As if the irony of Barack Obama having been dubbed the first “post-racial president” wasn’t thick enough, now the Obama administration wants to create a new racial category — for people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Just as with “Hispanic,” “Arab” and “Persian,” the two terms describing most Middle Easterners, refer not to races but ethnicities. But now the feds want to change this in what USA Today describes as “the biggest realignment of federal racial definitions in decades.” The new category would include Israeli Jews and Coptic Christians as well and would appear on 2020 census forms.
And while “creating a new race” may seem the domain of God, what’s going on here is actually quite devilish. As American Thinker points out, if the change is adopted, “The next step will be to view this group as a minority that would benefit by anti-discrimination laws in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and benefit from affirmative action programs in employment, education, and other areas. Obama is creating another bloc of voters for the Democrats to pander to. This is part of the Obama/Hillary plan to accept ‘refugees’ from the Middle East fiasco created by the policies of Obama/Hillary. These refugees will now be a protected minority that the Democrats expect to vote Dem.” Of course, the vast majority of Americans of Middle Eastern descent are currently voting Democrat.
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And the timing is uncanny. Virtually all the people in this new “racial category” would be Muslims, who traditionally had been less than one percent of the U.S. population. But with more Muslims having been admitted to our nation since 9/11 than during all our history prior to it, this bloc is growing. And the Democrats clearly want to grow with it.
USA Today presents some elements of this pandering, writing:
According to the White House notice, the new data [collected on the new race] could be used for a wide range of political and policy purposes, including:
• Enforcing the Voting Rights Act and drawing congressional and state legislative district boundaries [with Muslims in mind];
• Establishing federal affirmative action plans and evaluating claims of employment discrimination in employment in the private sector [to benefit Muslims];
• Monitoring discrimination in housing, mortgage lending and credit [same as above];
• Enforcing school desegregation policies [read: social engineering]; and
• Helping [Muslim] minority-owned small businesses get federal grants and loans.
Granting such advantages — and thereby buying votes and further cementing political loyalty — is presently difficult because Middle Eastern people are, unbeknownst to most, classified as white (Palestinian girls shown in photo). Convert them into a new race, however, and “voila!” — an even more privileged minority is born. This is what happened with the LGBT phenomenon, of course, where sexual anomalies were redefined as special “identities” which could receive special privileges.
Speaking of which, defining racial categories should not be the privilege of government but the purview of (good) science. Anthropologists have generally defined three or four races: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, and sometimes Australoid. There’s also a fashionable, apparently pseudoscientific view stating that “there’s only one race, the human race”; this notion, however, is based on one “scientific” paper written decades ago and which only gained currency because some of those who want to move beyond race by pretending it doesn’t exist find it ideologically convenient. It doesn’t seem very scientific, however, given that an individual’s race can now be determined from DNA evidence alone.
Of course, anthropology’s determinations could perhaps be questioned, as “social sciences” are more easily politicized than hard sciences (it was social science that invented the “transgender” category) and are often influenced by social(ist) fashions.
Yet the government’s classifications are completely political. USA Today illustrates this by explaining the history of governmental MENA racial classification, writing, “Under current law, people from the Middle East are considered white, the legacy of century-old court rulings in which Syrian Americans argued that they should not be considered Asian — because that designation would deny them citizenship under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.” Note again, however, that this categorization at least accords with anthropological definitions; USA Today gives the impression that the judgment was purely political.
But what is political and has changed since those rulings are the winds of state favor. Consequently, special-interest groups that once lobbied to be considered white now lobby to be considered something else. As the paper tells us about the proposed MENA racial category, “‘What it does is it helps these communities feel less invisible,’ said Helen Samhan of the Arab American Institute, which has been advocating the change for more than 30 years. ‘It’s a good step, a positive step.’” It certainly is if you want access to today’s racial spoils system.
And that’s the bottom line. Left-wing writer Susan Sontag stated decades ago, “The white race is the cancer of human history,” placing herself in the vanguard of our age’s anti-white movement. Since then it has metastasized, with quotas, affirmative action, and college-campus “safe spaces” excluding whites; white-privilege theory and a presidential candidate (Hillary Clinton) saying white people need to “recognize” their privilege; and many other racial policies, presumptions, and propositions. And is it a coincidence that when being white brought protection from governmental and societal discrimination, activists such as Helen Samhan wanted to be considered white, but now that it invites the same, they want to be considered non-white?
Also note that Republicans derive almost 90 percent of their votes from whites while 65 to 90-plus percent of non-whites (depending on the group) cast ballots for Democrats. Given this, is it surprising that the Democrats would want to use racial-category manipulation to isolate and minimize whites as much as possible?
