Armenians, Hmong and Other Groups Feel US Race and Ethnicity Categories Don’t Represent Them

The federal government recently reclassified race and ethnicity groups in an effort to better capture the diversity of the United States, but some groups feel the changes miss the mark.

Hmong, Armenian, Black Arab and Brazilian communities in the U.S. say they are not represented accurately in the official numbers. While the revisions were widely applauded, these communities say the changes have created a tension between how the federal government classifies them versus how they identify themselves.

The groups say money, political power and even health could be at stake. Being lumped into the wrong column can mean a gain or loss of government funds that are distributed based on data. For some, it’s about their identity and feeling seen by their own country.

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During the Vietnam War and unbeknownst to the American public, the CIA recruited Lao and Hmong people to fight the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. Tens of thousands of Hmong soldiers died while others fled to the U.S. as a result of what became known as the “secret war.”

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Given their history fighting in that region for the U.S., many Hmong feel strongly that they should be classified as Southeast Asian. But because China is considered the Hmong ancestral homeland, the U.S. Census Bureau categorized them as East Asian after the 2020 census.

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The East Asian label also pains them because the Hmong were oppressed in China as an ethnic minority and sought refuge in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, according to Quyên Dinh, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.

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When the government revised its race and ethnicity standards in March — it’s first major alteration since 1997 — its seven categories included a new one, Middle Eastern or North African, or MENA. The revisions also encouraged detailed data collection about respondents’ backgrounds, such as African American, Jamaican and Haitian under the Black category.

Missing from the list of backgrounds under the new MENA category: Black Arabs from such countries as Somalia and Sudan, and Armenians. The groups were left out after a 2015 field test by the Census Bureau found that most Armenians still identified as white and most Somali and Sudanese respondents identified as Black even when MENA was an option.

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For many Armenian Americans, not having their own category amounts to an existential threat as a large part of their diaspora’s culture is now concentrated in the United States. Ethnic Armenians also have communities around Europe and the Middle East, in particular Lebanon.

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Without Armenian inclusion in the MENA subcategories, many will likely categorize themselves as being from a different country. That could diminish their official numbers and reduce their power when it comes to redrawing political districts in places with large Armenian communities, said Sophia Armen, chair of the Census Taskforce of the Armenian National Committee of America-Western Region.

“We will now be undercounted by potentially hundreds of thousands of people,” Armen said. “It spells out a very real destruction of Armenian identity in the next two generations.”

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An analysis by Pew Research Center showed that the coding mistake revealed at least 416,000 Brazilians, or more than two-thirds of Brazilians in the U.S., also identified as Hispanic in the 2020 American Community Survey.

Usually, if someone marks Hispanic and Brazilian on the survey, they are recoded as “not Hispanic” {snip}

Not including Brazilians, or Haitians for that matter, in the definition of Hispanic or Latino, means that large numbers of Afro-Latinos aren’t counted {snip}

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