>>>>You're both wrong (smiling). It was a reference to a geographic disagreement with Dragan probably a year ago. He was dogmatic that every country belongs to a continent and said Natalie Portman is Asian.
>>>
>>>Well, what is she, if not Asian?
>>>
>>>Or, if you insist that Israel doesn't belong to any continent, then it must be an island - therefore, surrounded by waters of which sea exactly?
>>
>>Middle Eastern. To me that is much more precise.
>
>And middle East is on which continent?
>
>In several apps (mostly medical) that I did in the US, there was a list of ethnicities, which pretty much reflects what I saw in the census forms - Caucasian, Latin American or Hispanic, plus African, Asian, and Native American. There was no "Middle Eastern American" anywhere on these lists. No part of Asia was exempt from being Asian.
>
>Are you saying they were all wrong in basing these classifications on whole continents?

Actually, for races in the census, it is specific to a smaller group (not the entire continent):

Asian. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. It includes "Asian Indian," "Chinese," "Filipino," "Korean," "Japanese," "Vietnamese," and "Other Asian."

Makes no sense, I know...
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68178.htm

For some (strange) reason, the rest of Asia falls into this category:

Some other race. Includes all other responses not included in the "White", "Black or African American", "American Indian and Alaska Native", "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" race categories described above. Respondents providing write-in entries such as multiracial, mixed, interracial, Wesort, or a Hispanic/Latino group (for example, Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban) in the "Some other race" category are included here.

Update: It appears that may middle easterners use the write-in section to annotate their race. A new subcategory was discussed but not added:

While OMB accepted the Interagency's Committee recommendation not to create a new category for this population group, OMB believes that further research should be done to determine the best way to improve data on this population group. Meanwhile, the write-ins to the ancestry question on the decennial census long form will continue to provide information on the number of individuals who identify their heritage as Arab or Middle Easterner.

http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/race/Ombdir15.html