In 1977, the federal government issued Statistical Directive No. 15, establishing America’s official racial and ethnic classifications: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. The purpose was to create uniform classifications, so that data for endeavors like civil rights enforcement and educational achievement could be shared and compared across government agencies. Nevertheless, the classifications quickly spread through American law and society and are now used for everything from college admissions to scientific research.
The problem: Directive 15 classifications are arbitrary and inconsistent, both in how they are defined and how they are enforced. The government developed its classifications through a combination of amateur sociology, interest-group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, and happenstance. The classifications never made much sense beyond the historical black–white divide. Now, given the country’s dramatic demographic changes since 1977, they border on incoherence. It’s time to reconsider them.
First, the next administration should review every instance in which the government uses, or requires private parties to use, racial classifications. These identity-group categories are inherently illiberal and divisive. Consistent with Supreme Court precedent, the government should get out of the racial-classification business entirely, unless a “compelling interest” exists for using such classifications.
Second, the administration should abolish the regulations that force biomedical researchers to classify their subjects and report data based on the Directive 15 classifications. These classifications have no plausible scientific justification; they absorb resources better spent on scientific advances; and they have stunted the development of therapies based on genetics.
Third, the next administration should reverse the Biden administration’s plans to turn the Hispanic ethnic classification into a racial one and to add new Middle Eastern and North African classifications. If implemented, both proposals would make our already-incoherent, arbitrary classification system even worse.
Fourth, to the extent that racial classifications do serve a compelling government interest, their use should be narrowly tailored to that purpose. One model to look at is the FBI’s hate-crime statistics. The agency tabulates such crimes against 29 identifiable groups, among them Mormons and gender-nonconforming people.
Finally, to the extent that the Directive 15 classifications continue to be used, it makes sense, in many instances, to break up the broad, crude classifications into ethnic and national-origin subcategories. The “white” classification, for example, includes people with descent anywhere from Iceland to Yemen. “Asian” includes Bangladeshis and Filipinos. Limiting the data to the broad classifications, rather than digging deeper into their constituent parts, can obscure more than it illuminates.
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