Truth comes out in Census lies: Doesn't matter if you write in ARAB -- you WON'T be counted as Arab

Census to Count Arabs as White, Despite Write-In Campaign

New America Media , News Report, Suzanne Manneh, Posted: Mar 25, 2010

The Census Bureau says it doesn’t matter if Arab Americans write their race in on their Census questionnaire. 

Even if they check the “other” box and write in “Arab,” as many community groups advocate, the Census will still count them as racially white.

“Anyone from Europe, North Africa or the Middle East [will be classified] as white,” said Roberto Ramirez, chief of the ethnicity and ancestry branch at the Census Bureau.

Ramirez said that will be the case no matter how many people write in “Arab,” because the Census Bureau is required by law to use racial categories determined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and those categories do not include Arab.

Advocates for including Arab as a race say they will press on with their write-in campaign however. Census regulations provide that any organization can pay for its own special tabulation providing a formal count of write-ins.

“As with any write-in option, it is not comprehensive enough to be published as a ‘count,’ but it will provide us with important trends and estimates of the proportion of people of Arab ancestry who do not identify with the white race classification,” said Helen Samhan, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, which plans to order a special count.

“That is a start for working with the Census Bureau to research necessary changes in the way race and ethnicity are measured,” she added.

A spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget told New America Media that current racial standards for the census will be reevaluated after the 2010 census, in time for the next one in 2020.

Click here to read the full report

-- Ray Hanania

www.RadioChicagoland.com

Jerusalem Post: Why doesn't the Government want to know about Arabs in America?

Yalla Peace: Some other race?

By RAY HANANIA, THE JERUSALEM POST, 17/03/2010 12:28 

Why doesn't the government want to know how many Arabs there are in the US?

A lot of Israelis think it is rough growing up Jewish in the Western world, but we Palestinians and Jews share a lot. It’s just as difficult for us.

As a child, my friends once surrounded me and demanded to know “What are you?”

What am I, I wondered. “I’m American.” No you’re not, they insisted.

So I went home and asked my dad. “Dad, what am I?” My dad shook his head and said, “Ya rubbee. Don’t tell them you are Palestinian. Tell them you are Syrian or Lebanese.”

Imagine, it was okay to be Syrian or Lebanese back then. So I went back to school and the kids surrounded me again and they asked “What are you?” I told them: “I’m cereal. But I think my mother is a lesbian.” Badda boom! Great joke in my comedy lineup but also a true reflection of the challenges facing Arabs in America.

Things haven’t improved at all. In fact, they’ve gotten worse.

Recently the US Census announced its decennial campaign to “count” all Americans. You see, in America, money is distributed based on the ethnic and racial demographics of the population – how many people each ethnic and racial group has.

If the census shows blacks living together in one spot, the government designs political boundaries to help black voters strengthen their voices in elections.

THREE TIMES over the past 30 years, the US Census has spent millions on lobbying ethnic and racial communities to convince them to fill out the census forms which ask questions about family size. Traditionally, though, minorities have resisted the census believing it is a way for the government to peek into their lives, and then punish them for things they might be doing wrong.

Hispanics fear that the government might discover some of their relatives are “illegal aliens,” for example. (Actually, things could be worse for me. Instead of being Arab, I could be “Hispanic” and have the word “panic” built in to my name.)

So the census has added “ethnic identity” to the form and identified 29 ethnic and racial peoples to help them more easily be counted. And, the more easily you can identity yourself, the more benefits you may get.

When you review the census form’s long list of 29 “recognized” ethnic and racial groups, you notice that Arabs, and Jews by the way, are not included.

The groups are:

White.

Black people are listed in three different categories on the form: Black. African-American. Negro. (A strange apparition in 2010)

Hispanics are listed in five different ways on the form: Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin. Mexican-American. Chicano. What country does Chicano come from?

The census also identifies American Indian and Alaskan native. They even give them space on the form to write in their tribe.

There are all kinds of Asians. Lots of them. Asian-Indian, Japanese, native Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean, Guamanian or Chamorro, Filipino, Vietnamese and Samoan. Just in case they missed someone, they’ve added categories for other Asians such as Laotian, Thai, Pakistani and Cambodian. They also have Pacific Islander, Fijian, Tongan. Who are Tongans?

I know why they don’t have Arab or Jew written on the US Census form. They don’t have any room left on the form.

Now, many people think that Jews already “control the news media” and don’t need to be counted. They have the highest voter turnout of any group in the country and are considered among the most politically empowered.

SO THAT leaves us Arabs. What do we have? Zip. Zilch. Zero. How many ways can I say ‘nothing’? The fact that the US government doesn’t want to know how many Arabs there are in America or where they live is really kind of strange, actually.

Because since September 11, 2001, the US government has done everything it can to identify Arabs and Muslims, too. Usually at airports, profiling us to pull us out of lines and give us the third degree. When it comes to something bad, the government is all over us as Arabs. But when it comes to getting something good, like power, the US government leaves us out. And it doesn’t count us.

We’re told when we complain that Arabs are not listed on the US Census form that we Arabs can just write our name on the “other” line at the bottom of the form.

That is so demeaning. I don’t want to be “other.” How much have we lost as Arabs in America because we’re not counted by the census?

Well, take a place like Chicago for example, that has 36,000 to 38,000 city jobs paid for by taxes (we Arabs pay taxes, too). Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was in Dubai last year trying to raise money for his near-bankrupt city, the second largest in America, by the way. He told
the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chicago has 250,000 Arabs. He treats them well, he boasted.

In fact, next month, Daley will be feted at a dinner hosted by the Arab American Institute in Washington for all the “good things” he has done for “his” 250,000 Arabs.

Well, it turns out he hasn’t done much for his Arabs at all.

Chicago has 3 million people. Do the math. Arabs are about 8 percent of the population. That means we should have 8% of the city’s jobs, or about 3,040 city jobs. Arabs have only about 200 total jobs in the city.

Arabs being paid to promote the census are angry with me. But I have learned one important fact when it comes to American politics: If you can keep ethnic groups from knowing how many they are, you can un-empower them.

Named Best Ethnic Columnist in America by New America Media, the writer is a Palestinian-American columnist and peace activist. He can be reached at www.YallaPeace.com

Op-Ed Columnist Ray Hanania tells the U.S. Census to SHOVE IT!

Ray Hanania tells the U.S. Census to SHOVE IT! In this Opinion Commentary on YouTube.





-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com

The truth about the "Don Imus" Affair: It's not about race but about the unfair of "free speech"

The truth about the "Don Imus Affair"
By Ray Hanania

The Don Imus controversy is not really about the limits of free speech as some are contending, but rather about the discrepancies in how "freedoms" such as free speech are tolerated for some in America but not for others.

These discrepancies are based not on merit but solely on the basis of race, stereotypes and a mainstream society of plagued by the ugliness of America’s unbalanced racial realities.

I enjoyed seeing the Don Imus empire collapse in such utter humiliation. Why? Well, I am Arab American who is most often mistaken for a Muslim.

I disliked Don Imus passionately and am celebrating in his demise. I’d like to see a handful of other American media bigots tumble down along the same ugly path including anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others like them.

But is the issue curtailing free speech? No. Because free speech is more free for some than it is for others in America.

Those who have enjoyed free speech as unrestrained and as viciously as Imus has, deserve to be judged by a tougher standard of morality.

Those who come from communities who are excluded from the mainstream media, denied equal rights of expression not just in principle but more because of the practice of media exclusion have more flexibility in how they may express themselves.

The freer you have been to disparage people who do not have the same ability to respond to the attacks, the less your right of free speech, in my opinion.

The more you have been a victim of hate speech, the more you have the right of flexibility in what you can say.

Imus and others like him have made sport of Arabs and Muslims, blaming an entire race and religion for the actions of a few fanatics. The horrors of today’s terrorism has been used to rip away the Constitutional protections from a race of people, I believe because they were never popular in this country to begin with.

Most Americans hated Arabs and Muslims long before 19 Saudi Arabian hijackers commandeered four airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Should Imus have been fired for the three words he uttered. As an Arab American who watched and listened helplessly as Imus ranted, slandered, insulted and defamed Arabs and Muslims relentlessly, never giving us the opportunity to respond.

Am I glad he is fired? Absolutely. Was it fair? No.

But fairness has nothing to do with this not because I say so, but because Imus rose to fame on the basis of an unfair system anyway.

In other words Imus rose in popularity to host one of the nation’s premier syndicated radio shows that was also broadcast on an important and high profile Cable Network because 2.5 million people cheered on his rants against Arabs and a select few others in America, mostly Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, Muslims and even some Jews.

He rose not because of talent, but because his message of hatred, disguised as "satire," defended wrongly as humor, was popular among a growing class of Americans who look down on other ethnic groups. Imus was not popular because minorities loved him. Imus was popular because Whites in mainstream America loved him.

Therefore, his fall from the pinnacle of that mountain of discrimination is justified to be brought down not on the merits of whether what he said was right or wrong, but because just as 2.5 million people can elevate him to popular radio and TV host status, 10 million mostly minorities, Blacks, Asians and Hispanics, and Arabs, have the right to bring him down.

Defenders of Don Imus offer the ridiculous contention that he is the victim of free speech hypocrisy.

Imus merely said in one moment what some African American hip-hop artists, comedians and other entertainers say all the time, endlessly.

But the difference is that Imus directed his comments against individuals of another race. The African American members of a basketball team.

The Black rappers and hip-hop artists are saying things are that considered distasteful to many Americans, but they are almost always speaking about their own experiences of the environments in which they have lived.

There are whores in this world and the fact is they come in all colors and races and religions. If rap artists of one race, African American or even White, want to write lyrics that address that reality of their lives and experience, they have every right to do so even if someone, a majority of Americans, find their comments distasteful.

They can use the term "hos" because it is about what they see around them. Don Imus was not talking about himself, his experience or even trying to make a social statement about the relevance of "whores" in American society when he described 8 African American basketball players as "nappy haired hos."

He made the comments because that is how White Don Imus viewed eight Black women playing basketball who had tattoos and looked "tough."

There is a difference when you laugh at some one, as racist do, or laugh with someone, as true comedians and satirists do all the time. Black comedians joke about their stereotypes and they have every right to do so.

Don Imus, a White man, has no right to lampoon the stereotypes of Black people.

White people are not under the foot of a new more sophisticated form of racism. Blacks and other minorities are.

At the very bottom of the hatred that is the foundation of some in American, sit Arabs and Muslims. As heavy as the burden is upon our heads, we can find the room to celebrate in the demise of Don Imus, and we will do so with gusto!

(Ray Hanania is an award winning Palestinian American columnist, author and standup comedian. He can be reached at www.hanania.com.)