Did anyone actually find them inflammatory, or was the justification that "someone" "might" find them inflammatory? If some individual raised a complaint that's one thing, but sounds like a massive overreaction.
If you as an employer were to take _any_ actions based on that information it would be illegal.
So after you get hired and provide that information for government statistics collection, why would your employer ever need to ask you for it afterwards?
Because your employer wants to collect statistics too.
I’m regularly asked that question in official contexts in the last few years. American companies make hiring decisions now based on racial identification. Big companies even require their vendors and service providers to factor race into staffing decisions.
It’s illegal under American law, but in the last decade or so corporate HR departments have gotten some funny ideas.
> in 1966 I discovered that something very good had happened: the race question had disappeared from the security clearance form. In fact, this question disappeared from nearly all government forms then. I liked to think I helped that change along.
> I have argued that all historical and present racial and ethnic classification systems for individuals are nonsensical and so are the laws, court decisions, computer applications, and bureaucratic superstructures that have been built on top of them.
Virtually every good joke could be considered, "inflammatory" by someone.
Not very long ago in developed countries "agitating for women's suffrage" or "kissing a person of the same sex" or "a white woman marrying a black man" would be inflammatory. In many places it still is.
But many people have said essentially the same thing, over the course of many years. I think there’s a moment for each of us when we realize that our worldview isn’t substantially similar to that of others anymore, especially younger people.
> The arbitrator said that he read this policy as not incorporating a “reasonable person” standard, meaning that workers “must be vigilant not to post anything on social media that could conceivably be interpreted as inflammatory even by highly sensitive and thin-skinned individuals without an appreciation for irony or satire.”