When Africans in the USA Cease to be Africans

Several years ago I went to a restaurant in New York, just off Times Square. A waiter came to take my order, after which he asked me where I was from. I’m not sure if it was my accent, or the fact that I did not order for any starters, just the main dish. Typically African, as my mates would say. Anyway, I told him, ‘Africa’.

“Oh really, I’m from Africa, too,” he said.

“Really?” I replied, “You don’t look African.”

“Actually I’m from Egypt, so I’m an Arab,” he said, looking rather pleased with himself.

And there in lies an age-old problem, where the folks from below the Sahara feel the ones in the north of the continent do not identify as Africans, unless it is to their advantage to do so. And they definitely refuse to be referred to as blacks.

When Adele James, a mixed-race British actress, was cast as the last Egyptian Pharaoh Cleopatra in a TV series that ran on Netflix, the Egyptians complained. A government official went as far as to insist that Cleopatra was Greek, not black. A portion of the Egyptian population called for a boycott of the TV series.

All that will be largely academic for North Africans living in the US, if the government's plans to redraw the classification of people by race and/or ethnicity come to fruition. According to an article published in the Washington Post, the Middle Eastern and North African population, for example, will be recognized as a distinct race and ethnic identity for the first time.

“The federal government is updating how it classifies people by race and ethnicity for the first time in over a quarter-century, aiming to better capture an increasingly diverse country,” the paper wrote. “And Latinos will also be able to identify as such without having to also identify as a separate race, such as Black or White.”

The announcement, and the subsequent story, drew mixed reactions from many Americans across the racial divide. Many didn’t see the whole sense of it, but some supported the move, citing the need to get an accurate picture of who is in America.

“Why at all do we need all these identifications? We are all just the same humans,” commented one.

“There is no good reason to categorize people, all it ends up doing is reinforcing systemic racism,” wrote another.

But others were not in agreement, and saw it as a positive step.

“Demographics are important in censuses/surveys, if you don’t take that data, you can’t see how things negatively impact populations,” wrote a supporter of the move.

“If, for instance, Black people are poorer than White people, or are being arrested more often than White people, or are getting their homes appraised lower than White people, that's something we can learn, and then start to fix, by collecting this kind of data,” another supporter.

But the greater majority seem to be against it, and some found the USA to be obsessed with race.

“Race is a social construct only,” argued one. “Humans are 99.9% alike according to Harvard University and other research institutions.”

“Among Latinos there are whites, blacks, indigenous, mestizos, mulattos, Arabs, Jews, Asian, you name it!” said another. “Latino is just a denomination that references our linguistic and institutional heritage, and it's even contested by some, but the term doesn't represent our complex diversity. These labels are just reductionism.”

“If you must categorize people, we need a lot more categories. ‘White’ is not a race either”, said yet another.

The United States categorizes race and ethnicity separately. The last US census recognized five racial categories: White, Black, Native American/Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander.

But alongside their race, Americans were asked during the 2000 census about their origins, which formed the basis of the ethnicity categories.

In March this year (2024) the US Office of Management and Budget published a revision to the Statistical Policy Directive No. 15:Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity, which effectively created a new race -  Middle Eastern or North African (MENA).

What does that mean to the African immigrant? Not much, according to some commentators.

“I’m dark-skinned, but my folks come from Morocco,” wrote one. “So with the new classification, I’m neither white nor black, but Middle Eastern. Tell that to the cop that will stop me when I’m just minding my own business, or that overseer who will refuse to give me a job. Americans obsess too much about race.”

One pinned that white Americans would not support the creation of a Middle Eastern race, as it would mean that Jesus would no longer be white.