The US Census, the MENA Campaign, and Classification Struggles: Neoliberal Distribution of Pride, Fear, and Deception

In this paper, I explore the history of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) campaign, which aims to extract Southwest Asian and North Africa populations from the white legal category on the US Census. I use Bourdieu’s classification struggles and theory of field to make sense of different approaches to this campaign. The data presented in the paper are gathered from 65 qualitative interviews with activists and citizens with Southwest Asian and North African backgrounds. The data manifest that although all participants unanimously reject the relevance of their current legal white racial category, they have divergent reasons for their support, or lack thereof, for the campaign, all of which are different from the advocacy organizations’ framing of it. I draw on these variant perspectives to investigate the classification struggles between different actors at different levels and examine how these actors meet in the field and pursue their goals.