Censusless: Arab/Muslim Interpolation into Whiteness and the War on Terror

Abstract

This essay explores the unstable racial positioning of Arabs and Muslims in the United States by analyzing the implications of their censusless/white legal status coupled with their hypervisible racialization through containment, surveillance, and repression in the War on Terror context. The author situates Arab/Muslim racialization within a genealogical overview of racial formations of power in the United States and particularly focuses on how these processes have conditioned the historical and current legal status of Arabs as white on the U.S. decennial census. Next, the author examines the 2018 decision by the U.S. Census Bureau to omit a separate category for Middle Eastern and North African communities in 2020. The author demonstrates how racially tinged moral panics of Arab/Muslim proclivity for violence, terrorism, and radical extremism, coupled with their invisibilization through their white legal status, cultivates the breeding grounds for expansive forms of racial state violence for other communities as well. Drawing from scholar-activist research while working with the Arab community in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 2010 census campaign, the author concludes by offering examples of how censusless communities can work to strengthen their collective well-being in the absence of a given census category.