An important new story by Layla A. Jones out this morning shows yet another way right-wing conspiracy theories may be making their way into government, impacting regular people’s lives.
For more than a decade, the Census Bureau has been preparing to swap out the way it records people’s race and ethnicity, eliminating the separate “Hispanic or Latino” ethnicity option and adding more options to the question about race. The change was intended to offer people categories that better reflect their understanding of their identity; many respondents had been checking “other” rather than choosing from the categories available.
Here’s where the story gets weird.
This spring, the Census Bureau quietly reversed course, posting a note in the federal register that cited OMB guidance delaying the project.
The Census Bureau did not respond to TPM’s questions about the delay. But a think tank founded by White House Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought posted a conspiratorial screed to its website two weeks after the Census Bureau reversal, claiming the new questions were the “woke” product of “neo-Marxist ideologies.”
To give you just a taste:
The Biden administration’s cited reasons for this revision were “large societal, political, economic, and demographic shifts in the United States, including increasing racial and ethnic diversity, a growing number of people who identify as more than one race or ethnicity, and changing immigration and migration patterns.”18 It is important to note that the Biden administration had a de facto open-border policy and allowed large-scale illegal immigration into the United States.19 The administration also attempted to entrench DEI concepts in almost every aspect of the federal government.20
By expanding SPD No. 15 “to better reflect the diversity of the Nation,” the Biden administration created a more elaborate apparatus for classifying citizens by race, and that apparatus remains the foundation on which state-sanctioned racism is built. DEI offices cannot impose racial targets and racially drawn congressional districts cannot be defended in court without an authoritative federal scheme that first sorts Americans into the relevant boxes. The post-Clinton SPD No. 15 is that scheme. The more finely it organizes the population into multiple categories, the more grievances can be generated, the more woke programs can be promulgated, and the more aggressively the government can be primed to engineer outcomes predicated on race essentialism.
As you can see, the Center for Renewing America theorizes that better race and ethnicity data would help Democrats in their redistricting goals, and claims that the “more finely” the government “organizes the population into multiple categories, the more grievances can be generated.”
OMB and the Center for Renewing America did not reply to questions about whether the document should be viewed as representative of the administration’s thinking.
The current pause in the program applies to the American Community Survey. We’ll be watching to see what happens ahead of the 2030 Census.
