As a child, people often asked me or my parents where we were from. Was I Iranian? Jewish? French? In eighth grade a boy told me I had “negroid” eyes, and for most of my adolescence I was mocked for having a “ghetto booty.” Last summer while in a thrift store near D.C. a complete stranger, a white middle aged man, approached me and asked in deliberately slow English if I was from Honduras. A former boyfriend once commented on the fact that I was not “pale” when naked in winter. I live in a mixed neighborhood with many Central American immigrants, and have been addressed in Spanish on a few occasions.

To most people, I assume that I appear white. I have brown hair, black/brown eyes, and an “olive” complexion. I consider myself to be on the pale side of this “olive”, paler than most of my father’s family at least.

I am of North African/Tunisian, Sicilian, and “Black” Irish decent. None of these categories have been deemed pure “white” by historically racist notions of U.S. “whiteness.” I am not a WASP. I have often wondered if I had blonde hair and blue eyes if people would ask where I’m from on a monthly basis. I gets worse in the summer as I do tan very quickly. But, if I was clearly white, of no curious or “exotic” background, would strangers feel as comfortable violating my personal space? It’s as if my height, skintone, and eye color are an accent – one to be met with “Where are you from?” My cousin, who like most of the women in my family, has very curly hair, was called a “mulatto” all through high school. We have all learned to laugh this off. We eat ravioli, my grandmother travels to Sicily frequently, we know where we are from. And yet, of all the assumptions strangers have made regarding my or my family’s ethnicity, Arab is never one of them. If we all wore headscarves perhaps our “origins” would be more apparent, more clearly marked. After 9/11 some of my friends would joke about my father getting pulled over due to racial profiling, and I would laugh with them.

So after years of being hailed as less white than my white friends I decided that I am not. I am not entirely white. A few years ago when the U.S. census came to my apartment, I had to check off my ethnicity. While “Other” seemed the best choice for me other than “White”, I noticed that there was no “Arab” choice. “African American/Black” was available, but many North Africans are not black. Most are Arab or Berber. Although Arabs constitute a large number of the world’s population, covering North africa and Western Asia, as a people or race they are simply invisible in the United states. So unwanted as to not be counted. I checked every single box and handed it back to the census worker.