New RACE COUNTS report reveals SWANA residents’ quandary
Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) communities face a Catch-22 of invisibility in California. Though these communities (also called Middle Eastern/North African, or MENA) experience the world as people of color, those collecting data often classify them as White. That label leaves them out of conversations among communities of color that share their concerns.
A new RACE COUNTS report, Toward Identity and Visibility: 1 Million SWANA Californians Strong, works toward ending that invisibility, spotlighting the lives of SWANA people in California. The report looks at this community in terms of five issue areas where sufficient data is available: safety and justice, economic opportunity, health care access, built environment, and housing. The goal is to reveal—and begin to address—the inequities that SWANA Californians routinely face.
“We have to say: it’s been a long time coming, and a triumph and a celebration,” said Dr. Sophia Armen, of the Armenian American Action Network, who participated in a May 6, 2025 webinar to discuss the report’s findings. “This report coming out of Catalyst California is one of the first of its kind ever …. It’s really marking what I hope is absolutely a new trajectory, the beginning of many more.”
A note on nomenclature: Catalyst California worked with SWANA-led organizations and researchers to define the SWANA term conceptually. We then used the U.S. Census Bureau’s reported ancestry field to create a custom definition of SWANA, taking a list of ancestries that we consider part of the SWANA region and aggregating estimates for them. The existing data, combined with this new analysis, provide a clearer picture of SWANA people’s true experiences.
Among the findings in the report are the following:
Statewide, police officers tend to stop SWANA residents more than the average Californian. Decades of so-called “tough-on-crime” and post-9/11 policies have devastated the state’s communities of color through punitive enforcement and hyper-surveillance, including traffic stops that reflect police bias in their number, severity and outcomes. People of color, including SWANA Californians, are particularly likely to cross paths with police even in minor traffic situations.
In 2022, California law enforcement officers stopped a total of 213,686 SWANA Californians, nearly 113 stops per 1,000 SWANA people. The average for White residents is nearly 97 stops, and the total average for all Californians is almost 106 stops for every 1,000 people.
Note that this source combines SWANA and South Asian people into one group. Also, the data is based on officers’ perception of the person’s race, not on self-identification. Underreporting is a distinct possibility. This is one example of the disconnect between how SWANA people appear in data versus how they appear in real life situations.
The report also found that SWANA Californians, along with Latinx residents, are most likely to live near hazardous sites that expose them to harmful chemicals in the air, soil, or water. Scientists have found toxic metals in house dust and pesticides in the blood of people living near these sites, and there are strong risk correlations for chronic health conditions. In addition, generations of racialized housing policies and government neglect allow these pockets of risk to develop among low-income communities of color in California—including among SWANA residents.
Similarly, our report found that the neighborhoods where SWANA Californians live have the second highest levels of drinking water contamination in the state, just behind the areas where Latinx people live.
In urban areas where most SWANA people live, industrial wastewater and aging infrastructure like lead pipes contribute to poor water quality. In rural areas where many Latinx people live, the problem is more often fertilizers and pesticides in runoff that seeps into the groundwater.
SWANA people are 2.5 percent of the state’s population, while Latinx people are almost 40 percent. Contrary to their frequent categorization as White, the high level of exposure to environmental hazards places SWANA Californians squarely with other communities of color in the conversation about reducing these risks. SWANA and Latinx residents also both face language and immigration status barriers that can limit their ability to voice health concerns through community activism or political participation.
Amin Nash of the Arab American Civic Council, who also participated in the webinar, affirmed the importance of SWANA people seeing their experiences reflected in statistical information—and the urgency of adding to the data picture.
“Some of those data points and impacts on SWANA folks, we’ve never seen before,” Nash said. “Seeing this type of data is important to clarify what many SWANA people are living.”
Our SWANA report uses available data that is admittedly incomplete. Overall, we found that in California, SWANA people have worse outcomes than White people for 12 of 14 indicators with SWANA data across the five issue areas, though RACE COUNTS actually tracks 47 indicators across seven issue areas for racial/ethnic groups in California. We believe making the missing data pieces visible helps address long-disguised inequities, so communities can better fight for their health and their rights.
“We need to see graphs like this in ten years that look a lot better,” Dr. Armen said. “It’s us at stake. It’s our lives, it’s our futures. We are powerful, we are brave, and we matter.”