U.S. Census classification of Arabs as white no longer matches lived experience.

Evidence

These stories highlight how 9/11 marked the beginning of a new racialized experience for Muslim Americans in the United States. While they may have never been seen as fully American, they were now treated as if they were unwanted. Being yelled at to “go back home” reveals a shift in how Muslims are now treated in their country of residence. Aziz’s experience revealed the loss of his status as an honorary white, the racial location that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2002) argues is between white and collective black. Honorary whites, according to Bonilla-Silva (2002) are able to access some of the privileges of whites, like socioeconomic mobility, but do not experience all of the privileges that whiteness affords. He places Middle Easterners in this category, a placement that is tenuous, as Aziz’s testimony highlights. Omar’s and Saima’s encounters show how the U.S. Census categorization of Arabs as white is no longer an accurate classification. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 133

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Bonilla-Silva’s ‘honorary white’ category and its tenuousness, the chapter’s conceptual backbone.
• XREF: The gap between bureaucratic census categorization and lived racial experience echoes the reader’s prior map on how state classification systems mislabel groups.
• QUESTION: What does it mean that a legally white category (census) coexists with a socially nonwhite lived experience — worth chasing how the mismatch itself does work.