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The 2030 census is coming up: What will you do?
By Eleanor Jaffe-Pachuilo
The most relevant hate crime law to the MENA community is 18 U.S.C. § 245; this statute prohibits any interference with or injury of an individual due to their race or religion. Many people who have MENA ethnic backgrounds are of muslim decent or treated as racially non-white and this statue covers the relevant hate crimes occurring in the MENA community.
Post 9/11, Arab Americans faced and continue to face verbal, physical, and emotional abuse and harassment (Alfonseca, 2021). Anti-Muslim sentiment seems to re-emerge every election cycle since 9/11, with people derogatorily calling Barak Obama a Muslim and Donald Trump proposing a Muslim ban which would later go into effect. Consequently, nearly 80% of Muslim and Arab-Americans in one survey conducted by the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley reported fearing for their family’s safety in the United States (2021).
But tracking this anti-muslim, anti-Arab American hate is not made easy under our current crime databases. The Uniform Crime Reports database categorizes hate crimes with the following categories: racial bias, disability bias, sexual-orientation bias, religious bias and ethnicity or national origin biases as seen in the figure to the right (Hendricks et al., 2007). However, the ethnicities included are the same as those used by the census, only including “anti-Hispanic” hate crimes. This is not ideal for MENA-Americans as not all MENA-Americans are Muslim and not all Muslims are part of the MENA community. Many of the hate crimes motivated by anti-islamic ideologies end up targeting people perceived as Muslim, which includes a wide variety of people, especially Arab-Americans. This demonstrates how the MENA community may interact with the law in a unique way including as targets of hate crimes. Currently, MENA-Americans are included in anti-white racially motivated hate crimes in FBI hate crime reports (FBI, 2022).
[Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting]
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