of a broader cultural reckoning about how people from this vast region of diverse languages, religions, colors, and cultures want to be recognized and valued.
The U.S. Census Bureau officially categorizes them as white, even though many suffer discrimination that they say gets overlooked as a result. That may soon change. The federal government is resurrecting the idea of adding a category to the census for people who identify as Middle Eastern or North African. In June, the nation’s chief statistician said her office was reviewing and revising how data on race and ethnicity is collected and reported, and it’s widely expected that a question about MENA identity will surface again.
The census categories dictate not only how federal data is collected and money disbursed to minority groups, but how the Common Application, and colleges’ own data crunchers, count people. The census categories are the default colleges often fall back on, and the reason they sometimes cite for why they don’t have enough information to justify, say, a MENA cultural center or counselors sensitive to the needs of this population.
Germine H. Awad, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has been working with other researchers to push for a MENA category in the census, a move the Census Bureau supports, but the Office of Management and Budget has yet to approve.
‘Forced Into Boxes’
The discrimination and prejudice many students who identify as MENA suffer is compounded by “the invisibility and invalidation of their identities,” Awad said. “There is a psychological cost of having this racially minoritized experience and not having any acknowledgment of that. You’re categorized as white, but your experience is similar to the minority populations.”
One of the reasons, she speculates, that students have had such trouble getting support for cultural centers is “the zero-sum thinking” that they’ll take away resources from other minority groups. Then, there’s the question of who should be lumped together in a category that covers such a broad and diverse region. Similar questions have swirled around the Hispanic/Latino categories since activists pushed for their inclusion in 1970.
Selma Mazioud, a Yale sophomore, embodies the complex ethnicities bound together in the MENA category. Born in France to Tunisian parents, she grew up and spent most of her life in Morocco.
As a freshman, she went to a dinner organized by Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center. With her olive skin, “I felt the need to explain why I was there.” Even more disorienting, she said, is having to check the box the census assigns her.
“I’m applying for internships and have to identify as white every time,” Mazioud said. “I don’t think anyone considers me as white, and being put in that bucket is very frustrating.” Ibrahim felt that way checking off “white” on the Common Application he filled out to apply to Yale. “I’m being forced into boxes I don’t relate to.”
When he gets together with friends, they cook together, talk about what’s happening in the Arab region, and share memories of the Arab Spring and how the pro-democracy protests that started in 2011 influenced them, even as children. “Our identities are entangled with our culture,” Ibrahim said. If the group had its own cultural center, he said, “that would mobilize resources” other groups have for speaking engagements, poetry events, parties, and exhibits.
Yale does have student groups like the Arab Students Association, which meets in a small room of the Asian American Cultural Center. But without demographic data to draw from, organizers say, recruiting new members sometimes means combing through lists of Yale students, looking for Arab-sounding names. They miss a lot of students that way.
A Yale spokeswoman, Karen Peart, said the dean’s office worked with students to create the designated space in the Asian-American Center where MENA students who come from more than 18 countries can “socialize, share cultural traditions, and build closer relationships.”
She added, in an email, that “Students who trace their heritage to the Middle Eastern and North African regions make vital contributions to Yale, and the university thanks everyone involved for the success of creating a dedicated space for student use.”
Mazioud said the room is only a “step in our struggle to get our own cultural center” — one where the students from the diverse cultures of the region where she grew up feel seen and valued. —Katherine Mangan
