Adding Census Categories Won't Unite a Divided America

Amitai Etzioni

Society, Americas

Adding a “Middle Eastern and North African” census category will only sow disunity.

One of the parting acts of the Obama White House is to leave for the generations to come is a new American race: Middle Eastern and North African Americans, or MENAs for short. By a stroke of pen, or more precisely a change in census categories, the White House is about to declare that some ten million Americans, who until now were considered white, are a distinct nonwhite category, akin to African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. It is an odd move, given that one of the few subjects on which both President-elect Trump and Secretary Hillary Clinton agreed is that we need less divisiveness and more cohesion. Moreover, one of President Obama’s most often repeated refrains has been that we ought to look past divisions and view ourselves as Americans. As he put it: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

The White House notified the public about the planned changes in the Federal Register on September 30, and allowed comments until October 31, i.e., the Obama administration may well make the revisions before Obama’s term expires. The main issue that remains to be sorted out, according to the U.S. Census, is which groups will be included in the new racial category. For instance, will Turkish and Sudanese Americans be encompassed or allowed to remain white?

One should not overlook that adding a minority has major policy implications. These include who is covered by affirmative action, school desegregation, voting rights and much else, all involving special standing and privileges for nonwhites. So far the only opposition to the move has come from a few Muslim American groups that worry the new category will enhance surveillance of their members.

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