Government Proposes To Make Bad Standards on Race and Ethnicity Worse

John F. EarlyI recently laid out the case to stop government classification of people by race and ethnicity in a CatoBlog post. Those observations were stimulated by The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posting a notice for comment in the Federal Register with respect to a report from the Federal Interagency Technical Working Group and Race and Ethnicity Standards to revise the existing standards for collecting data by race and ethnicity. Comments are due by April 27, 2023.Ipublished a similar op ‐​ed in the Wall Street Journal, which subsequently printed a singleletter to the editor in response. That letter captured in a very personal way the divisive harm of classifying human beings by race and ethnicity. The writer had entered “Human Race” as a write ‐​in response to the 2020 Census questionnaire. Three months later, Census sent an agent to knock on her door to “verify” the answer. During the conversation, the interviewer revealed that his own children found it hard to answer the question because he was White, and his wife was born in Ni geria.While the overarching concern about this proposed OMB directive is that such an official classification system is inherently a threat to liberty, the details of the proposed changes are technically deficient across several dimensions. OMB specified two “governing principles” of the workgroup as: (1) “Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs…not an attempt to...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs