Researchers conflate Middle Eastern ethnicity with Muslim identity in health studies.

Evidence

The first challenge is identifying Muslim Americans within existing health care databases and survey data. Researchers can only identify people who are likely to be Muslim, which in the United States usually means those of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. However, a large proportion of Arabs are not Muslim—many are Christian. Although both Middle Eastern Americans and Muslim Americans can experience Islamophobia, we should be careful not to conflate the 2 groups. — Goleen Samari, Islamophobia and Public Health in the…, 65

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the same conflation problem in hate-crime data and immigration policy debates, where ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ are treated as interchangeable.
• DEFINE: Illuminates why ethnic markers (‘Middle Eastern descent’) are broken proxies for religious identity in surveillance data.

Related

• Racial classification as White does not shield Middle Eastern Americans from Islamophobia. (similarity 0.82)
• The U.S. public conflates Arab and South Asian identities (similarity 0.81)
• Private citizens conflate Islam with the Middle East, erasing Muslim ethnic diversity (similarity 0.81)
• Arab and South Asian identities have been conflated with Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Arabs are a minority of American Muslims and mostly Christian (similarity 0.80)
• American Muslims are racially diverse and often identify as white or Asian (similarity 0.80)
• Islamophobia intersects multiple identities to shape additive health effects. (similarity 0.79)
• Islamophobia harms both mental and physical health of Muslim Americans. (similarity 0.79)
• American Muslims are racially heterogeneous across white, black, Asian, Latinx categories. (similarity 0.79)
• An ethnic minority identity invites questions while a Muslim identity invites hostile expulsion (similarity 0.79)
• US media and academia collapsed diverse groups into a single Arab-looking category (similarity 0.78)
• Muslim America’s narrative is rooted in blackness, not Arab identity (similarity 0.78)
• Religious identity racializes Arab and South Asian Muslims along shared lines (similarity 0.78)