In Peggy Noonan’s “A Certain Idea of America,” a sentence in an essay on the American Dream caught my attention: “The original sin of America, slavery, meant some of the earliest Americans were brutally excluded from it.”
What a terrible sin it was and what a high price all Americans are still paying for that sin. It reminds me of Exodus 34:6-7: “The Lord passed before him (Moses), and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
The US Slaves were given freedom by the 1863 Emancipation Declaration but our selfish, foolish, detrimental, and expensive national obsession with race continues 162 years later. Until outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a 1967 Supreme Court Decision, law in many states required that any person with as few as one African ancestor be considered Negro or Colored or Black and be treated differently. It was known as the “One Drop” or “One Ancestor” Rule. Unfortunately, changing the law failed to change the thinking and behavior of many citizens.
And a half century later, the 2020 US Census still required that we reveal our race and ethnicity from these choices, option f. having been added in 2000:
a. White
b. Black or African American
c. American Indian or Alaska Native
d. Asian
e. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
f. Some Other Race
g. Hispanic or Latino or not Hispanic or Latino
This unjustified, discriminatory, and expensive invasion of privacy continues because there is a profitable bureaucracy built around the issue, and bureaucracies have momentum. There are experts in Demographic Analysis, in Race and Ethnicity Research and Outreach. Data are collected on Geographic Population Divisions. And of course, there are expensive Diversity Studies in colleges and universities presumably preparing people for jobs in the bureaucracy.
There is a United Nations Population Division which “assists countries in developing their capacity to produce and analyze population data and information.” It is gratifying that a search of the website for “race” has no hits, but I suspect the data are collected.
At least three major US government agencies are involved. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) which is responsible for the staffing of our armed forces, the US Census Bureau (CB) which collects the race data, and the Department of the Interior which takes special interest in “trust responsibilities or special commitments to American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and affiliated Island Communities.” So, if the POTUS is looking for cost reduction opportunities with no downside, I recommend that the federal government quit collecting, distributing, studying, and promoting use of race data.
In recent history, the outlawing of discrimination based on sex and gender was temporarily overridden by the DEI movement which promoted such discrimination. The response of the new POTUS, published on the Whitehouse website, is one effort to stop that movement: “As Chief Executive and as Commander in Chief, I am committed to meritocracy and to the elimination of race-based and sex-based discrimination within the Armed Forces of the United States.”
This issue reminds me of the famous quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
Maybe if all the money being spent on collecting, distributing, managing, commiserating about, and responding to race data were diverted to a national emphasis on character development we would get a better return on the investment. Or maybe not. It would depend on leadership and organization.
Bonus: Concerning the references on this post to US Government agencies, this US Government organization chart may be helpful.
