The Trump administration has made bold moves in its attempt to rescue America from cultural balkanization, as its fights with the Smithsonian Institution and the educational establishment demonstrate. But no move is more vital than its proposal to eliminate race, ethnicity, and sexual preference from the U.S. Census.
Trump’s proposed rule states: “No question about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation shall appear on the short form decennial census questionnaire or any questionnaire used for the enumeration of the population. . . . With the exception of questions about biological sex, date of birth, and household relationships, no person shall be obligated to furnish a response to any demographic question as part of the decennial census.” The rule would also exclude illegal aliens and temporary foreign workers, students, and visitors—none of whom can legally vote—from congressional apportionment.
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These changes are significant and worthy of support. Dismantling the grievance industry, the oppressor-oppressed paradigm, identity politics, and other ideas that rend the national fabric is an essential cause. The Census is a frequently overlooked theater in that struggle.
The high stakes of these Census reforms may be news to many Americans, especially conservatives and nonactivists minding their own business and trying to make ends meet. No doubt many see the Census as a mundane task that happens at the start of every decade, undertaken to provide the necessary data for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives.
It’s considerably more than that. The Indo-European root of the word “census” means “to evoke in speech, almost to call a thing into existence by naming it,” in the words of the French classical historian Claude Nicolet. In the wrong hands, a census can change the character of a republic.
For nearly four decades, leftists have used the Census to do just that, fragmenting the U.S. into a nation of groups, some of them invented. Few know today, for example, the meaning of MENA—short for the Middle East and North Africa, a designation that encompasses peoples as diverse as Kurds, Arabs, Persians, and Berbers. If the Left’s plans to add MENA to the 2030 Census succeed, it may become the next official ethnicity in the public mind.
That’s how Hispanics and Asian-Americans became fixed categories in the public consciousness. Few used these terms before the Office of Management and Budget created them in 1977 and added them to the Census for the first time in 1980. I remember it happening: my uncle, a journalist, walked into our semi-detached home in Queens in the 1970s and announced, “They’re going to start calling us Hispanics.” We were dumbfounded.
Of course, the bureaucrats didn’t come up with the idea on their own. It was pressed on them by radical groups such as the National Council of La Raza (now called UnidosUS) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), both founded with seed money from the Ford Foundation.
UCLA sociologist Cristina Mora, who is sympathetic to the creation of the Hispanic category, wrote in Making Hispanics, “U.S. Census Bureau records reveal that census officials were reluctant to create a Hispanic pan-ethnic category, in part because they judged that persons of Latin American descent were quite diverse and would eventually assimilate and identify as white.” Chicano activists couldn’t bear the idea of assimilation. “They used militant tactics and described Mexican-American communities as internal colonies that needed to shed the yoke of assimilation,” Mora writes. In the end, “Mexican American activists played an important role in pressuring hesitant state and census officials to institutionalize the Hispanic category.”
At the policy level, the Census reforms will help on fronts where the administration is already fighting elsewhere with other measures, eliminating several societal ills. Among these: the corrosive doctrine of disparate impact, which holds that group discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional to be illegal; racial preferences in university admissions and hiring; court holdings that the Voting Rights Act requires the creation of racial voting districts; and a society manipulated by interest groups.
The activists cloaked each of these actions in the rhetoric of noble intent. But America’s focus on race has unsurprisingly failed to produce the desired results. As the sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote in 2002, “As we follow this process further and further into the details that have shaped the census, the element of nobility declines.”
The Census’s racial questions are a betrayal of the vision of the American Founders, who wanted immigrants to “get assimilated to our customs, manners and laws: in a word, soon become one people,” as George Washington put it.
Trump’s Census proposal revives Washington’s vision by attacking the source of the problem: racial, ethnic, and sexual preference categories. As the proposal explains, the Census exists because of a constitutional mandate to count, for the apportionment of congressional seats, the “whole number of persons in each State” based on “usual residence.” This is “a process that factors in an element of allegiance but otherwise should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race.” The proposal acknowledges that this step is of a “(potentially) sensitive nature” but hastens to add, “Substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact of attempting to categorize persons by race and ethnicity, in particular, have featured prominently in our national discourse and have been reflected in shifts in the law.”
The boldness of the proposal seems to have caught the Left off guard, but the Trump administration should hold the line against the inevitable blowback. The proposal is indispensable to the success of his overall project. It must, of course, be accompanied by a return to assimilation and a more rational immigration policy.
The proposal itself is not perfect. While it rightly aims to stop counting all transient or illegal aliens for apportioning House seats, it doesn’t specify how the Census Bureau should determine legal status. The Supreme Court has already held that the Constitution “lawfully permits the Census Bureau to at least inquire about citizenship on the census questionnaire,” and it should absolutely do so. The racial questions should also be eliminated from the much smaller American Community Survey. The best way to support the proposal is to go to the Federal Register, submit a comment supporting it, and then ask that a question on citizenship be added. There’s no time to waste, as the comment period ends on November 2.
In his seminal 2004 book, Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington worried that if the balkanization process continued much longer, whites would join the process rather than fight it. At that point, he warned, “the cultural divide in America will be formalized.”
The second Trump administration has made reuniting Americans one of its signature missions. It deserves our support in this effort.