If the U.S. Census Bureau wants people to judge one another not based on the color of their skin but the content of their character, it isn’t doing a very good job. According to the NYT, the Bureau is busily spending your tax money to come up with new ways to make America’s Hispanic population “pick a race” on the U.S. Census.
This is not a good plan. Hispanic-Americans, as a group, are less conscious of race than other Americans. As the article says, Latinos “tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs.” Getting Americans also to identify themselves by “a shared set of cultural traits” instead of skin color is a pretty good description of the kind of country we want to become.
America’s goal should be to make consciousness of race or skin-color less salient over time. Instead, the bureaucrats at the Census Bureau seem to think that too many Americans don’t care enough about race. Hopefully they’re the only ones who do.
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