[How to capitalize/classify A/americana:] Statistical Policy Directive 15 (1977)

From: Kyle Peterson, "Affirmative Action Mocks Ethnic Diversity [:] As the Supreme Court takes up preferences at Harvard, legal scholar David Bernstein argues that labels like ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Asian’ are completely arbitrary," The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2022 4:05 pm ET 

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Excerpt:

Mr. Bernstein, 55, is the author of a recent book, “Classified,” that traces the haphazard codification of the federal government’s racial labels. “We created these classifications in 1977 in a very different America, right, that was primarily black-white,” he says. “Now we have all these other groups, and we have much more division within the groups, and we’ve barely changed them at all.” 

The decisive player in the ’70s was the Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions, set up under the Federal Interagency Committee on Education. A task force with three interested federal workers—Mexican-American, Puerto Rican and Cuban-American—debated a Spanish-language label. The eventual result was a document with a title only a hardened bureaucrat could love: Statistical Policy Directive No. 15. [JB see] 

Issued by the Office of Management and Budget in 1977, Directive 15 set definitions for the racial categories we mostly know today: white, black, Asian and Native American, with an ethnicity option for people of Hispanic heritage, who can be any race. In 1997 a Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander grouping was split off. A complaint from Hawaiians, which echoes today, was that colleges treated them as Asians.

In a country that’s far more diverse five decades after Directive 15, its labels show up everywhere from college applications to clinical trials. The problem is that these blunt categories are arbitrary and historically contingent. “Asians are supposed to have descent from the original peoples of Asia, whatever that means,” Mr. Bernstein says. That grouping covers half the world’s population and a dizzying number of ethnicities. Yet according to the feds, Asia ends at the Pakistan border. Pakistani-Americans, like Japanese-Americans, are classified as Asian. Afghan-Americans are officially white.

The black classification covers anyone with origins in “the black racial groups of Africa.” Well, Mr. Bernstein asks, “what do you do if you’re an Aborigine from Australia?” He also cites immigrant diversity that’s missed by Directive 15, since 21% of black Americans are first- or second-generation.

The Hispanic category includes immigrants from Spain, as well as people with indigenous heritage in places such as Mexico, even if those ancestors spoke no Spanish. The U.S. has something like three million black and Asian Hispanics. The government uses “Latino” as a synonym, yet it excludes Brazilians—except that the Transportation Department counts “Portuguese culture or origin” as Hispanic in its Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program.

The Native American label requires “tribal affiliation or community attachment,” but for all the jokes about Elizabeth Warren, those ties can be distant. Some reports say the Cherokee Nation has members enrolled with 1/4,096th ancestry. For the record, Ms. Warren’s DNA test suggested she was at least 1/1,024th.

As for the white classification, it covers Cajuns, Quebecois, indigenous northern Scandinavians, Greeks, Arabs, Iranians, and most Jews, not to mention people who see themselves as simply American but whose parents or grandparents identified as minorities. A push for a multiracial category faded as the census began to let people check multiple boxes in 2000.

Things could have been different, which is a theme of Mr. Bernstein’s book. ...

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