U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D) is raising eyebrows for past research associating the “interethnic mating” of Arab women with “adverse birth outcomes.” The 2011 paper, published in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, suggested that Arab women who have children with non-Arab men are more likely to give birth prematurely than those who have children with ethnically Arab men. Critics like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) decried the research as “‘science’ with a pre-ordained racist & eugenics outcome.”

El-Sayed and Sandro Galea “found that paternal non-Arab ethnicity was associated with 18% greater odds of PTB [preterm birth risk] and 24% greater odds of late PTB among AE [Arab ethnicity] mothers.” The researchers boasted that, while several studies have investigated “interracial … mating” for black, Chinese, and Japanese minorities, theirs was the first known study to apply this niche lens to ethnic Arabs in America.

After stating their findings, El-Sayed and Galea proposed an explanation that focused more on cultural reasons than genetic ones — a surprising decision for two researchers with medical training. After acknowledging that unknown genetic factors may play a role, they quickly proposed that “social explanations may plausibly account for much of the association between interethnic mating and PTB risk observed in our study.”

The researchers proposed two social explanations. The first was predictably left-wing: ethnic discrimination. The second was, if possible, even more radical: Arab cultural purity.

“First, it has been shown that individuals in interracial/interethnic relationships have increased stress, distress, and risk for discrimination,” the discussion proposed. “In turn, stress and discrimination have been shown to increase risk for adverse birth outcomes.”

This explanation becomes implausible once any concrete relationship replaces the academic jargon. It presumes that two people of different ethnicities, who fell in love, most likely wedded, and conceived children together, still maintain ethnically discriminatory attitudes toward each other, despite a depth of shared experience. This presupposition asks the reader to believe not merely that racism is a prejudice (a state of pre-judging that can be overcome), but that all people are racist all the time.

“Second,” the researchers propose, “certain cultural practices among ethnic groups may be protective against adverse birth outcomes.” They found “important differences in ethnic cultural practices,” citing “suggestively” that “[Arab ethnicity] mothers engaged in interethnic mating were less likely to be married, had higher maternal ages, were more educated, were less likely to born abroad, and were more likely to smoke than their counterparts who mated with Arab fathers.”

In plain English, this argues that Arab women in America who intermarried with non-Arabs embraced the immoral Western lifestyle, instead of the strict moral code of Islam, which produces a healthier environment for childbearing. Without question, children born out of wedlock, to older women, or to women who smoke face greater health risks. But Arab Americans are not the only subgroup in the nation to, for example, encourage couples to marry before having children, and it is rather lazy of the researchers to lump all the rest of America into a “non-Arab” category.

Of course, this “non-Arab” category was essential to the cautionary tale El-Sayed’s research hoped to tell. “On the whole,” it concluded, Arab women who marry non-Arab men, and who seem to experience a slightly higher risk of prebirth, “broke away from cultural norms relative to their counterparts.”

Consider the pedagogical impact such research would have on the Arab community. “Do you want to have healthy children?” Arab-American parents might tell their daughters. “Then marry a good boy from the community. If you marry an outsider, you risk putting your children in danger.” They might say such things anyways, but thanks to El-Sayed, now there are studies to support their position.

But many responses to this paper are questioning why researchers funded by at least three different grants from the National Institutes of Health would bother investigating such a racially charged question in the first place. The conclusions are sketchy, and the health impacts marginal at best. The only clear reason why anyone would undertake such a project is to create some sort of justification for Arab-Americans (specifically Muslim enclaves) to preserve their purity and cohesiveness in the face of a foreign culture.

But, as with most arguments against assimilation, the underlying motive for such a position seems to be, in whole or part, simple racism.

Or so the Supreme Court judged when it last addressed prohibitions on “interracial dating and marriage” in 1983. In Bob Jones Univ. v. United States, the court upheld a decision to strip the Christian university of its tax-exempt status for banning interracial dating, even though it acknowledged the university’s sincere religious conviction against the practice (which the university has long since abandoned). “Although a ban on intermarriage or interracial dating applies to all races,” the court found, “discrimination on the basis of racial affiliation and association is a form of racial discrimination.”

By this logic, it is difficult to see how El-Sayed’s argumentation against “interethnic mating” is not inherently racist.

Nor was El-Sayed’s 2011 project an embarrassing one-off. The 2011 paper claimed that “women with self-reported AE [Arab ethnicity] are 16% less likely than whites to give birth prematurely.” The source for that claim was a 2008 paper co-authored by El-Sayed, Galea, and Craig Hadley. As the New York Post observed, the 2011 paper omitted to mention that the earlier study “found the gap disappeared after adjusting for maternal and socioeconomic factors.”

“Ethnic minority groups may preferentially interact with members of their own groups,” El-Sayed and his coauthors went on to argue. “Larger, more concentrated ethnic enclaves should correspond to larger and more complex social networks. … If Arab Americans in Michigan live in larger, more complex social networks, they may be more socially cohesive and more likely to benefit from positive health effects. … Studies have shown the positive effects of ethnic density on ethnic minority health.”

This does not just read like an argument against Arab assimilation (which, one expects, El-Sayed equates to Muslim assimilation). It is an argument against such assimilation altogether.

El-Sayed has not publicly called for bans on “interethnic mating” as a matter of public policy. And he himself married a wife of Indian descent in 2006, although they had their first child in 2018. This would place him and his wife in the category of people who are higher educated and having children later in life, which his 2011 research associates with higher preterm birth risk.

El-Sayed’s larger family history also provides an interesting background to this research. His Egyptian parents divorced when he was three, leaving El-Sayed to be raised by his father Mohamed and stepmother, Jacqueline Johnson. On Thursday, a reporter with NBC confronted El-Sayed with his birth mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college,” and El-Sayed denied having any ties.