In a 15-page publication released March 29, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued revisions to the agency's policies for federal data on race and ethnicity, last revised in 1997.

The new category and check box will be called "Middle Eastern or North African," known as MENA. Underneath the category are six check boxes next to nationalities that respondents can fill in to provide further details: Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi or Israeli. Under that, respondents can write in an ethnicity that is not one of those six options; the instructions read: "Enter, for example, Moroccan, Yemeni, Kurdish, etc." Chaldeans, who are Iraqi Catholics and make up a sizable part of Michigan's Middle Eastern communities, will also be grouped under the MENA category.

MENA will be one of seven racial and ethnic categories Americans can choose from.

Created Equal: Implications of the new MENA category on the new Mena categorty on the US census.  Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute in Washington D.C., joined Stephen Henderson on Created Equal Tuesday to talk about what the new designation will mean to Americans in those communities, and what the implications might be for American demographics.  Listen here.