According to the leaders of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Arab American Institute, Arabs are missing out on lucrative benefits by being counted as “White” in state and federal data. They see advantages to being treated as a non-White minority in the eyes of American institutions. Directly contradicting the left’s conspiratorial “White Privilege” hoax.
“We don’t get those resources because we’re White and fall under the generic White community that doesn’t get needs-based assistance.” – Samer Khalaf, the national president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
“An identifier is important for every single reason we can think of. It’s important for the trillion dollar-plus federal budget, the voter registration ballots, the classes for English as a second language.” – Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute
“I always tick ‘other’ and then write in Middle Eastern, Lebanese or Arab,” Hajjar said. “I remember, distinctly, when I was applying to high school — I went to a private high school — I ticked ‘other’ and the admissions person asked me what I was, and when I told them, they changed it to White. I still can’t believe that happened. That was really something.”…Put a little bit differently, while the treatment of identity in the US is robust and rigorous in some ways, it’s impoverished in others. And there are consequences.…“Our community is uniquely disadvantaged because we’re not granted the ability to accurately communicate our identity on the census and other survey data, meaning that the socioeconomic challenges of our heavily first-generation and immigrant communities, as well as the wide range of environmentally linked diseases specific to our ethnic population, are undocumented,” 20-year-old Nooralhuda Sami said.…Originally from Iraq, Sami and her family moved to Dearborn, Michigan — one of the US cities with the most densely populated Arab community — in 2010.“There are so many repercussions of this (lack of data and visibility) in Dearborn I observed growing up. Most notably in the south end of Dearborn — racism, classism and capitalism, and extremely high respiratory illnesses among its refugee and Yemeni residents,” Sami added.…“For us to claim our place in US society, as so many others have done, it’s important to be recognized by the government,” Khalaf, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee national president, said.
