Identity politics—the artificial segmentation of Americans into antagonistic groups organized along often imagined ethnic, racial and sexual categories—is tearing America apart. President Trump can do something about it.
Government played a key role in creating these identities. The establishment of a new official taxonomy of Americans started roughly in 1966, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began asking companies with more than 100 employees to collect information through the EEO-1 form on “$#@!, American Indian, Oriental and Spanish-surnamed” employees. What began as an effort to track how policies affected people thought to be disadvantaged easily but tragically slid into government-sanctioned promotion of victimhood and racial preferences. The goal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to prohibit racial discrimination, was turned on its head.
“The EEO-1 was a public, if implicit, federal declaration of the nation’s minorities,” writes University of California, San Diego political scientist John Skrentny in his 2002 book “The Minority Rights Revolution.”
“Being listed on the EEO-1 was a crucial prerequisite for benefiting from a difference-conscious justice,” he concludes. “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. This discourse mirrored racist talk.”
Spurred by lobbying from liberal advocacy groups, in 1977 the Office of Management and Budget standardized the categories of “white, black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian and Alaska native” nationwide. Added to the two familiar races, black and white, were three incongruous pan-ethnic categories. The Census Bureau went ahead and carved the entire country into what social scientist David Hollinger has dubbed “the ethno-racial pentagon.” Starting in 1980 the census began tabulating all residents into groups that correspond to a vague and unscientific color code: white, black, brown, yellow and red.
...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. That would have made a minority of everyone from Rep. Darrell Issa to the late Steve Jobs.
...“It is necessary and desirable to recognize and encourage the ongoing assimilation of the many strands that make up the American people into a common culture,” Mr. Glazer wrote. “One encourages what one recognizes and dissuades what one does not.” Mr. Trump has an opportunity to encourage unity and dissuade the division of Americans by race and ethnicity.
The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
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