How Biden Made Me a ‘Minority’

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

So I guess I’m a “minority” now, and can identify myself as such on the 2030 US Census by picking the Middle Eastern or North African category and the Iranian subcategory when filling out the race/ethnicity section. This realization of my minority-hood comes courtesy of the Biden White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which revived an Obama-era proposal to count “MENA” as a racial group after Team Trump shelved it. “These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America,” said Karin Orvis, OMB’s chief statistician.

Oh joy. For American society, the advent of the Middle Eastern “race” will further the sad racialization of our common life, in which demands for recognition and respect aren’t legible unless they are formulated as claims about skin pigmentation.

I trust the consequences for American society writ large needn’t be spelled out at great length. As the writer Kenan Malik demonstrates in his brilliant recent-ish book Not So Black and White, race as we know it was largely invented in the wake of the Enlightenment: A questionable biological category was given ontological weight as a way to justify persistent economic inequalities that defied liberalism’s ideal of political equality.