Armenians, Hmong feel US race, ethnicity categories don’t represent them

The federal government recently reclassified race and ethnicity groups in an effort to better capture the diversity of the United States, but some groups feel the changes miss the mark.

Hmong, Armenian, Black Arab and Brazilian communities in the U.S. say they are not represented accurately in the official numbers. While the revisions were widely applauded, these communities say the changes have created a tension between how the federal government classifies them versus how they identify themselves.

The groups say money, political power and even health could be at stake. Being lumped into the wrong column can mean a gain or loss of government funds that are distributed based on data. For some, it’s about their identity and feeling seen by their own country.

The Office of Management and Budget said the working group that oversaw the revisions held 94 “listening sessions” with many advocacy groups, academics and the general public, and it will continue to reach out to communities.

THE EXCLUDED BACKGROUNDS

When the government revised its race and ethnicity standards in March — it’s first major alteration since 1997 — its seven categories included a new one, Middle Eastern or North African, or MENA. The revisions also encouraged detailed data collection about respondents’ backgrounds, such as African American, Jamaican and Haitian under the Black category.

Missing from the list of backgrounds under the new MENA category: Black Arabs from such countries as Somalia and Sudan, and Armenians. The groups were left out after a 2015 field test by the Census Bureau found that most Armenians still identified as white and most Somali and Sudanese respondents identified as Black even when MENA was an option.

Some advocates said the decision to omit Black Arabs from being included in the MENA category was based on outdated research.

For many Armenian Americans, not having their own category amounts to an existential threat as a large part of their diaspora’s culture is now concentrated in the United States. Ethnic Armenians also have communities around Europe and the Middle East, in particular Lebanon.

Many are descendants of those who fled the 1915 campaign by Ottoman Turks in which some 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres, deportations and forced marches. The atrocities, which emptied many ethnic areas in eastern Turkey, are widely viewed by historians as genocide.

Without Armenian inclusion in the MENA subcategories, many will likely categorize themselves as being from a different country. That could diminish their official numbers and reduce their power when it comes to redrawing political districts in places with large Armenian communities, said Sophia Armen, chair of the Census Taskforce of the Armenian National Committee of America-Western Region.

“We will now be undercounted by potentially hundreds of thousands of people,” Armen said. “It spells out a very real destruction of Armenian identity in the next two generations.”

During the last redistricting round following the 2020 census, Armenians in greater Los Angeles — which has the largest concentration of Armenians outside Armenia — were almost split up into different city districts, but the redistricting plan was modified after they sounded the alarm. There are an estimated 460,000 Armenian Americans in the U.S., with half living in California, according to the 2022 American Community Survey.

Being identified in the data correctly also is important to local health departments. It can influence anything from vaccination outreach in the proper language to tailoring health campaigns for specific communities.

Armenian Americans, for instance, are more likely to suffer from hypertension than the general population, but there’s not a lot of data.

“Policy is driven by data, first and foremost,” Armen said of people who feel missed in the classifications. “It just seems like we are purposely being ignored.”___

By TERRY TANG and MIKE SCHNEIDER Associated Press