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.