With the clock winding down on its final term, the Obama administration is rushing to institute changes in racial classifications. Yet, with all eyes glued to President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team, the move will likely get little notice.
That’s a shame because the proposal will only aggravate the volatile social frictions that created today’s poisonous political climate in the first place.
The Office of Management and Budget slipped notice of the proposed rule under the door just one day after Congress went on recess in September. It calls for the creation of a new ethnic group out of an estimated 10 million Americans who trace family origins back to the swath of land between Morocco and the Iran-Afghanistan border. Now classified as white, they would form part of a new Middle East and North Africa (MENA) ethnic group in the 2020 Census.
A second change would affect 56 million Americans who are now told by the census to classify themselves as “Hispanics” ethnically. The proposed rule would eliminate a second question that lets them also choose their race.
In 2010, more than half (26.7 million of 50 million) of these people identified themselves as both Hispanic and white, while others chose other races. A new, single question would effectively make “Hispanic” their sole racial identifier.
The notice said this “limited revision” is needed to improve data collection. Yet, these changes will have repercussions at the heart of political power, from congressional redistricting plans to affirmative action plans, and they will further balkanize the United States into what the great California gadfly Ward Connerly calls “silly little boxes.”
Silly in both these cases because these ethnic “groups” are not really ethnic at all. Each is a hodgepodge of ethnicities cobbled up by bureaucrats without any basis in culture, science, language, or anthropology.
They bring together under two roofs peoples with such varied cultural indicators as Argentines, Mexicans, Dominicans and Bolivians (in the case of Hispanics) and Arab-Americans, Persians, Berbers and Israelis (in the case of MENA). The “data” couldn’t possibly inform policymaking.
MENA would say nothing about “Muslim-Americans,” as Pakistanis, among many others, would not be counted. They’re “Asian.” Most Arab-Americans are Christian, by contrast, and include people whose families largely began to arrive here in the 1890s. Among their descendants are many Americans we don’t usually associate with minorities, such as former quarterback Doug Flutie and the late journalist Helen Thomas.
Thomas, no conservative, once remarked: “I think everybody who was born here or becomes a naturalized citizen is an American, period. You shouldn’t have to have a hyphen between your nationality and your ethnic background.”
Anyone visualizing winning electoral coalitions as far as the eye can see should consider warnings from important liberal intellectuals.
One was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who cautioned that this ethnic reinterpretation of America “reverses the historic theory of America as one people — the theory that has thus managed to keep American society whole.”
Often sold as a remedy for racial inequality, the proliferation of ethnic identity groups actually reinforces cronyism. The gainers are network insiders such as the heads of advocacy organizations formed to “lead” the new ethnicities and the politicians who get elected in the rotten boroughs that emerge from ethnicity-based redistricting.
Nearly all the voices lobbying for MENA come from such leaders, but rank-and-file Americans often resist being pigeonholed. Eide Alawan, born in America 75 years ago to Syrian immigrants, told the Associated Press, “I’m not for it … I feel I’m a Mayflower American.”
Alawan’s objections mirror the Mexican-American experience in the 1960s. Leo Grebler, a University of California at Los Angeles academic who canvassed Mexican-Americans back then, wrote bitterly that telling them that they were minority victims of discrimination caused “irritation among many who prefer to believe themselves indistinguishable white Americans.”
As for alleviating inequality, the social scientist Peter Skerry explains that “because these elites remain oblivious to the structural factors” that cause poverty, and insist that the primary obstacle to advancement is racial discrimination, “their efforts are not very successful.” Insider networks become “more and more an insiders’ game.”
President Barack Obama, who has seen what the perception that Washington insiders “rig the game” has done to his party’s fortunes, has it within his power to call this rule off.
If Schlesinger’s ethnically balkanized republic and Skerry’s insider dealing sound familiar, they should. These phenomena have caused much of the social churning of the past 18 months. Yet, the same elites who helped brew that dangerous potion want to create new spirits to toss into the mix.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.