The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has a new proposal to increase the number of racial and ethnic groups about which it collects data and to change the operational definitions for many racial groups. It proposes to split “Black Americans” into separate categories, create numerous subcategories for “White Americans,” treat the Hispanic ethnic identity as a separate race, create an entirely new category of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans, and make other changes.
In the Federal Register, the OMB has posted recommendations for revising OMB’s 1997 Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity (SPD 15). The recommendations, which come from the Federal Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards, are posted for comment from the public. Comments must be submitted by April 27, 2023.
The Federal Register prose is turgid, but the following analysis will provide some useful insight for navigating the content. The current policy directive already poses threats to liberty by collecting detailed data on race and ethnicity in the United States. But the proposed changes exacerbate those failings rather than correcting them. Figure 1, reproduced from the OMB posting, shows an example of how the proposal might be implemented in data collection.
Figure 1: OMB Example of Potential New Questionnaire
The three most extensive proposed changes are as follows:
- Split the existing race classification of the “White” race into two races – (1) White of European origin and (2) Middle East and North Africa (MENA). (p. 5379)
- Change the standard for classification as Hispanic. The current standard requires that the government must first ask respondents whether they are Hispanic, and then ask them what race or races they are (White, Black, Native American, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander). The proposed change would remove that question and add Hispanic to the same list as the five currently identified major races plus MENA, with instructions to pick all that apply, thereby making “Hispanic” appear to be of the same level and type of classification as racial groups. (p. 5379) Hispanic would now implicitly be a race.
- Require more detailed racial breakouts within each of the six main racial categories (p. 5380). This includes separating African Americans into two groups: descendants of American slaves and all other. (p. 5381) Figure 1 does not show this separation because the working group is considering placing this question separately. Descendants of slaves from the Caribbean or Latin America would be assigned to the relevant country of residence before immigration. This categorization also seems to apply the discredited one-drop-of-blood approach to classify a person as a slave descendant. The proposed primary list of European countries that determine the “White” race does not include Spain, although it has more population than five of the nine countries listed as examples. In the Hispanic list of detailed origins, “Spaniard” does not show up until the tertiary detailed list and may be completed only by manual entry, despite the fact that Spain is the ultimate origin of the entire classification. (p. 5381)
The working group members that developed these classifications come from 13 “principle” [sic] statistical agencies and 25 other agencies that collect, process, and act on the results of data classified by race and ethnicity. The importance, compensation, and job security of at least some of these employees depend, at least in part, on continuing and expanding racial classification.
The working group recommendations are responsive to the requests from organized groups that would benefit from government endorsement and data to support claims that they might make. For example, the National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants is backing the proposed changes as helpful to its lobbying for reparations. Political actors in Congress and the executive also see benefit from these expanded categories as new opportunities for income redistribution and enforcement actions based on race, such as expanded affirmative action or allocation of more government contracts to favored racial groups. Individuals from everyday walks of life without such personal monetary or power interests in the results are not considered in the report.
OMB’s explicit objective for the working group and its report was to increase the number of different racial and ethnic groups that can be identified in official U.S. government statistics. There is no evidence that the working group ever considered the appropriateness of government acquiring more data on race and ethnicity, not to mention reducing it.
There are few statutory requirements for racial data, such as the one requiring that the decennial Census and American Community Survey include a category of “Some Other Race.” None of the additions being proposed are required by statute.
Allocating government contracts to minority-owned businesses is based mostly on executive orders and regulatory rule making, and Small Business Administration subsidies to “disadvantaged business enterprises” rely on administrative definition and identification of races. These administrative rules are generally derived from SPD 15.
The government could substantially reduce the amount of race and ethnicity data and still comply with existing legislation. Of course, the working group of civil servants cannot abrogate legislation, but OMB should (1) make no expansion to the race and ethnicity classification, (2) remove all race and ethnicity designations from existing programs that are not explicitly and precisely required by legislation, and (3) urge Congress to remove all data collection by race or ethnicity from existing legislation.
Two of the “governing principles” that OMB asserts for the classification are: (1) “Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs…not an attempt to define race and ethnicity biologically or genetically,” and (2) “respondent self-identification should be facilitated to the greatest extent possible.” (p. 5378) In short, this exercise is capturing the subjective view of what individuals believe about their historical origins and membership in racial and ethnic groups. But it goes beyond that to include “observed identification,” presumably by some official. (p. 5377) And it explicitly proposes to “Require the collection of [the most] detailed race and ethnicity categories by default.” (p 5379).
Classification by race and ethnicity is no different than classifying people by their religion, political party, beliefs about public policies, or any other personal attitude. None of these are proper subjects for government classification and data collection. Both history and the current news cycles are littered with thousands of examples of government classifying groups of people by race, ethnicity, religion, political views, or other personal attributes in order to designate some of them for special benefits and others for oppression. Indeed, it is impossible to favor some groups without implicitly disfavoring others.
America revels in its diverse roots, and we celebrate the many streams of tradition that feed our civic culture. Ethnic and cultural organizations strengthen that civic culture. But when government collects and classifies individual data by personal racial and ethnic characteristics it is laying the foundation for discrimination, oppression, and favoritism. As Chief Justice Roberts has written, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
When government collects, processes, analyzes, and publishes classifications by race and ethnicity, it is discriminating by race. The threat posed to our liberty by these categories is great because government has the power and resources to act on those classifications. It also has the power to compel or threaten private citizens to discriminate on that basis.
While Roberts was speaking specifically in the context of school admissions, the principle applies more broadly. If government classifies people by race, religion, political views, or any other personal beliefs, it can, and often will, engage in the most oppressive of human injustice. The most obvious and horrific historical example is Nazi classification, labeling, and ultimately genocide against Jews, but there have been many other recent cases of genocide against groups labeled by race or ethnicity: the Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds in Turkey; the Tutsi in Rwanda; the Uyghurs and Tibetans in China; and a host of others. These extremes are not likely in the United States, but the government still should not collect the data necessary for future madmen to undertake such heinous actions.
This caution is not hyperbolic polemic. France learned that lesson when the Vichy government used racial records to betray French Jews to the Nazis, and French law now forbids government publication of data by race. More likely, the additional data collected at OMB direction would be used to establish more subtle forms of discrimination by expanding the racial spoils system in the form of more affirmative action or designation of government benefits for specific racial groups that must, implicitly, discriminate against other groups.
OMB attempts to hide this threat to liberty with a small fig leaf saying, “the standards state that these categories are not to be used for determining the eligibility of population groups for participation in any Federal programs.” (p. 5377) But this fig leaf doesn’t conceal anything because the report is rife with references to using race and ethnicity to determine who will benefit and who will be punished.
For example:
- “Data could be used to allocate program or initiative benefits.” (p. 5378)
- “SPD 15 provides a minimum set of categories that all Federal agencies must use regardless of the collection mechanism (e.g., … program benefit applications.)” (p. 5376)
- “MENA population counts could be used to allocate needed resources.” (p. 5378)
- “Foremost consideration should be given to data aggregations by race and ethnicity that are useful for statistical analysis, program administration and assessment, and enforcement.” (p. 5379) (emphasis added.)
OMB claims that the race and ethnicity categories do not affect distribution of government largess or punishment are both ignorant and disingenuous. David Bernstein has documented just how extensively these categories are used to determine government benefits for individuals and businesses and even how the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration have used OMB definitions to dictate sample designs for scientific medical and pharmaceutical research — despite the clear and explicit disclaimer that they have no basis in biology or genetics.
The whole idea that government should poke and prod at people’s beliefs about their race or ethnicity is antithetical to America’s foundations and values. We are the country of “all created equal” and “e pluribus unum.” This OPM initiative is attempting to create even more categories by which people can be divided, separated, discriminated against, or given special favors.
Using available Census data, one team of researchers showed that about twenty percent of new marriages are between people of different races or ethnicity, and for some groups almost half of current marriages cross racial or ethnic lines. OMB uses this trend to justify collecting more data on race and ethnicity because of “A growing number of people who identify as more than one race or ethnicity.” (p. 5377) They miss the point of their own argument. If a rapidly growing proportion of the population has multiple racial or ethnic roots, that means when establishing the most intimate and significant of human relationships, the family, identification with race and ethnicity is becoming less important. So why should government intervene to insist on keeping the distinctions not only alive, but reinforcing and expanding them?
Creating more classifications and combinations of poorly defined groups for race and ethnicity is simply an invitation for government to create more groups that can be differentiated by arbitrary distinctions so that government can dispense more favors based on the meaningless definitions or use the definitions to segregate groups that can be oppressed.
Please read my recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on this issue and check back here for a future blog post on some of the brutal technical details.
