It’s Time the U.S. Census Counted Armenian Americans | Opinion

By Thomas Simsarian Dolan

In recent weeks, every possible candidate to join Kamala Harris as a running mate was analyzed on not only policy but also identity. We live in an era when Americans’ hyphenated identities are inescapable parts of the national discourse and more importantly, how our society sees itself. Nonetheless, the U.S. Census seems inexplicably determined to ignore a large, proud, and important community—Armenian Americans.

Armenian Americans had high hopes when the White House announced the first major change to U.S. Census race and ethnicity standards in 27 years last March. The standards boast an unprecedented level of granularity, but despite expert testimony, thousands of public comments, and decades of community advocacy, the Census mulishly left Armenians out.

Few groups are more passionate about their identity, since we have clung to language, culture, and Christianity through thousands of years of invasion and persecution. Nonetheless, the whole of recorded history documents Armenians as a core Middle Eastern people—in the inscriptions of Darius the Great, writings of Herodotus and Tacitus, as well as in Christian and Muslim chronicles.

During World War I’s Armenian genocide, the Turks murdered 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians, and other Indigenous Peoples to manufacture a Turkish homeland in a region whose defining characteristic is diversity. When Europeans redrew the map of the Middle East after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, their rivalries and racisms blocked the creation of an independent Armenian state. The result was that only a sliver of our homeland survived in what become the Armenian Soviet Republic and Nagorno-Karabagh—an autonomous region arbitrarily isolated in Azerbaijan when Joseph Stalin too redrew maps.

In the wider region, Armenians are still celebrated as princes and princesses in Persian fairy tales, viziers and prime ministers in Egypt, custodians of Christian Holy Sites and their own quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, and popstars in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt.

In the United States, a major Armenia diaspora grew, where many found success but where many also faced restrictive housing covenants, xenophobic immigration policies, state-sponsored surveillance, and deportation. The so-called Armenoid race is still invoked in white supremacist literature, and Armenians have been impacted by anti-Middle Eastern profiling throughout the 20th century, especially after 9/11, when the Bush administration defined the Armenian Republic as Middle Eastern. Hate crimes against Armenian churches and schools still recur, and just last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Citi for intentionally discriminating against Armenians.

Given these histories, a separate group label for Armenians is a crucial litmus test of the value and validity of the new Census categories.

To its credit, the Census has trended toward greater specificity and opportunities for self-identification since its first iteration in 1790. Whereas early enumerators simply guessed at racial identities they inaccurately labeled with terms like “Hindoo,” “Mohammedan,” or “Quadroon,” the Census began allowing individuals to choose among more nuanced races in the second half of the 20th century. The Census now even allows respondents to select or write in national and ethnic identities as specific as Navajo, Samoan, or Barbadian.

With such highly specific Census line items, denying more than a million Armenian Americans a distinct group label is both unaccountable and unacceptable.

Fortunately, the Census has a ready-made and simple solution—an Armenian checkbox in the newly-added Middle East and North Africa (MENA) category.

For the last hundred years, the Census has used a Middle Eastern ancestry code to classify Armenians, but Armenians inexplicably do not appear among multiple subcategories and write-in examples, such as Israeli, Syrian, Moroccan, or Iraqi. This omission is especially baffling since Armenian Americans far outnumber every checkbox listed, with the exception of Lebanese, Iranian, and Egyptian. In fact, according to the Census’ own data, self-identified Armenian immigrants from Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq alone outnumber all write-in examples—which Census publications have already begun erasing as hundreds of thousands of undifferentiated MENA “Others.”

Even worse, this erasure reiterates Turkey and Azerbaijan’s genocidal commitments to purge the Middle East of even the memory of Armenians. Continuing to erase Armenians would make a mockery of President Joe Biden‘s belated recognition of the Armenian genocide in 2021.

This can all be remedied by a simple decision to add Armenians as a distinct checkbox within the MENA category. This is a statistical, ethical, and historical imperative—with huge stakes in ensuring the more than a million Armenian Americans have access to political representation, inclusive education, accurate personalized medicine, and access to more than a trillion dollars in federal funding. To refuse would imply we don’t exist or shouldn’t have equal access to civil rights protections, funding, or self-identification. To right a historic wrong, Armenians must no longer be erased.