Tag: John Skrentny

Government played a key role in creating these identities. “Without much thought given to what they were doing, [policy makers] created and legitimized for civil society a new discourse of race, group difference and rights. Added to the two familiar races, black and white, were three incongruous pan-ethnic categories. If you don’t think of yourself that way, the government will do it for you. There’s a box on the census for “some other race,” but the bureau explains: “When Census 2010 data were edited to produce the estimates base, respondents who selected the Some Other Race category alone were assigned to one of the OMB mandated categories.” For people who tick multiple boxes—permissible since 2000—OMB has instructed the Census Bureau to “allocate” responses that “combine one minority race and white” to “the minority race.” As Mr. Hollinger puts it, “thus the federal government quietly reinserted into the tabulation of the census the principle of hypodescent”—the technical term for the old segregationist one-drop rule—“that the opportunity to make ‘more than one’ was publicly said to repudiate.” Until the Trump administration stopped it last month, the census was preparing to add in 2020 yet another vast pan-ethnic grouping—“Middle East or North Africa”—for residents with ancestry anywhere between Morocco and Iran. Mr. Hollinger has proposed to do away with the pan-ethnic groups altogether and “count instead those inhabitants who identify with descent communities from specific countries.” The 2020 census starts down that path by adding a “write-in area” for countries of descent for both whites and blacks, as well as Hispanics, but will still divide them under the pan-ethnic umbrellas. Such revisions “would indicate that the census and the government are not interested in group characteristics in the third generation and beyond,” Mr. Glazer wrote. Mr. Hollinger’s solution is to include a box labeled simply “African.” As Mr. Glazer puts it, “this is the group that has suffered from prejudice, discrimination, and a lower caste status since the origins of the republic.” The Commerce Department must submit 2020 census questions to Congress by the end of next month. Mr. Trump could instruct agencies to report back on their progress after, say, six months. Mr. Gonzalez is a senior fellow at Heritage and author of “A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans.”