You MENA I’m White? The Priming of Middle Eastern and North African Identity

• In Event: Multidimensionality in Measurement and the Study of Racial and Ethnic Boundaries

Abstract

Does having one’s ethnoracial identity represented in a form influence political attitudes? Most often, researchers use Census-standard questions to capture respondents’ self-reported ethnoracial identities. However, not every ethnoracial group is accurately captured by these questions. For instance, there is some tension surrounding whether Latinx identity should be thought of as a racial or ethnic category (e.g., Hitlin et al., 2007; Mathews et al., 2017). Moreover, some Caribbean individuals prefer to identify as such, as opposed to Black or African American (e.g., Mathews et al., 2017; Rogers, 2006). This begs the question, can the presence or absence of one’s ethnoracial identity on surveys influence how people respond to questions about politics? To test this, I use the case of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) individuals.

MENA individuals are legally classified as White; however, there are many reasons to believe that those from MENA are not seen nor self-identify as White. MENA are dehumanized (Ktiely et al. 2015), victims of non-specific hate crimes (Maghbouleh 2019), conflated with and victims of Islamophobic attacks (e.g. Lajevardi 2020, Oskooii et al., 2019), and subject to government surveillance (Bayoumi 2006) and travel bans. This treatment leads many MENA individuals to reject self-identification as White (Maghbouleh et al., 2022). In this paper, I test whether MENA respondents answer political questions differently based on whether the survey instrument includes or excludes the category of MENA. I show that when MENA individuals do not have the option to identify as MENA, their answers to political questions involving the Middle East and questions related to racial justice are more extreme relative to when they are given the option to self-identify as MENA. This research has broad consequences for our study of ethnoracial politics, as we often rely on measures of identity that do not reflect or unknowingly exclude groups that we wish to understand.

Author

• Amanda Sahar d'Urso, Georgetown University