For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.
The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This evolving process often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as a wish for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.
I would argue you do need census data, because that provides the data for where resources should be distributed. If I am trying to combat a racialized system that gives African Americans fewer resources, I need to know where the African Americans are.
Consider the scenarios that result in the practice of redlining. Back in the day, schools were racially segregated. To combat this, the government began forcefully integrating schools by bussing in students who were otherwise considered “outside” of the district. So the racists move further away to preserve their effectively segregated communities, closing their businesses and bringing their wealth with them.
The formerly integrated, now majority-minority neighborhoods are left with little capital to support the growth of business as well as less capital coming in the form of municipal taxes (why that is still a thing is beyond me as well). So a neighborhood with less financial resources through business/tax revenue faces crumbling infrastructure along with brain drain due to academics not willing to serve as educators in these neighborhoods.
The census helps levels of government at higher tiers than the municipal level recognize when areas are being underserved due to racial discrimination and compensate with distribution of state/federal resources. The suburban schools around Boston, for example (which are majority white) are almost wholly funded by property taxes collected in the towns that the school districts serve, but the urban schools in the city receive substantially more state funding to incentivise educators to come in for higher paying jobs and ensure that minority students who were forced back into de facto segregated systems can still receive a quality education and help counteract the effects of redlining.
The state of things right now is definitely not perfect, but it could be a lot worse if we were just combatting racism with colorblindness.
I mean, like I said, I’m not American, I don’t have a horse in this race at all…
…but am I the only one surprised that in a country driven by of anarchocapitalism and endless Hobbesian paranoia white rich guys seem to be unusually fine with specifically this quirk of government oversight? Because it’s not super usual, it’s a rather American thing.
I get that you do want to correct specific, race-driven bias in things like those, and I get that the absolute insanity of some of the pushback necessitates different measures, but if the racists have the tools to enact the racist policy surely so do the policymakers pushing back.
I don’t want to be disingenuous, either. I fully understand that the US starts from a pre-segregated baseline. Part of the reason you don’t need those tools as much here is there was never a similar push for outright apartheid, so you’re not trying to make up for geography and ethnicity at once to the same level. But still, for a country that thinks having universal government ID is a step away from tyranny the willingness to ask broad questions on protected categories like ethnicity or religion seems… surprising to me.
You can do the same thing with standardized test scores. You don’t need to violate the privacy of people to know that the school their children go to is underperforming.