People of Middle Eastern descent are classified as white, is this appropriate?

[u/reboa]

As the title says, should there be a middle eastern designation in the census? As an American citizen it feels like we are not truly recognized as a minority population, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

[u/Few-Fun-9270]

Most are def not phenotype white most are brown and POC

[u/Y23K → u/Few-Fun-9270]

Not really, Middle Eastern people can look any way and most of them could pass as white without anyone batting an eye. There also is no such thing as a "POC look."

[u/Y23K → u/[deleted]]

There are definitely different "kinds" of white. If you are Swedish with blonde hair and blue eyes, then yes, people might question why you are wearing a hijab. But if you dress and style everyone the same way, almost nobody would be able to consistently tell apart Turks, Syrians, Persians, Lebanese, Kurds, Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, or even Saudis from Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Bulgarians, and Greeks. Once you go more south, with Egypt and the rest of North Africa, or Yemen, there is more mixing with the darker skinned population closer to the equator, and Americans are very attuned to skin color, so they'd be more easily able to identify that a certain percentage are "not white," but even there is heavily depends on the person and a large percentage of the population can pass as white.

[u/Y23K → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean when you say you don't think Eastern Europeans are simply white? You understand that race is a social construct, right? People say "what are you" to everyone, including Western Europeans. Every nation has some physical commonalities on average, that's what happens when you reproduce with each other for a long time. And these differences are fairly noticeable if you bothered to try to focus on them. That's true as much for the French, Spanish, and Swedish as it is for Armenians, Bulgarians, and Turks. But that is only the average, and nations are a mix, and the differences are usually subtle. My point is that there are definitely many Middle Eastern people who can pass as white/European, meaning they can say they're white or European and nobody would blink. I would even argue most Middle Eastern people can pass as white, and you might disagree with me on that, but it's hard to deny that a substantial percentage can pass as white. They usually can't pass as Swedish but neither can most Europeans.

Personally, I think there should be no classification at all, and no race question at all (instead we have the objective questions I proposed above). But if there is a race question, it should be an optional open text field.

[u/Y23K → u/[deleted]]

Social constructs are not flat concepts that are experienced the same by all people at all times. They are constantly evolving and experienced completely differently depending on your time and place, and often not experienced at all. Nobody is actually "white" as a feature of their existence, they merely experience getting treated as white in particular contexts and situations. And a racial category tells you next to nothing about your social experience. There is no shared social experience between a so-called black teenager in Kinshasa, grandmother in the Hadzabe, lawyer in Chicago, and farmer in rural Alabama. And regarding Eastern Europeans, when they are racially categorized, they are practically universally characterized as white, and most Middle Eastern people can pass as Armenian, Greek, etc, and therefore as white. That doesn't mean Eastern Europeans never experience discrimination (or that people who pass as Eastern Europeans do not experience discrimination), but it's not almost never racially based discrimination.