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Thursday, July 30, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com MICHIGAN IN COLOR

My experience in a COVID-19 hotspot 

Recently, my family drove down 
to Tennessee to immerse ourselves 
in nature and find some peace and 
adventure during such dystopian 
times. While being up in the Smoky 
Mountains was beautiful and well 
worth the trip, it was also scary 
driving past the crowds of locals.
Tennessee is one of eighteen 
other states recognized as a COVID 
“red zone” with limited safety 
measures. The Center for Public 
Integrity defined these red zones 
as having more than 100 new cases 
per every 100,000 people within 
the last week. They were previ-
ously indicated to be in the yellow 
zone for test positivity between 
5-10 percent. While federal rec-
ommendations have been made 
such as closing bars and gyms and 
encouraging more outdoor dining, 
this is far from what I saw. 

IZZA AHMED-GHANI
MiC Staff Writer

MENA: America’s ‘white’ minority group

Read more at michigandaily.com

 Photo provided by Izza Ahmed-Ghani

Throughout the course of my 
academic career, my race has 
“changed” three times. In elemen-
tary school, I was advised by my 
teacher to bubble in “Asian” on a 
standardized test since my parents’ 
mother countries of Iraq and Leba-
non are geographically located on 
the continent of Asia. A few years 
later in middle school my race was 
suddenly “Other” since Asian was 
reserved for Southeast Asia and 
India. Then, when I went to take 
the PSAT my freshman year of 
high school, there was a startling 
new addition to the race category: 
“White (including Middle Eastern 
origin).” Of all the questions on the 
exam, and this was the most con-
fusing bubble I had to fill in — to 
identify myself.
The generalization and erasure 
of Middle Eastern and North Afri-
can culture has been a constant 
tumultuous addition to the already 
ongoing identity struggle many 
young adults go through. MENA 
Americans and white Americans 
have different reputations, differ-
ent cultures and different struggles 
in the United States. Even now as I 
write in a newspaper section des-
ignated for students of color, the 
U.S. government continues to label 
me as white. These two statements 

GRACE GARMO
MiC Staff Writer

directly contradict each other, yet it 
is a perfect analogy for how we are 
treated and perceived in America. 
Bubbling in “white” in the race cat-
egory on any standardized test or 
legal form almost feels like disre-
spect, because throughout my life, 
several of my white classmates per-
sistently made it a point to socially 
isolate me and made sure I knew 
that we were not the same. Token-
ing Middle Easterners as “white” 
when convenient and “Other” 
when convenient is how American 
society interacts with us histori-
cally, and now, it has been declared 
on a piece of paper.
When I bubble in “white,” I am 
actively neglecting my arched eye-
brows, my enlarged nose, my olive 
complexion and my thick dark hair. 
I am repressing all the times my 
peers have asked me if my family 
is associated with terrorist orga-
nizations and snuck judgemental 
looks at my parents while speak-
ing our native tongue. I am shov-
ing aside my identity struggles as 
an Arab-American who has no race 
to identify with because we were 
an afterthought without a spot left 
for us. As a community, MENA 
individuals socially receive the 
negative consequences of having a 
minority status, yet on legal docu-
ments we are forced to check a box 
that misrepresents us. 
As a student of color, diversity 

 Design by Hibah Chughtai

As if the local Trump hats and 
Confederate flags weren’t disturb-
ing enough, the majority of the 
tourists and locals refused to wear 
masks. Young and old alike would 
walk about downtown like noth-
ing has changed. The only mask 
enforcement was inside shops and 
restaurants; even then those masks 
were worn with noses exposed. 
The majority of the people in 
Gatlinburg, Tenn., where I had 
briefly stayed, were majority white 
and from the South, coming from 
states with few governmental 
restrictions imposed. Therefore 
any families who wore masks were 
openly ridiculed and mocked. The 
unspoken consensus was to be 
complicit in carelessness — as if 
“coronavirus is a hoax.”
Mind you, this isn’t some made 
up remark. Along the trip, I came 
across a family on a trail from Lou-
isiana. She remarked that the case 
numbers are fake and that, at its 

worst, the virus manifests like that 
of a common cold. “People aren’t 
really dying from COVID, the sur-
vival rate is 99.99 percent,” she 
exclaimed. 
She 
begrudgingly 
mentioned 
the current state and public health 
protocols were impending upon 
watching their football games. I 
remember giving my brother an 
exasperated look as we left them.
I think the concept of social 
distancing and masking has some 
unnecessary 
negative 
connota-
tions. The idea of wearing a mask 
has been seen as almost exagger-
ated to be oppressively restricting. 
While the yellow zone indicated 
above for Tennessee may seem 
small, it demonstrates these num-
bers are only increasing and nation-
ally indicates poor implementation 
of federalized mandates to dimin-
ish exposure. 
How do you get someone to 
internalize what it means to be in a 

was a tremendously crucial factor 
in my college application process. 
I was excited to add to the univer-
sities’ cultural variation and share 
my experiences with my new peers. 
However, every time I got my hopes 
up, the same realization would 
dawn on me: I won’t be counted. 
When researching the Univer-
sity of Michigan’s undergraduate 
demographic, I couldn’t even tell 
how many MENA students there 
were. All I could see in the pie chart 
was a large slice of ‘white,” and my 
identity was lost somewhere with-
in it. Despite the Common Applica-

tion allowing students to make the 
distinction between “white (Euro-
pean)” and “white (Middle East-
ern),” all this did was give MENA 
students a false glimmer of hope 
despite a total lack of practical-
ity. The fact that MENA students 
get excited when our existence is 
officially acknowledged on a form 
blatantly illuminates the problem 
at hand. 
On the U.S. Census, tens of thou-
sands of Hispanic or Latinx indi-
viduals bubble in “white,” yet also 
have the opportunity to make the 
distinction of their ethnic back-

ground which shows up on virtual-
ly every legal form. This distinction 
is commendable, and I believe that 
MENA individuals should have the 
same opportunity. Especially in a 
post 9/11 world, Muslims and Arabs 
have become a larger target for dis-
crimination, and it is crucial that 
we have a separate legal identifica-
tion to ensure that the MENA pop-
ulation is showing up to the polls, 
securing jobs at a consistent rate, 
and graduating from high school.

Read more at michigandaily.com

global pandemic? These aforemen-
tioned sentiments and the lack of 
action in areas like Gatlinburg are 
not only recklessly naive, but they 
are selfish and a proven endanger-
ment to not only American health, 
but America’s educational dis-
parities, 
concerning 
magnitude 

of unemployed people, homeless 
people, the food insecure and so 
many other people and institutions 
whose very existences are chal-
lenged viciously by this virus.

