The U.S. government’s overhaul of race and ethnicity categories, aimed at further segmenting and separating the American public as part of the state religion of diversity, has left some communities still complaining about improper representation.
Despite the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) extensive outreach efforts, Hmong, Armenian, Black Arab and Brazilian groups find the changes fall short in accurately capturing their identities.
For the Hmong community, whose soldiers fought and died alongside American forces in the Vietnam War’s “secret war,” being classified as East Asian rather than Southeast Asian is a painful slight. The categorization not only disregards their history of oppression in China but also masks the stark economic disparities between Hmong households and the broader Asian population.
Armenians, many of whom descended from survivors of the 1915 Ottoman Turk campaign now widely acknowledged as genocide, fear the absence of a specific Armenian category could lead to a significant undercount and diluted political influence. The community’s exclusion from the new Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category, based on what advocates argue is outdated research, threatens the preservation of Armenian identity in the U.S.
Similarly, Black Arabs from countries such as Somalia and Sudan find themselves excluded from the MENA category, with the OMB relying on a 2015 field test that critics say used outdated methodology. This omission raises questions about the accuracy of demographic data and its implications for health outreach and resource distribution.
A coding error in a Census Bureau survey also exposed the complexities of identity, revealing that more than two-thirds of Brazilians in the U.S. identify as Hispanic, despite not being included in the official definition. This exclusion, along with that of Haitians, leaves a significant portion of Afro-Latinos uncounted.
As OMB works to implement these changes over the next five years, new complaints will undoubtedly be loudly complained as Americans continue to be subjected to the insanity that is modern-day America.
