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You assume everyone acts rationally all the time, every time. What you call "impartial data" somebody might make the argument that this data is promoting racial segregation.

By being able to track the racial makeup of every census tract you would be able to self-segregate.

If you follow this line of reasoning, then this action is a good one, since it promotes racial integration.

In other words, choose your side and then have at it! When there are no shared principles and values, then there are no shared actions.

France has banned collecting data on race/ethnicity since 1978. Moreover, if you are of the mind that we are in a post-racism society (not that I subscribe to that by the way), then this sort of data to you merely reflects peoples' preferences and is only presented to sow disunity.

The only people who would ever subscribe to the notion that we're in a post-racism society are those who stand to benefit from that nonsense.

I disagree. I was raised being told that race doesn't matter, and I don't see it as an issue. Continuing to acknowledge race will just amplify the natural tendency of people to categorize people based on differences.

You may not see it as an issue, but the people negatively impacted by it certainly do. Or are we pretending that events like laws suppressing voters based on race [1] don't happen?

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/08/03/...

There are many other good arguments you could use to say that racism still exists, but voter ID laws isn't a good one. Brown people can get an ID just as easily as white.

I see you didn't bother to read the article.

> The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in its decision last week, held that the North Carolina state legislature acted to entrench itself and “it did so by targeting voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party. Even if done for partisan ends, that constituted racial discrimination.”

> The court called this strategy what it is: racist. The panel wrote that “using race as a proxy for party may be an effective way to win an election. But intentionally targeting a particular race’s access to the franchise because its members vote for a particular party, in a predictable manner, constitutes discriminatory purpose. This is so even absent any evidence of race-based hatred and despite the obvious political dynamics.”

> In North Carolina, the legislature requested racial data on the use of electoral mechanisms, then restricted all those disproportionately used by blacks, such as early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. Absentee ballots, disproportionately used by white voters, were exempted from the voter ID requirement. The legislative record actually justified the elimination of one of the two days of Sunday voting because “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.”

Are we pretending that the source you cited is not a biased opinion piece?

> In North Carolina, the legislature requested racial data on the use of electoral mechanisms, then restricted all those disproportionately used by blacks, such as early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. Absentee ballots, disproportionately used by white voters, were exempted from the voter ID requirement. The legislative record actually justified the elimination of one of the two days of Sunday voting because “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.”

I welcome any other sources you might have showing that this is factually incorrect.

The future has arrived, it just isn't evenly distributed.

Oh, okay. So racism, institutional or otherwise, doesn't affect people because you've chosen to ignore that it exists.

Gotcha.

I wish it were that simple. Firstly, what definition of racism are we using, because by measures such as bias against black names on resumes, in the justice system, in police shootings, there is strong evidence we're not remotely in a post-racism society (against blacks, let alone middle-easterners).

And having grown up in a 95%+ white area and moved to SF, it's been my personal experience that it's very easy to have sweeping assumptions about groups you haven't met any members of (which is a class segregation of housing and schooling can lead to future problems).

To take this a step further, I think such biases even hold to a lesser extent within races (based on accents, dress, hobbies) that perpetuates the class system and ultimately the 1% issue.

one possibility: to promote alternative facts.

I was wondering exactly the same when Holder's Justice Dept removed offender race stats from the NCVS report in 2009.