Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Arab and Middle Eastern Americans in the United States Congress

This AfD might strike people as odd. At first blush, the page seems like an anodyne piece of demographic interest, no different to "list of Native American members of Congress." So why the AfD? I ask you to bear with me because it will take some time to explain my rationales, although they are rock-solid.

In sum: the page must be deleted because it fails (and will inevitably fail, as I argue below) the standards of the encyclopedia in terms of WP:V and WP:RS.

There are two key ways in which the page fails (and will inevitably fail) WP:V and WP:RS. First, the page relies on WP:OR, rather than reliable sources, to determine who is Middle Eastern. Second, the page relies on WP:OR, rather than reliable sources, to determine who is Arab. As I will show, the problem of OR is unfixable because (due to the nature of the definition of “Middle Eastern," which unlike, e.g., "sub-Saharan African" is extremely fuzzy and controversial) it is impossible to verify the claims as to who is Middle Eastern. I propose the deletion of the page and the creation of new pages with the same information that do not violate WP:V and WP:RS.

Unverified/OR claims to as who is Middle Eastern

The page relies on WP:OR to determine who is Middle Eastern. People of Iranian, Armenian, and Georgian descent (countries often included in the Middle East) and Ashkenazi Jews (who are partially descended from the Levant, and often identify with their ancestral roots), are excluded for no reason but OR, despite being considered "Middle Eastern Americans" on the wikipedia page on that subject, as well as being considered as such by the US Census Bureau.

There are no sources cited in the page as to which of the Congresspersons are Middle Eastern, and since the definition of the Middle East itself is fuzzy and controversial, there will never be such sources. (To illustrate how fuzzy the region is: many commentators would consider Turkey Middle Eastern, others would say it’s part of Europe; many would include Armenia and Georgia while others would not; many would include Sudan, and others would not. Others still would exclude the Levant and all countries West of the Gulf.) Following the census definition would not add any additional clarity; this too is controversial and was on the verge of being changed in 2016, to exclude Armenians and Georgians.

The subjectivity of the definition of Middle Eastern leads to an inevitable problem of lack of verifiability. This problem is showcased by the completely OR talk page debates about who does or does not “count” as Middle Eastern, as well as the absence of reliable sources in the article. In particular, the editor User:AuH2ORepublican has been active in removing former members of Congress of Armenian and Jewish descent from the page, based on nothing but OR. As silly and vulgar as this kind of amateur ethnic line-drawing is, no one can say AuH20 is "wrong" in his definition of Middle Eastern, and his exclusion of Armenians and Jews therefrom. And this is exactly my point: There is no way to present a verifiable, RS-supported list of "Middle Eastern Congresspeople," so it must be deleted.

Unverified/OR Claims to as who is Arab, which contradict the non-Arab identity of those cited as Arabs

There is an even more glaring and embarrassing OR/WP:V problem: the overwhelming majority of the people on this page didn’t/don’t identify as Arab, yet we are labeling them as such based on our own opinions about who should be considered Arabs. Specifically, the vast majority of the people on the page are Lebanese Christians. This ethnic group tends not to identify as Arab (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_people#Identity). It is extremely disrespectful to label them as “Arabs”, not to mention an expression of OR and inaccurate on the merits in most if not all of these cases.

So the page, in implicitly rejecting the ethnic identities of the Lebanese Christians (and instead insisting that we are Arabs, contrary to our identity and also contrary to genetic testing showing we are more closely related to Mediterranean Europeans than Gulf Arabs or North Africans) is not only a failure in terms of WP:RS and WP:V, but offensive, insofar as it imposes an ethnic identity on people which they do not or didn’t accept.

Again, the editor User:AuH2ORepublican has been active in insisting that Congresspersons of partial or full Lebanese descent be labeled "Arabs" and included on this page, stating that it is irrelevant whether these people identify as Arab, and they must be included on the page of Arabs elected to the Congress. He cites no sources for his OR view that we (Lebanese Christians) are Arabs regardless of how we identify. I don't accuse him of bad faith, but I instead cite him as an expression of how unverifiable and OR-based the assertions on the page are.

Proposal

So, my proposal? Delete this page (on grounds of WP:V and WP:RS, as described above) and create a new page for "Arab American Congress members," that is not combined with the vast and nebulous category “Middle Eastern congresspersons.” There we should list anyone who 1) identifies as Arab and 2) is fully or partially descended from an Arabic speaking country. (For example, Ilhan Omar is from Somalia where Arabic is one of the official languages; since she identifies as Arab we should include her, but we shouldn’t automatically include all future Somali-American Congresspersons in this category, unless they identify as such, since many Somali people reject an Arab identity.) That will solve the problems of OR, V, and offensiveness.

I don’t think we should re-create a “Middle Eastern Congressmembers” page because the category is too broad and fuzzy and diverse to be descriptively useful, and will inevitably lead to problems of verifiability. People who are interested in the subject of American representatives from the region should instead create pages like “List of Armenian-American congressmembers” or “List of Lebanese-American Congressmembers” or “list of Egyptian-American Congresspersons”, which can have all of this information and will not have to rely on OR. GergisBaki (talk) 17:56, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Survey

Delete Combining the extremely broad (and fuzzy) categories of Middle Eastern and Arab in one page is a total disaster, the page should be deleted. I am fine creating a separate "Arab-American Congresspersons" but OP's point about self-identification is important to keep in mind when we do create that. Arab identity is controversial and new outside of Arabia (the Gulf Arabs), and we shouldn't label anyone as Arab (apart from literal Arabians, e.g. Saudis) without RS evidence that they self-identify as such. Steeletrap (talk) 18:48, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Keep For the reasons set forth under "Discussion" below. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 19:51, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

This article was created after a British editor, based on how the term "Asian" is used in the UK (but unfamiliar with how the term is used in the U.S.), wanted to add Arab-American members of Congress to the article on Asian-American (and Pacific-Islander) members of Congress. I recommended to him, and he accepted, adding "and Middle-Eastern Americans" to the title because otherwise it would exclude persons from Arab countries who are not Arab speakers, such as persons of Assyrian (aka Chaldean), Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, etc. descent.

While Arab Americans are not considered ethnic minorities under U.S. federal law and do not comprise an individual category under the U.S. Census, they nevertheless are deemed--by themselves and by society writ large--as an ethnicity within the Caucasian race, with use of the Arabic language by their forebears and certain traditions and cultural norms being the main points of commonality. While sub-groups within the Arab diaspora sometimes prefer to focus on differences between the groups--no one claims that there are no differences between Lebanese Christians and Saudi Arabian Muslims--the term "Arab American" is one that generally is used to describe the descendants of all such peoples.

I do not claim to be an expert on sociological characteristics of descendants of Lebanese Christians, but, anecdotally, I can tell you that my grandfather, who was the child of Lebanese Christians from the Zgartha/Eden region of North Lebanon, considered himself an Arab American. So does my father-in-law, also the child of Lebanese Christians from (a different part of) North Lebanon. It isn't that they didn't or don't acknowledge the differences among Arab sub-groups, or that they ignore that they descended from Phoenicians while people from, say, Yemen likely didn't, but they still considered all Arabic-speaking peoples to be fellow Arabs. This dichotomy is no different from that of Cuban-Americans who consider people from other parts of Latin-Americans to be fellow Latinos despite recognizing that Argentines and Hondurans and Cubans do not have identical cultures.

As for GergisBaki's characterization of the removal by myself and other editors of edits in which persons with non-Arab and non-Middle Eastern ancestry (such as Armenians from the Caucasus, and European Jews who immigrated in the 1930s to what later became the State of Israel) had been included in the article, such decisions were taken by consensus, with discussion in the Talk page. If the issue of including "Middle Eastern" in the title (so as not to exclude Assyrians and such) is creating more controversy than such article can withstand, then I guess that "Middle Eastern" can be excised from the title and only persons of Arab ancestry would be included (which would exclude Congressman Benjamin and Congresswoman Eshoo, as well as future non-Arab Middle Easterners in Congress), but certainly it wouldn't be grounds to delete the entire article.

In addition, it would be futile (and a violation of NPOV) to try to establish whether an American of Lebanese descent "identifies as Arab American" (particularly when we're talking about people long dead), as GergisBaki proposes, just as it would be inappropriate to second-guess the Latino bona fides of a Mexican-American who is proud of his Mexican heritage but is not into Pan-Hispanicism. There shouldn't be a test prepared by an editor with a particular POV to determine whether a descendant of an Arab-speaking people "truly is" an Arab.

So that's my two-cents' worth on this issue. As always, I welcome the opinion of other editors interested in this article. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 19:49, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

In the first place, Au, can we say you are in favor of deleting the page and creating a new Arab-American Congresspersons page, and scrapping Middle Eastern? I don't want to put words in your mouth but it sounds like you basically favor a delete while disagreeing on what the content of what the Arab American Congresspersons page should be.

On the issue of whether we should include all Lebanese: I still think Gergis has the right of this. You say that Arab is a sub-group of white but the reality is a lot fuzzier and more controversial than you think, which makes sense because racial categories like white/Caucasian are themselves social constructs, with only crude relations to biology. Rashida Taliba, for example, is generally referred to as a racial minority (i.e. non-white) by the press, despite being Arab. Danny Thomas, the legendary Lebanese American actor, was not referred to as Arab or non-white. And as Gergis states many ethnicities (Lebanese, Somalis, Sudanese, Egyptians, etc) can't agree about whether they are Arabs or something else.

Our own Wikipedia page Arab American makes self-identification a requirement of being an Arab in a way we don't make self-identification a requirement of being, for example, Japanese or African-American. We should uphold that on the Arab Americans page and (apart from obvious cases, e.g. people literally from Arabia) only include as Arabs those who identify this way.

To emphasize the lack of clarity as to the definition of Arab, let me note that the US Census Bureau is currently debating changing Arabs from Caucasian to some other race, based on the experience of many Arabs in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Americans#Arab-American_identity

In any case, regardless of who is more persuasive on an anthropological level, the fact remains that (because the issue is controversial) there is no way to verify Arab-ness apart from self-identification. And thus we shouldn't list people as Arab who don't identify as such. Steeletrap (talk) 20:22, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

My preference is not to exclude Assyrian Americans, who come from Arab-majority countries and share similar experiences in Americans as Arab immigrants and their descendants, just because the term "Middle Eastern" can lead to some hard cases. But I will support whatever the consensus is.

As for the whole "Arabs may not be white" spiel, that's absolutely POV, and something that is rejected by almost all Arabs (albeit perhaps not by Congresswoman Tlaib, who insists that any criticism of her is an attack on a "woman of color" despite her not being of sub-Saharan African, South Asian, East Asian or Amerindian ancestry). If the Census Bureau ends up adding Arabs as a separate category someday, it wouldn't be one that excludes then from the "white" category, but as an additional ethnicity category that would allow people to check that box *in addition to the box for "white," "black" (think Congresswoman Omar) or another race*. It would be like that Census category labeled "Hispanic or Latino," which does not substitute or contradict the selection of racial categories by the person answering the Census. It also should be noted that the Census Bureau has decided *against* adding "Arab" as a special category, so "is considering" is not a correct characterization of that particular goal of some Arab-American groups.

And I believe that your proposal to have a committee to determine who "identifies as Arab" as opposed to who descends from Arabic speakers from Arab countries would be an exercise in POV and a terrible way to determine inclusion in an article listing Arab-American congressmen. In America, Lebanese Americans are considered Arab Americans both by Arab groups and the popular at large, and the particular words of affiliation used by an individual shouldn't matter when compiling a list of Arab-American congressmen.

Question: Is your goal to exclude Lebanese Americans, as well as Assyrian Americans, from the article? Because your hand-wringing about nomenclature could be solved by changing the title to "List of Arab-American, Lebanese-American and Assyrian-American Members of Congress" (and to add "Kurdish-American," etc. to the title when other Middle Eastern ethnicities elect members of Congress someday). AuH2ORepublican (talk) 20:59, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

My friend, you're full of PoV pushing. Saying almost all Arabs think they're white is PoV pushing, and ridiculous by the way. Have you looked at pictures of Saudis or Yemenis, or Upper Egyptians? Perhaps Lebanese Christians generally identify as white; that would make sense because people from the northern Levant are genetically a lot closer to Mediterannean Europeans than they are to North Africans or Gulf Arabs. But Saudi Arabians, Yemenis, Sudanese, etc virtually never look or identify as white. There is massive racial diversity within Arab-speaking peoples. And Rashida Taliba (a Palestinian, i.e. someone of southern Levantine heritage) is seen as a minority as well; even her critics generally credit her identification in this regard.

Regardless, all of this is OR. You need sources saying all of these people on the page are Arabs. Right now you just have OR, and even if you're "right" that they should be considered Arabs, that's not enough when the definition of Arab is contested as concerns Lebanese Christians. Wikipedia itself, in its entry on Lebanese, notes that the Arab identification is controversial as applied to Lebanese, and rejected by many. Steeletrap (talk) 21:54, 29 July 2019 (UTC)