Of course, this may lead to targeted policies, just as insulin is applied to people with a diabetes diagnosis, and not to the general population.
Race is a social construct. The census strengthens that construct. OP’s argument is that race should be a weaker construct, which is a legitimate if debatable argument.
Therefore, something such as race, even if it is an arbitrary social construct used to divide based on nothing more than skin color, is important to measure against other factors such as income and address. It helps you decide when/where/what is being discriminatory.
Race should be a weaker social construct, yes. But living in Infinite Fun Space doesn't help anyone today in the real.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/12/us/washington-spokane-naacp-r...
Transgender people have only very recently been given the faintest legitimacy, and they naturally want to defend that against transracialists and otherkin and other movements that basically look like a parody of trans people. Even if their logic isn't fundamentally stronger than those other movements, transgender people have something that actually matters: a little bit of power.
Why should anyone sacrifice that to the altar of logic?
For example those whose ancestors didn't partake in the Dawes Roles are generally excluded from tribal membership even if they are genetically similar; the reasoning being they haven't been present as citizens in generations.
And really, what should we care about most? A particular hue of skin, or our values, principles, traditions, and history?
That's always been a hard question to answer when there's an existing reality and history in which the "should" in your first sentence is replaced by "do". It's easy to say that it would be best to start doing the right thing today (or even yesterday); much harder to do that after centuries of doing the wrong thing.
But by constantly reminding people of their racial category, a feedback loop is created. The more are people defined by their race, the more important will they consider their racial category. They will also start viewing more interactions through the race angle, especially the negative ones. Not "the policeman was rude because he is an asshole", but "the policeman was rude because I am of a different race from him".
I cannot imagine a scenario where constant race consciousness leads to people being less concerned about anything that can be construed as racially charged.
Before positive changes can be made, people need to recognize that do-nothing mindset is very common. On this, two days after Martin Luther King Jr Day, it may be value for us all to reflect on his words on the difference between the peace of the absence of tension and the peace of the presence of justice.
The Democratic party has held the belief that demographics will keep them in power without having to actually address economic and legal inequalities, that is, without having to do anything at all.
But the middle and lower classes will never find solidarity amongst themselves so long as we are fixated on identity, and nothing will change (that's the point).
I already expounded way more than was worth the effort on here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29981488
As someone on the boot-end of people who chant "no politics maaaaan, just vibin', peace and love with no ideology" to distract from the boot, I vehemently disagree.
It's not, inherently, though it can be used that way, which is the essence of bourgeois identity politics, which is a distinct subset of identity politics.
> The best improvements for everyone will come from policies which ignore identity and materially improve the lives of people.
Identity is often intimately tied to distinct material circumstances; policies that “ignore identity and materially improves the loves of people”, without exception, ignore the distinct material circumstances of identifiable groups of people while improving the material circumstances of other groups of people, and invariably do so in ways which favor the groups most privileged by visibility in the status quo.
> The Democratic party has held the belief that demographics will keep them in power without having to actually address economic and legal inequalities
That's very much not true of either of the major factions of the Democratic Party. The dominant neoliberal centrist faction actively doesn't want to deal with the economic inequalities more than is necessary to smooth out social disruptions interfering with corporate capitalist profit making (though it does want to deal with legal inequalities that impede efficient exploitation of human potential by capital), to the point of being willing to have the party lose power rather than doing more than is necessary to that end, whereas the progressive populist wing actively wants to deal with the problems.
And neither faction is so ignorant of the political realities of the US system to expect that the party is secure in it's (extremely narrow) federal legislative majority or control of the White House.
Not so fast. Au courant are stories around data disaggregation, highlighting that Asian Americans in NYC have the highest poverty rate (also noted is the way this runs counter to popular perceptions). But rather than splitting up the populace in increasingly finer-grained ways, why don't we just do something to address the poverty in our society?
To wit, yes we agree the DNC does want to do anything about poverty or economic inequalities in general. They are happy to stage photo ops while draped in kente cloth but they will never do anything to improve the material circumstances of the lower classes.
> The Democratic party has held the belief that demographics will keep them in power without having to actually address economic and legal inequalities
>> That's very much not true of either of the major factions of the Democratic Party.
You mean the neoliberal and conservative wings of the Democratic party? I assume "the squad" knows how to use political power as well as Manchin, but the fact that they don't indicates they, too, simply use identity as a means to the ends of the donor class.
Because the actual specific dynamics are different for different parts of society; when you try to address the problem without regard to those differences, which tend to be very closely tied to identity because they are one of the things that forges shared identities, you end up addressing the broad problem in the way which address the way that problem manifests in the most dominant group primarily.
> I assume "the squad" knows how to use political power as well as Manchin,
Better, probably.
> but the fact that they don't
Uh, they do.
What they don't do is have the position Manchin (or Sinema) does by virtue of the 50-50 balance in the Senate, and the reliable support of Republicans when they oppose the rest of the Democratic Party.
Every one of my very white looking kids has fielded questions about that dark hispanic guy hanging around, or knocking on the door to pick them up. They've also been privy to rascist discussion that they've later shared with me, since people don't see them as non-white.
Heck, I didn't see myself as non-white until I moved to a rural school in the early 90's.
1: https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/diverse-popul... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20121206131053/http://www.amnest... 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20050829051045/http://sacbee.com... 4: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/us/native-american-boardi... 5: https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadian-graves-of-indigenous-c... 6: https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_federal-judges-reconsider-indi...
I highly recommend Cecily Hilleary's relevant articles on VOA if you're unfamiliar of the grotesque and disturbing history of forced assimilation and cultural genocide through America's Indian Boarding schools. They are excellent primers on the topic, highlighting yet another example of the US's embarrassing treatment of America's indigenous population.
Examples of Cecily Hilleary's great investigative work on boarding schools and maltreatment of Native children:
- https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_oneida-nation-boarding-school-... - https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_native-americans-feds-own-amer... - https://www.voanews.com/a/indian-boarding-schools-outings-ap... - https://www.voanews.com/a/assessing-blame-for-deaths-of-indi... - https://www.voanews.com/a/scholars-work-to-untangle-the-comp...
Some recommended reading if you're interested in learning more about Indian boarding schools:
- https://www.amazon.com/Pipestone-Life-Indian-Boarding-School... - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0700629602/ref=wl_mb_wl_huc_mrai_2... - https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Five-Indian-Schoolboys-Omaha/d... - https://www.amazon.com/Stringing-Rosaries-Unforgivable-Conte... - https://www.amazon.com/Boarding-School-Blues-Educational-Exp... - https://www.amazon.com/They-Called-Me-Uncivilized-Everyday/d...