‘White’ federal workers would no longer include Middle Eastern, North African heritage under new Biden plan

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The Biden administration is proposing a change to the way it collects data on federal workers that would allow employees to identify themselves as of Middle Eastern or North African descent, instead of identifying themselves as “White.”

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Thursday announced a series of proposed changes to the race/ethnicity data that it has kept since 1977. OMB said changes are warranted because people’s preferences relating to how they identify themselves have changed.

The OMB said in its proposal that there have been “large societal, political, economic, and demographic shifts in the United States throughout this period,” citing the following examples: increasing racial and ethnic diversity; a growing number of people who identify as more than one race or ethnicity; changing immigration and migration patterns.

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One of those changes would affect current language that requires people to identify themselves as “White” if they have “origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” But OMB’s proposed change said many are requesting a new category separate from White people of European descent.

“Presenters advocated for the Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) population to be recognized and respected by becoming a new and distinct minimum reporting category because, for example, many in the MENA community do not share the same lived experience as White people with European ancestry, do not identify as White, and are not perceived as White by others,” OMB’s proposal said.

OMB also said a new “MENA” category would “recognize this community.”

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The goal of the government’s data collection effort is to “ensure the comparability of race and ethnicity across Federal datasets and to maximize the quality of that data by ensuring that the format, language, and procedures for collecting the data are consistent and based on rigorous evidence.”

OMB proposed other changes to the way the data is collected and presented, including by seeking out race and ethnicity information in a single question. OMB said many people confuse the two terms and proposed a question that asks for federal workers’ “race or ethnicity.”

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OMB proposed several other wording changes, such as replacing “Far East” with “East Asian” from the definition of “Asian,” and ending use of the terms “majority” and “minority.”

OMB said those last two terms “may be perceived by some as pejorative and not inclusive.”

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The proposal is not final, and OMB is seeking public input on these ideas through mid-April.