Since 1976, the U.S. Census has been forbidden by law to ask Americans about their religious identity. And yet it is allowed to ask Americans about their racial identity. To make matters worse, instead of relying on self-identification for ethnicity and race, the federal government insists that every American choose an identity from a small set of official “races” approved by. . . the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Yes, you read that right. The bureaucracy that assigns Americans to this or that official “race” in the twenty-first-century U.S. version of the Nuremberg Laws is OMB. According to USA.gov, “The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oversees the performance of federal agencies, and administers the federal budget.”
Why is OMB given the task of formulating the number of “races” into which the American population is supposed to be divided? For the answer, we must go back to the aftermath of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which struck down racial segregation in employment, voting, housing, and other areas. Having outlawed Jim Crow, the civil rights movement then split into a color-blind liberal wing led by Bayard Rustin and others, who argued that the next step should be race-neutral economic reform, and a color-conscious wing, associated with black radicals, who demanded racial quotas in hiring and university admissions and black-majority congressional districts. The color-blind liberals lost the argument.
Radical Chicano activists like those of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) jumped on the racial-preferences bandwagon and argued for the recognition of a pan-Hispanic “race” whose members would be eligible for race-based affirmative action like blacks. Some “white ethnics” like Irish Americans and Italian Americans argued unsuccessfully that they, too, should be included in affirmative action, because their groups had been discriminated against by Anglo American Protestants for generations.
To forestall conflicting and arbitrary racial and ethnic classifications, Caspar Weinberger, secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Nixon administration, ordered the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE) to come up with a consistent system of classifying Americans by race and ethnicity. The recommendations led to OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, adopted in 1977, which mandated the classification of all Americans as members of one of five official races: American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Black; White; and Hispanic.
Why five arbitrary pseudo-races? Why not three? Or 17? Who knows. However, in March 2024, OMB announced that the five official races of the United States will be expanded to seven, beginning with the 2030 census. “Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander” will be separated from the “Asian” category, and a new Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category will be added.
The seven official races that are scheduled to be identified in the 2030 census are as arbitrarily defined and ludicrous as the former set of five used by OMB and the Census Bureau from 1977 to 2024. Even without the inclusion of Pacific Islanders, the “Asian” category is as absurd as ever, lumping together South Asians with East Asian nationalities like Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. Jews, Arabs, and Iranians (Iran originating from the word for “homeland of the Aryans”) will cease to be “white” for U.S. government purposes and will now be “non-whites” in the MENA category. The “white” category will continue to exclude blond, blue-eyed Paraguayans of exclusively German descent—they are “Hispanic or Latino,” you see—but will continue to include ethnicities as diverse as Portuguese and Danes.
“Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) was a motto in the early days of computer programming. It applies today to the misleading racial statistics that the Census Bureau collects and their equally misleading applications.
The purpose of a national census is to provide the government with accurate and useful data. But lumping together recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria with Americans, who are mostly of European descent and whose ancestors of whatever skin color arrived here centuries ago but under the archaic segregation-era “one-drop rule” count as “black,” is worse than useless. Likewise, no scientific purpose is served by combining Filipinos, Chinese, and Indians—who have nothing historically, culturally, or linguistically in common—in a single arbitrary category dreamed up by a few federal bureaucrats and academics in the 1970s.
When comparisons of income, education, and other characteristics are made between these arbitrarily defined pan-racial groups, the result is not scholarly discovery but sheer confusion. For example, using census definitions, in 2021 so-called “Asians” had a median household income of $101,418—43 percent higher than the national median income of $70,784. But this is a meaningless statistic, because there are no generic Asian Americans. Among the nationalities arbitrarily assigned to the Asian category, Indians have the highest average household income—$119,000—while Burmese American households made only $44,000 a year.
But accuracy of data is not the point of America’s system of official racial classifications and never has been. Since the 1970s, the unspoken rationale for America’s system of half a dozen official pseudo-races is to identify Americans eligible for rewards from the ever-expanding racial patronage racket pushed by the post–New Deal Democratic Party. Now is the time to end it.
For half a century, Democratic strategists have hoped that immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other countries, instead of following Irish, German, Italian, and other white groups down the road of assimilation and intermarriage, might function as cohesive racial voting blocs like the black American bloc, which since the civil rights revolution has voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. For the last generation, progressive Democrats have therefore shrugged off the party’s loss of white working-class voters, telling themselves that they could compensate for the losses by importing non-white voters from other countries who will vote strictly on party lines without caring about either the bread-and-butter economic issues or the cultural issues that have severed many working- and middle-class Americans of all races from the party’s fantastically wealthy, self-serving elites.
The left-wing Urban Institute is candid in describing the financial benefits of the new MENA category to its members under the existing affirmative-action racket: “MENA Americans’ recognition as a distinct marginalized identity grants them legal recognition for policies that were created to protect racial minorities. . . . Finally, policymakers will be able to better assess how to allocate its trillions of dollars to meet the MENA community’s unique situations.”
The greatest danger to the post-1960s racial spoils system of the Democratic Party and the bizarre OMB system of racial categories on which it is based was the possibility that the new immigrants, after a few generations, would lose their distinct identities and merge with so-called whites in a new, mixed-race majority whose members voted on the basis of interests other than racial identities bestowed by bureaucrats. To forestall such a disaster for identity politics, Democrats have used the institutions they controlled, like the federal civil service, the universities, and the media, to brainwash immigrants and their descendants into assimilating not to a transracial American melting pot but to government-sponsored, pan-ethnic pseudo-nationalities.
Thus Mexican Americans and Puerto Rican Americans and Argentine Americans have been taught that they were all part of one big permanent “Hispanic” or “Latino” community, on the basis of which they would obtain various preferences and rewards from the government, ostensibly to counteract the virulent racism directed against them by “whites.” Meanwhile, immigrants from Indonesia, Pakistan, and South Korea have been encouraged to identify not with the American people as a whole—or even with the cultures and interests of their ancestral nations—but with the newly imagined community of “Asian and Pacific Islanders.” To promote the fiction that these government-fabricated pseudo-nationalities are real, there are AAPI student groups on campus, Hispanic nonprofits, and more recently, MENA lobbies.
The larger message of this new form of officially sanctioned segregation was and is clear: Today’s voluntary immigrants are not comparable to the Irish and Italians and Germans of yesteryear, who aspired to become Americans—and did so. Rather, they are and will forever remain the new blacks, a permanently distinct “race”-based underclass whose members can claim special benefits in hiring, jobs, and congressional redistricting solely on the basis of their genes, while depending on Democrats to protect them from persecution by allegedly powerful white supremacists who at any moment might restore segregation and carry out ethnic cleansing.
According to the logic of the Democratic racial spoils system, members of each of the five (soon to be seven) official OMB “races” are interchangeable. For example, if there is a Hispanic quota for a professor at a university, it can be filled by a Swedish Brazilian, a black Venezuelan, or a Yaqui Indian of Mexican descent. An Indian American can represent a Chinese American community in Congress—they are all “Asians,” after all—but a Polish American cannot, though the Polish American politician might represent other government-designated whites like Greeks or Italian Americans.
On top of the informal rule that all members of an OMB census category are interchangeable racial units, another rule has been superimposed by the left: All of the official races except “white” belong to a single super-race or supercategory, “people of color.” Loyal people of color must vote only for Democrats in all elections at all levels of government. Of course, Irish Americans and Italian Americans once overwhelmingly preferred Democrats to Republicans, but nobody in the twenty-first century would accuse an Irish American who voted for Republicans of being a traitor to the Celtic race. And yet Hispanic or black voters who dare to vote for Republicans or independents by definition are alleged to be “traitors to their race”—their race, that is, as defined by census bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and their allies in the Democratic Party and progressive NGOs and identity-politics departments on campus. As Joe Biden told the podcast host Charlamagne tha God during the presidential contest in 2020, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Yet in spite of their best efforts, Democrats and their propagandist allies in the universities, media, and nonprofit sectors, to say nothing of the U.S. Census Bureau, have obviously failed to consolidate today’s voluntary immigrants into permanently separate Democratic racial voting blocs, each with a pan-ethnic sense of identity and community. To the shock of Democratic strategists who staked the future of their party on racial identity politics, the various national immigrant diasporas lumped together arbitrarily as “Hispanics” and “AAPI” are acting like the new Irish and the new Italians, not the new blacks. They are losing foreign languages, assimilating to America’s transracial common culture, and marrying outside of their ethnic groups in numbers that increase with each generation.
In 2015, 46 percent of U.S.-born Asian newlyweds and 39 percent of U.S.-born Hispanic newlyweds married an American of another race—usually white, because so-called whites are still the numerical majority. Among black Americans, interracial marriage shot up from 5 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015.
Remember all those stories in the press in the 1990s and 2000s claiming that the melting pot model of the American nation is obsolete and the new model of American identity is the salad bowl, in which lettuce leaves and croutons retain their identity, even as they are stirred around? It’s nonsense. The melting pot, which once fused dozens of European immigrant ethnicities into a common American community, is now melting away racial differences as well.
America’s bungling and politically correct Census Bureau bureaucrats have tried to cope with the blurring of divisions among its officially promulgated races by means of expedients like allowing census respondents to check more than one race. But rather than try to prop up the crumbling system of official federal races, we should just abolish official subnational races, once and for all.
In 1976, Congress outlawed the collection of religious data by the Census Bureau. In 2025, the Republican majority in Congress should outlaw the collection of racial data by the census, whether on the basis of the existing bogus racial classifications or any substitutes, beginning with the 2030 census.
Cue the outcry from “civil rights groups” (a code name for de facto Democratic nonprofits staffed and subsidized by rich establishment Democrats). If the federal government can’t assign every American to one or several arbitrarily defined races, how would it be possible to fight cases of discrimination on the basis of race?
The absence of questions about religion in the U.S. Census and on other government forms does not prevent Americans from suing if they believe they are victims of religious discrimination. In the same way, individuals will remain free to sue employers and other organizations for racial discrimination, and juries will remain free to deliver verdicts in their favor, even after Congress has banned the use of nonsensical racial categories by the census. Gone will be the days when you had to check one of half a dozen “race” boxes on census and other federal and private organization forms. But racial discrimination will continue to be illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
To prevent the Census Bureau from going around a ban and using the same existing racial categories in its American Community Survey questionnaires, Congress should mandate that the federal government can ask questions only about specific countries of ancestral origin, not about pseudo-biological races. Respondents could put down more than one. If the purpose of the census is accuracy, then an American of German and Mexican and French descent should put down Germany, Mexico, and France. If family tradition refers to a polity that no longer exists—Austria-Hungary or the Romanov Empire—then write that down. The more accurate, the better, if you are really interested in empirical demography and not corrupt Democratic racial patronage politics.
What about black Americans who do not know where their ancestors in Africa came from? For them, the generic African American category might be kept. But contemporary immigrants and their descendants from Africa or other countries in the Western Hemisphere would be required to identify their specific countries of origin—Haiti or Angola, say.
These reforms reflect common sense. They are based on the way both native-born Americans and immigrants actually think about themselves. Outside of the weird elite subculture of the center left, most Mexican Americans do not think of themselves as generic “Hispanics” or “Latinx,” any more than German, Swedish, and Austrian Americans think of themselves as “Teutonics” or Jewish and Arab Americans think they are part of one big, happy, affirmative action–eligible family of MENAs.
The Republican majority in Congress should act now to ban racial questions from the census and the American Community Survey, given the possibility that they could lose one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms. There are no political downsides for Republicans if they stand up for race-neutral, color-blind law and public policy. Democratic attempts to demonize Trump and Republicans as racists have not deterred growing numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and even black voters from voting Republican in recent elections. The number of non-white voters whom the GOP might lose by preventing the Census Bureau from continuing to assign Americans to absurd racial categories is negligible. And if Democrats decide to use the filibuster in the Senate to mount a die-hard defense of arbitrary racial classifications in the census, their focus on a niche issue that seems odd to “normies” of all races would be free publicity for Republicans who stand for the proposition that Americans should be treated as individuals, not as units in government-designated racial blocs.
Separation of church and state means that the federal government and employers and universities and other organizations are not permitted to ask you to identify yourself by your religion. Six decades after the civil rights revolution, the time has arrived for the separation of race and state.
A version of this essay was originally published by Tablet magazine.
Michael Lind is a Tablet columnist, a fellow at New America, and author of Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America.
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