Trump Can Help Overcome Identity Politics
Americans are divided in part by decades-old bureaucratic decisions the president could undo.
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 “Negro, 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.”
.. 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.
.. For people who tick multiple boxes—permissible since 2000—OMB has instructed the Census Bureau to “allocate” responses that “combine one minority race and white” to “the minority race.” As Mr. Hollinger puts it, “thus the federal government quietly reinserted into the tabulation of the census the principle of hypodescent”—the technical term for the old segregationist one-drop rule—“that the opportunity to make ‘more than one’ was publicly said to repudiate.”
.. 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.
.. Universities have become cultural battle zones where students search for victim status rather than truth.
.. if you work for a large organization, there’s someone in your human-resources department whose job is to put you into one of the government-created silos.
.. Mr. Hollinger has proposed to do away with the pan-ethnic groups altogether and “count instead those inhabitants who identify with descent communities from specific countries.”
.. proposed asking only questions on national descent, and going back only as far as grandparents