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 (OMB) 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. [...]
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.
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