This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/wisconsinites-changing-demographics-challenge-governments-racial-silos/

Number of those identifying as two or more races more than doubles; ‘At the grassroots level, people care less and less about race’ 

Wisconsinites are increasingly interracial, challenging a deeply embedded and divisive system that relies on racial categories that, across the country, are used to apportion billions of dollars in government programs and subsidies in the name of equity.

In 2023, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of race in deciding college admissions, the federal Office of Management and Budget was enacting plans beginning with the 2030 Census to further divide the government’s official categories for race, going from five categories to seven.

At the same time, the number of people identifying themselves to the U.S. Census Bureau as being of two or more races increased by 276% from the 2010 to the 2020 Census, according to the bureau’s data. Nearly a third of the 33.8 million people who identified that way were under the age of 18.

In Wisconsin, the number of people identifying as two or more races increased from 195,000, or 3.4% of the state population in 2020 to 437,000, or 7.4% of the population, the following year, according to Census data analyzed by the Badger Institute — a 125% increase in just one year.

After holding between 97% and 98% for nearly a decade, the percentage of the state population identifying as one race dropped to 96.6% in 2020 and fell all the way down to 92.6% in 2021, the Badger Institute found.

But while the data suggests that we are moving toward a society that will render racial categorizing meaningless, “government and the elites — big corporations and educational institutions, for instance — are wedded to keeping these categories intact,” David Bernstein says. “We now have two competing paradigms in the United States: At the grassroots level, people care less and less about race, and at the elite level, people want to emphasize it more and more.”

Bernstein, a law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, is the author of “Classified, The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.”

He is one of a small cadre of academics who have questioned the validity of the Census Bureau’s racial categorizing and have warned about how stubbornly rooted it is, even as the courts have begun dismantling race-based favoritism and programs billed as promoting “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI.

How it is used

The Census Bureau openly acknowledges the questions it asks about race are “used to evaluate government programs and policies to ensure that they fairly and equitably serve the needs of all racial groups and to monitor compliance with antidiscrimination laws, regulations, and policies.”

Race data informs bureaucrats running affirmative action, equal employment, medical and educational programs, according to the website. The National Science Foundation, for example, keeps track of the racial makeup in its science and engineering workforce.

In turn, a network of advocacy groups leverages Census data. In celebration of the OMB’s two new race categories, the left-leaning Urban Institute, which exists to put such data to use, issued a statement saying, “Altogether, this new racial category could build on and further institutionalize policies focused on racial equity and economic mobility.”

More explicit is California Catalyst, one of the many non-profits that exist to “identify funding, services and opportunities in our public systems that can be redistributed for more just outcomes for all.” In doing so, California Catalyst says it carries on a fight against “racism, oppression, and enforcement of White supremacy as a matter of federal policy.”

All of this dividing up as a matter of federal policy, however, is in and of itself discrimination, John Early, who has studied the issue as an adjunct scholar for the libertarian Cato Institute, told the Badger Institute.

Early finds it particularly pernicious for the government to drive racial divisiveness at a time when real people, increasingly, resist fitting into those boxes. The same Census data that slices and dices showed recently that roughly one in six new marriages are of partners of different races, a trend that’s quickening, Early says.

Why should government “insist on keeping the distinctions not only alive, but reinforcing and expanding them,” Early wrote at the time the OMB proposed adding the two new racial classifications.

“As you slice the population into smaller and smaller groups,” Early told the Badger Institute, “it provides more opportunities to maximize differences between the groups — and create the basis for grievances. At some point, it just gets downright silly.”

Silly, perhaps, but rooted, like so many of today’s race quandaries, in the political struggle over civil rights in the 1960s. A moderate faction of the movement believed in race equality, while a more radical faction demanded equity.

The moderate faction, Michael Lind, a writer for Tablet, wrote last month, lost the battle. So while Congress in 1976 ordered the Census Bureau to stop collecting data about Americans’ religious affiliations, the OMB in 1977 put in place Directive 15, asking Americans to identify themselves as either Black, White, Hispanic, American Indian, or Alaskan Native or Asian or Pacific Islander.

Beginning in 2030, Asian will separate from Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern or North African (abbreviated as “MENA”) will join the other six categories.

Social constructs

These racial categories, as advocates on both sides of the issue concede, are a social rather than a genetic construct. Lind, Bernstein and Early argue the categories are broad and arbitrary.

Bernstein is fond of quoting a Nature Biotechnology article from 2005: “Scientifically, race is a meaningless marker of anything. Pooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers and okapis on the basis that they are all stripey.”

The silliness has a deadly serious side when it comes to the government picking winners and losers based on race. If a university establishes a quota for Hispanic professors, Lind wrote, a Brazilian who also identifies as Swedish, a Black Venezuelan or a Yaqui Indian of Mexican descent can qualify.

And while U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was ridiculed for claiming Native American ancestry on her application for law school, Bernstein says in his book that a study found that 10 times as many of today’s law school applicants as current lawyers are making the same Native American claim on their applications.

Bernstein said the Supreme Court ruling in the Harvard admissions case made a significant statement — but did not unilaterally end discrimination by the government and in academia.

“There’s still a number of blatantly illegal government programs that give preferences based on race and ethnicity,” he said. “The Biden Justice Department said you can use race as long as it’s not just race, so at universities and other places, they use the definition of ‘historically underrepresented groups.’ I don’t think it makes it any less illegal.”

The entrenchment is deep, but Bernstein said average Americans living their lives outside or in spite of government categorizing will do some of the heavy lifting. Relationships across categories will, counterintuitively, increase the pool of people who can claim some kind of minority status.

“Once everyone is a minority, no one will be,” the Mises Institute wrote in its review of Bernstein’s book, “and some degree of reform will almost certainly be forced in the face of ever-mounting absurdities and inconsistencies.”

Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute. Ken Wysocky is a Milwaukee-area freelance journalist and editor with more than 40 years of journalism experience. Wyatt Eichholz contributed to this report.

Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute President Mike Nichols at mike@badgerinstitute.org or 262-389-8239.

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