Is Kim Kardashian white?

Maybe not.

That is, according to a USA Today article, the Census Bureau is proposing adding a new racial category to the census, to cover Middle Eastern & North African-origin people, who up to now had been defined as “white.”  According to the article,

Under the proposal, the new Middle East and North African designation — or MENA, as it’s called by population scholars — is broader in concept than Arab (an ethnicity) or Muslim (a religion). It would include anyone from a region of the world stretching from Morocco to Iran, and including Syrian and Coptic Christians, Israeli Jews and other religious minorities.

But the Census Bureau, which has been quietly studying the issue for two years, also has gotten caught up in debates about some groups — such as Turkish, Sudanese and Somali Americans — who aren’t included in that category. Those are issues the White House is trying to resolve before adding the box on 2020 census forms.

But, of course, if you think about it, it’s rather odd that Turks wouldn’t be included if Syrians or Iranians, say, are (the Turks are hardly European!), and the Turks and Armenians are neighbors, after all — Armenia may be its own country now, but the Armenians killed in the Genocide, and those who fled in its aftermath, were an ethnic minority in Turkey.  Hence, it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Kim Kardashian, of Armenian ancestry, could be declared non-white.

(And what about the Kurds?  And Jews now living in Israel who had immigrated from Europe — but whose ancestors, millennia  ago, left the Middle East?  Or Jews now living in Europe, but, of course, with ancestors from the Middle East?)

And why are they making this change?  For a variety of political reasons — in order to count Middle Easterners and Arabs, to determine whether a congressional district needs to be gerrymandered on their behalf, for example, or to determine if they’re being discriminated against, or measure their health outcomes or income relative to other groups.  And for a feel-good reason, because many such individuals don’t like being labelled as “white.”

The impact?  If nothing else, all those predictions about whites becoming a minority — that is, less than 50% of the population — come true a lot sooner.  But this reclassification is likewise an indicator of the ultimate meaninglessness of these categories, and the fact that they are all about politics, not anything that has any real “truth” behind it.

But what’s peculiar about this article in particular is that this is actually old news — or, at least, Pew reported that the Census Bureau started the process of making this change over a year ago.  And what’s also interesting is that they are, according to this older article, no longer using the word “race” at all, just asking, “Which categories describe [the respondent]?”  Those categories are:

• White
• Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin
• Black or African American
• Asian
• American Indian or Alaska Native
• Middle Eastern or North African
• Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
• Some other race, ethnicity, or origin

Which does’t remedy my old gripe that “Hispanic” really ought to be renamed and ought to be a matter of whether your origin is (primarily) that of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, not asking about the language of your country of origin.  I suppose the new question seems to have eliminated the requirement, to be “American Indian,” that one be registered with a tribe, since the sample language in the Pew article suggests that Mayan or Aztec are possible “American Indian” categories, so that a Guatemalan, say, who identifies primarily as indigenous and not as a Spanish speaker, would perhaps be expected to check “American Indian.”  (Though it’s hard to believe someone would do so.)  But what about the typical immigrant from a Mexican village, of mostly indigenous ancestry?

Anyway, it’s all very silly.

Yes, there are historic uses of the concept of “race” in the United States:  “black” meaning someone with dark skin color, from subsaharan African, “Oriental” referring to Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and others with an “Oriental” appearance with characteristic eyes.

And the Census Bureau has constantly tinkered with the adjustments to its labels — see this 2012 Slate article, which describes old categories such as octoon, and incidentally observes that the “Hispanic” category can be selected by those with a strong “Hispanic” identity as well as those who feel no attachment at all but are just trying to follow the instructions.

But it does make the whole concept of the United States becoming “majority minority” pretty irrelevant, if that’s the case only because the Definers of who counts as a “minority” determinedly preserve and expand that category when assimilation and intermarriage would have otherwise moved people steadily into the “white” label.

My preference?  Re-write the question as follows:

From what major geographical region do you or your ancestors originate?  If your ancestors have themselves migrated from one region to another in the recent past*, use their original region.  If your ancestors have come from multiple regions, use the predominant one.

(*By which I mean Argentines whose ancestors hailed from Germany, or South Africans with Dutch ancestry, or Kenyan nationals with Indian ancestry, for example; you might have a better way of phrasing this than “recent past.”)

And then you can provide choices such as Europe, North Africa, Subsaharan Africa, Middle East, Asia, North America, Central/South America, and the Pacific Islands.  Heck, you can follow this up with a second box for people to mark their “secondary ancestry” in the case of biracial folks.

That gives us meaningful information, without keeping the Census Bureau in the business of defining and perpetuating concepts of “race.”

image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKim_Kardashian_2%2C_2012.jpg; Eva Rinaldi [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons