As I may have mentioned once or twice over the years, when I’m accused of being a wild-eyed extremist for being skeptical of the Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom, I point out that I’m just treating race the way the Census, the New York Times, and Harvard U. treat race.
After all, the Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations all had the opportunity to instruct the Census Bureau that, as proved by The Science, Race Does Not Exist. So stop counting people by race.
Yet, they passed up that opportunity.
Now, however, the Trump Administration’s Commerce Department has more or less called the Race Does Not Exist crowd’s bluff by announcing it will be instructing the Census Bureau to stop including race and ethnicity check boxes on the 2030 Census.
From the New York Times news desk:
Trump’s Census Overhaul Would Exclude Some Immigrants and Remove Questions on Race
The proposals for 2030 are among significant changes that would upend a process for helping allot congressional seats and shape policies that address disparities.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Zolan Kanno-Youngs covers the White House. He reported from Washington.
Sept. 9, 2026, 6:42 p.m. ET
The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed to no longer count immigrants without green cards in the 2030 census or ask about race and ethnicity, part of an overhaul that would redefine who counts as a U.S. resident in the eyes of the federal government.
The sweeping measures would upend a process that helps determine the allotment of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding and policies to address systemic disparities.
The proposed regulation, published online on Wednesday, would not count noncitizens without green cards in the 2030 census, a significant departure from the process stipulated by the Constitution to occur every 10 years. Historically, the census has asked Americans about their race and ethnicity and counted all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status.
The overhaul also would bar the U.S. census from asking Americans about their sexual orientation.
The decennial Census has not asked about sexual orientation, just about domestic partnerships. But the Biden Administration was planning to add sexual orientation questions to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
The Washington Post news report argues that, hey, wait Race Does Exist when it comes to health, so we need to count it:
Civil rights and public health groups have also warned against the removal of questions about race and ethnicity from the Census, saying doing so would hamper officials’ ability to address health disparities, starting with how to appropriately allocate federal funding.
“If you change what the census counts, then you change where the money can help most,” Vi D. Le and Melanie Klein of the Federation of American Scientists wrote last week.
“Removing race and ethnicity data does not make health disparities go away,” they wrote. “It merely makes them harder to find, harder to measure, and harder to fix.”
The Commerce Department argues:
Separate from these aforementioned [apportionment] mandates, the decennial census questionnaires historically have also been used as a vehicle for collecting demographic information about the population of the United States. … in general, the more questions that are included on the decennial census questionnaire, the lower the overall response rate. …
Furthermore, each demographic question that is included on the decennial census increases the likelihood that the data of certain people who do respond will be identifiable in the resulting published data, in violation of their privacy and the law. … The more data that the Census Bureau publishes, the higher the risk that a particular respondent’s data can be identified, and the more uncertainty the Census Bureau must introduce into the data to reduce risk.
For example, the CDC mortality database that I frequently make graphs out of has a rule that it won’t report any number less than 10 to keep Nosey Parkers from using it to look up whether their neighbor’s death was a suicide or a drug overdose or a died of cirrhosis or whatever. I believe you could get around this restriction with enough work, but it probably discourages the great majority of privacy invasions. (Of course, in the age of AI, I could imagine somebody in the future selling TMZ on a system for looking up the official cause of death of every celebrity.)
In addition to disclosure risk, the Census Bureau also is considering the (potentially) sensitive nature of questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact of attempting to categorize persons by race and ethnicity, in particular, have featured prominently in our national discourse and have been reflected in shifts in the law. See, e.g., Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 276–77 (2023) (Thomas, J., concurring) (describing race as a “social construct” based on “ephemeral, socially constructed categories” that “are little more than stereotypes”);
This is from Clarence Thomas’s eloquent concurring opinion in the 2023 Supreme Court decision in which Harvard’s affirmative action policies were outlawed. Thomas wrote in 2023:
Applicants denied admission to certain colleges may come to believe—accurately or not—that their race was responsible for their failure to attain a life-long dream. These individuals, and others who wished for their success, may resent members of what they perceive to be favored races, believing that the successes of those individuals are unearned.
What, then, would be the endpoint of these affirmative action policies? Not racial harmony, integration, or equality under the law. Rather, these policies appear to be leading to a world in which everyone is defined by their skin color, demanding ever-increasing entitlements and preferences on that basis. Not only is that exactly the kind of factionalism that the Constitution was meant to safeguard against, see The Federalist No. 10 (J. Madison), but it is a factionalism based on ever-shifting sands.
That is because race is a social construct; we may each identify as members of particular races for any number of reasons, having to do with our skin color, our heritage, or our cultural identity. And, over time, these ephemeral, socially constructed categories have often shifted. For example, whereas universities today would group all white applicants together, white elites previously sought to exclude Jews and other white immigrant groups from higher education. In fact, it is impossible to look at an individual and know definitively his or her race; some who would consider themselves black, for example, may be quite fair skinned.
And yet Americans have relatively few controversies or scandals over who qualifies as black for affirmative action purposes, unlike Brazilians, or unlike the large number of white academics who have claimed to be American Indians with zero or negligible DNA evidence, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Yet, university admissions policies ask individuals to identify themselves as belonging to one of only a few reductionist racial groups. With boxes for only “black,” “white,” “Hispanic,” “Asian,” or the ambiguous “other,” how is a Middle Eastern person to choose?
The traditional Census instruction has been:
Paywall here.
