SWANA proposal under review by UC

The University of California is currently reviewing a proposal to add a checkbox on its application to allow applicants to identify as Southwest Asian or North African.

About a year ago, Nairi Shirinian, a student senator at UC Berkeley, proposed a resolution to call for the creation of new ethnic checkbox on the UC application.

The proposal, called SWANA to stand for Southwest Asian and North African, passed unanimously at UC Berkeley and is now making rounds across other UC campuses.

Shirinian said the student governments at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Davis and UCLA, as well as the UC Student Association have all passed similar resolutions.

By passing the resolution, the different campuses are formally showing their support, but ultimately the resolution needs final approval from the UC.

The University is now in the process of evaluating the SWANA resolution, said UC spokeswoman Shelly Meron in an email statement.

If the box is added to the application, new applicants would be able to choose between 34 new subcategories, including Circassian, Iranian, Israeli, Lebanese, Turkish and Azerbaijani.

Some students who prefer to distinguish themselves as being Middle Eastern rather than white, could benefit from the new representation that the SWANA checkbox could offer.

“It does psychologically affect you when you’ve never been able to distinguish yourself,” Shirinian said.

Currently, the term “white” refers to people with historical origins in Europe, the Middle East or North Africa, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The United States Office of Management and Budget cemented the classification of Middle Easterners as Caucasian on a federal level in 1977.

Though Middle Eastern communities are legally identified as white, they have historically been a minority in the United States, Shirinian said.

Supporters of the SWANA resolution contend that the Caucasian race is typically only used to refer to communities that are of European descent, according to the resolution.

The SWANA resolution will help students who identify as Middle Eastern in two fundamental ways, Shirinian said. First, it would give the SWANA community the chance to be accurately represented in the UC. From a technical standpoint, SWANA would also give students a tool to advocate for their communities and better track job recruitment, graduation and retention rates.

The movement to create a SWANA checkbox is not the first of its kind. In 2007, the Asian Pacific Coalition at UCLA lobbied to change ethnic data representation and include 23 ethnic sub categories on the UC application, including Hmong and Samoan. Those subcategories were successfully added to the UC applications in 2008.

Students at UCLA expressed mixed opinions about the SWANA resolution.

“I don’t necessarily agree that I’m not white, I am technically white and don’t really care for changing that on my application because I am from the Caucus region,” said Parham Peyda, a first-year undeclared student and international student from Iran.

Abdullah Baras, a first-year biology student and international student from Saudi Arabia, however, said the identification could prove useful.

“I call myself Middle Eastern, Saudi and Arab, not white,” Baras said. “So this might actually help me represent myself and my people better.”

The UC staff are looking into the feasibility of the proposal and how the new categories might impact federal reporting requirements or other data collection processes, Meron said.

Lana Habib El-Farra, external vice president of USAC and one of the advocates for SWANA, said the proposal’s supporters have been talking to the University for a while, and she is optimistic they will hear back at the end of this month.

Meron said, however, the UC has not set any dates for reaching a decision about the proposal.