FnF News
FNF News | National Identity & Politics
Published: June 20, 2025
By: Khadija Khan, Senior Writer
The American Racial Mirage: What Happens When Hispanics and Arabs Are Legally ‘White’?
Washington, D.C. — A viral quote that’s now making rounds online cuts deeper than most cultural memes:
“He’s going to be butt hurt when he finds out that Hispanics and Arabs are white.”
What sounds like sarcasm is actually a brutally accurate dig at one of the most persistent contradictions in American life: how race is legally defined versus how it is socially used.
While both sides of the political aisle weaponize identity for narrative advantage, very few Americans — including those shaping policy — understand that the U.S. federal government still classifies Arabs and many Latinos as “white.” And that contradiction may be one of the most consequential, yet quietly maintained, features of American identity politics.
Legally White, Socially “Other”
According to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, which sets racial classification standards for federal forms:
“White” refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
That includes Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians, Iranians, and other Arabs — even if they are profiled, surveilled, or scapegoated domestically.
It also includes many Latinos who are asked to first declare if they are “Hispanic/Latino” (an ethnicity), and then choose a race — often defaulting to “White” due to lack of better options.
In effect, entire communities that experience discrimination, hate crimes, and marginalization are told by the U.S. government that they’re white — and therefore ineligible for certain civil rights protections, targeted research funding, or policy-based inclusion.
“We’re white when it’s time to deny us benefits, and brown when they want someone to blame,” says Nour El-Sayed, an Arab American civil rights advocate in New Jersey.
The Strategic Ambiguity of Race in America
What we’re dealing with isn’t just outdated classification — it’s a willful ambiguity. One that gives both the government and political players flexibility to shape narratives on demand.
On the right, Arab and Latino communities are routinely painted as cultural outsiders, threats to American values, or even “infiltrators.” Yet when confronted with complaints of racism, critics respond: “You’re not even technically a minority.”
On the left, activists decry systemic oppression and promote diversity benchmarks — but Arabs are excluded from most “People of Color” categories, and Latinos are often squeezed into a statistical grey zone where they’re too large in number to qualify as marginalized, yet too racially diverse to count for equity programming.
“We are racialized when it’s politically useful and de-racialized when it’s inconvenient,” says Dr. Juan Carrillo, a professor of ethnic studies at Arizona State University.
The Census Fight That Never Ends
For decades, Arab Americans have petitioned for their own racial category — MENA (Middle Eastern/North African) — to be included in the U.S. Census. The Biden administration endorsed the change in 2023, but bureaucratic delays have once again postponed implementation until at least 2030.
Without that category:
- There is no accurate data on Arab American poverty, incarceration, or health disparities.
- Hate crimes against Arab Americans are underreported or misclassified.
- Federal funding formulas exclude or misallocate support for Arab communities.
Meanwhile, Latino identity — which includes white Cubans, Black Dominicans, and Indigenous Mexicans — remains so broad that it erases lived experience.
Weaponized Identity Across the Spectrum
This strategic ambiguity doesn’t just affect Arab and Hispanic Americans. It’s become a key part of how U.S. identity politics operates:
- When politically convenient, individuals and groups are classified as minorities to boost diversity statistics or fund outreach efforts.
- When politically threatening, the same people are declared “white-adjacent” or “non-minorities,” effectively stripping them of credibility in public discourse.
For example:
- In college admissions, Latinos might be used to showcase campus diversity, but not qualify for affirmative action if they select “White” on forms.
- After 9/11, Arab Americans were profiled as national security risks, even as official records counted them as white Americans with no special protections.
- In debates on Israel and Palestine, critics of Israeli policy who are Arab are often accused of antisemitism, while their own racial identity is dismissed as irrelevant.
“We’ve created a racial caste system that allows flexible outrage,” said legal historian Maya Gillon. “And no one suffers more than those forced to exist in between.”
What This Means for the 2025 Election
As America moves toward another highly charged election, these classifications matter more than ever. Candidates are once again courting “minority voters,” proposing reforms to DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) programs, and promising to fight racism — while often ignoring that millions of Americans are invisibly caught in these racial no-man’s lands.
- Arab Americans are increasingly swinging independent or right-leaning, disillusioned with progressive silence on issues like Gaza or censorship.
- Latino Americans — the fastest-growing voting bloc — are divided across class, geography, and race, making them the most misunderstood demographic in U.S. politics.
Yet both groups are routinely reduced to caricatures by parties that want their vote but not their complexity.
Conclusion: America’s Racial Code Is Broken — By Design
The most uncomfortable truth in modern identity politics isn’t just that Arabs and Hispanics are classified as white. It’s that this entire system of classification was never built to reflect reality — it was built to control access to power, resources, and legitimacy.
As long as that structure remains, moments of confusion and contradictions will persist. And no amount of viral memes, viral outrage, or government platitudes will fix a system that wasn’t meant to be fair in the first place.
So yes — he’ll be “butt hurt” when he finds out Arabs and Latinos are white. But he should be even more upset at the system that made it so.