race/ethnicity: Arabs/Middle Easterners

Rob D. sent along a commercial, made by the non-profit organization Iranians Be Counted, aimed at encouraging Iranian Americans filling out the U.S. Census to check “Other” and write in “Iranian.” It features a famous Iranian commedian doing a bunch of outrageous personalities, but in between the schtick is an argument that there is power in numbers and, therefore, a benefit to being identified as specifically Iranian:

This type of effort is really interesting and taps into a larger debate about Census categories.  How do we divide up the categories that we count?  Iranians are a much smaller group than, say, Arab American Persian (which is currently not an option on the U.S. Census).  If there is power in numbers, then wouldn’t it be better to write in “Arab American” “Persian”?  But, if you write in Arab Persian instead of Iranian, the resources to be gained from being counted may not benefit your community specifically. [As two commenters have pointed out, Iranian Americans are not Arab, except for a small minority. Iranians are Persian and most speak Farsi, not Arabic.  My mistake.]

The Asian American community in the U.S. is a good example of this conundrum.  “Asian” is a social construction; it is an umbrella label that includes very, very different groups.  There is great power in the social construction because it gives “Asians” a presence in American politics that, for example, the Hmong or the Vietnamese alone could never have.  But counting Asians as a group also means obscuring some very important differences among them.

For example, Asians outearn Whites in income surveys, suggesting that Asians should be excluded from programs trying to help groups escape poverty.  But, in reality, the groups we categorize as Asian vary tremendously in their average socioeconomic status.  Some Asian groups (e.g., the Japanese) outearn Whites; other Asian groups (e.g., the Hmong) have very high poverty rates.  When we look at the data broken out by smaller groups, we see more need, but the group itself is small enough that it can be ignored by politicians.

UPDATE: Roshan, in the comments, corrects me further:

Not all Iranians are Persians… Persians compose only 51 percent of the population. Other groups include the Azeris (24 percent), Gilaki and Mazandaranis (eight percent), Kurds (seven percent), Arabs (three percent), Lurs (two percent), Baluchs (two percent), and Turkmens (two percent) (Hakimzadeh, 2006).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.


Mary, writer of the fabulous blog Cooking with the Junior League, sent in an episode of the PBS series Faces of America. The episode, titled “Becoming American,” looks at the immigrant origins of various celebrities (Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert) in the period of massive immigration to the U.S. from about 1820 until 1924.

The segment Mary found interesting is about the grandfather of Queen Noor. An immigrant from Syria, he became a naturalized citizen, which Mary says “was unusual because at the time, only ‘white’ and ‘black’ people could be naturalized…but during this time, Syrians started taking their cases to court to prove that they were white, and could, as a result, become naturalized citizens.” It’s a great example of the social construction of race and the way groups have actively resisted the ways they were categorized.

The segment on Queen Noor’s grandfather starts at 36:23.

Also see our post on suing for whiteness.

Tilly R. sent in the clip below of Bill Maher attempting to illustrate the oppressiveness of the burqa by staging a fake fashion show in which every model comes out in an identical burqa. You only need to watch the first couple models to get the idea (starts at about .20 sec.):

The comedy is tasteless, at best. And it brings out two interesting assumptions: that measures of women’s liberation include (1) the right to show skin and/or your body’s shape and (2) the choice to express your individuality through your clothes.

It is with a focus on the latter that I introduce a website submitted by K.L. The website, Zarina, sells burqas. While most of the burqas we see in Western media are blue or black, this website sells burqas of all stripes.

A blue, embroidered burqa:

A “hot pink” burqa:

A saddle brown burqa:

A Turkish flag burqa:

An Afghan flag burqa:

An American flag burqa:

A camouflage burqa:

I have no idea if this website is legitimate (though it seems to be) and I have no idea whether women in (which) different burqa-requiring/encouraging societies can actually choose to wear these. I really have no idea.

But I do think it prompts us to interrogate our own assumptions about what women’s liberation looks like and if being able to choose your own style really is a good measure of it.

I’d bet that most Western women feel like being able to choose her clothes is a central part of her sense of freedom. Does that translate in this context? That is, if women were required to wear burqas, but could wear any burqa they like, does this mediate how oppressive the burqa seems to you? Conversely, does the seeming freedom that comes with choosing your clothes become less convincing once you think about it in this context?  I know this is tough to think about, but I think it’s an interesting thought experiment.

For related posts asking us to think about the relative freedoms represented by the burqa and the power of the male gaze, see here, here, and here.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Modern Language Association has all kinds of awesome language-related data available that you can customize depending on your interests. Most basically, you can get an interactive map showing the percent or number of speakers of various languages spoken at home by county (or number by zip code). Here is English:

English

Spanish:

Spanish

Navajo:

Navajo

Notice that the scale of the maps changes, so the same color doesn’t indicate the same percent of speakers for each language. For some languages the darkest red only indicates 1 or 2 percent.

There was one odd category I noticed. This is the map for “African languages”:

African languages

I can understand why you might lump some languages from an area together if they are so rare in the U.S. that they’d barely show up. But what, exactly, is an “African” language? It doesn’t appear to include Arabic, though it is spoken in much of northern Africa. Many people in Africa speak European languages (particularly French and English) due to colonialism. Presumably this category includes “native,” non-Arabic languages. It’s a strange category.

For those of you wondering about the little pockets of African language speakers in, say, Iowa and Nebraska, I could be wrong, but I would suspect in some of those counties it might have something to do with slaughterhouses. In the last decade or so some packing houses have recruited African immigrants, particularly Somalis, to move to rural areas and work in the plants. Again, that’s just a guess, but some of the locations fit.

UPDATE: Commenter mordant.espier says,

I think you’re wrong about African languages and meatpacking in the midwest. I know that Omaha has a significant Sudanese community, about 7,000, many of whom are refugees and asylum seekers.  In Minneapolis, there are a number of Somali. They are there because of the US government, and even more because religious and charitable organizations, especially the Episcopal Church and Catholic Charities, have provided support through all stages of the immigration process.  The existance of a group of refugees who are able to enlist the support of locals has created such pockets.

Anyway, moving on.You can also get side-by-side comparisons of two states. This shows the percentage of the population speaking Arabic in California and Michigan:

Arabic comparison

Number and percent of speakers of various languages:

Picture 1

You can compare the number of speakers in 2000 and 2005:

Picture 3

If you go to “Language by State” in that last link and select a language, you can then look at “ability to speak English”. Annoyingly, it only shows raw numbers, not percentages, so you have to do the calculations yourself. But here’s the breakdown for German in Michigan; clearly the vast majority of people who speak German also say they speak English “very well”:

Picture 4

You can also get an age breakdown (again, just raw numbers) for each language, by state. Here’s a partial list for Chinese:

Picture 1

I’m warning you now, the site can turn into an enormous time-suck. You think you’ll just look up the state you live in, say, and then you get started comparing things, and the next thing you know, it’s a half hour later.

UPDATE 2: Commenters have also pointed out that a) “Chinese” is as much of a thrown-together category as “African” (does it mean Cantonese? Mandarin?) and b) the site doesn’t have any information about use of American Sign Language, both great points.

I always enjoy having my preconceptions challenged and I had a nice moment while visiting the website of a U.S. company, East Essence, that sells clothes for Muslim women.

They offered some of what I expected, such as traditional clothing and hijabs:

aj50

Capture11

And also some things I didn’t expect:

Picture1

st3

The fact that the website includes traditional and modest clothing, and also models wearing tight jeans and revealing their midriffs, challenges the notion that Muslim women always dress according to strict rules, as well as the ideas that all Muslim women dress alike or that any given Muslim women dresses the same from day to day.

For more on Muslim fashion, see our posts here, here, here, and here.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I recently wrote a quite popular post, titled “What Do Women Want?”, based on data collected by the dating site OK Cupid (short story: women like it when men engage with their personality, not just their looks).  Mary S. sent in a link to some of their data on race and response rate, with some fascinating findings.

First, OK Cupid measured the compatibility of people of different races. They found that, by and large, race doesn’t impact compatibility scores:

Match-By-Race

Then they looked at response rates. When a man writes an inquiry email to a woman, what is the chance that that woman will write back?  Here is the data:

Reply-By-Race-Male

What this table shows is that race matters.  OK Cupid breaks it down:

Black women… are by far the most likely to reply to your first message. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and overall black women reply about a quarter more often.

white males just get more replies from almost every group.

White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them.

And how do men respond to women?

Reply-By-Race-Female

OK Cupid again:

Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.

White guys are shitty, but fairly even-handed about it. The average reply rate of non-white males is 48.1%, while white guys’ is only 40.5%. Basically, they write back about 20% less often.

To sum, white men appear to have the most dating capital in the online dating world, while black women seem to have the least.  This means that white men can sit back and enjoy the adulation, while black women are required to do more outreach to men to get the same results.

This makes sense give the way in which race is gendered.

For more, read Restaurant Refugee’s experiment comparing  responses on OK Cupid to an identical profile with pictures of a white person and a person of color.

UPDATE: Duran2, Dave, and Assaf critiqued my comment about white men sitting back and enjoying the adulation as both inaccurate and unfair. Point taken. I apologize.

For more, see our posts on asymmetry in interracial marriage and how Asian women are marketed to white men.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A gallery at Time Magazine offered a set of photographs that counter the frequent representations of Saudi women as (veiled) and downtrodden.  The slide show features professional women at work.

Daneh Abuahmed, Rotana’s head of information technology:

saudi_12

Dr. Maha Al Muneef, Executive Director of the National Family Safety Program:

saudi_19

Sultana al Rowaili, the head of human resources at Rotana:

saudi_14

Members of the National Family Safety Program:

saudi_2

Norah Al Malhooq, administrator King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre:

saudi_24

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life just released the results of a global study of Muslims. The interactive map lets you hover over a country and see what percent of its population is Muslim, and what percent of all Muslims reside there. It will be a surprise to many people to see what a small proportion of Muslims live in Arab countries.

Muslims

This map weights each country by population size (larger version here):

world-distribution-weighted

By region:

Pie-chart

Full report here.