The Balkanization Administration | Center for Equal Opportunity

If there’s one thing that this country needs more of, it’s racial division. That, at least, seems to be the view of the Obama administration.

As Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation writes in this Issue Brief posted recently:

On the first day of Congress’s recess, the Obama Administration recommended the most sweeping changes to the nation’s official racial and ethnic categories in decades. The two most significant proposals were creating a new ethno/racial group for people who originate from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and taking from those who identify as Hispanic the option to identify their race. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Notice asked for comments to be submitted within a month — the shortest window possible — for what it described as a “limited revision” of data collection practices. Far from limited, the proposals would have long-term consequences for how one-fifth of all Americans are defined demographically and would create more societal conflict over racial preferences and political gerrymandering. The American people deserve more than a month to debate such significant changes, and Congress must weigh in.

Mr. Gonzalez concludes:

The OMB states that America’s increasing ethnic diversity requires more and more group classifications. An equally practical, and much preferred, policy response would work to smooth out these differences by promoting assimilation, which was the policy approach taken for the first two centuries of the Republic. That approach succeeded in achieving what was thought by many to be impossible: It created a cohesive American population out of many and vastly different peoples.

I should add that the administration has also recently announced that it is pushing ahead with its proposal to encourage the creation of a Native Hawaiian “Indian tribe,” despite Congress’s longstanding refusal to endorse this additional balkanization of our country.

All this in addition to its usual support of racial and ethnic preferences of all kinds, its aggressive use of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement, and its encouragement of racial grievance hustlers in our inner cities.

I remain optimistic about America continuing its remarkable progress toward the realization of its E Pluribus Unum ideal, but increasingly that optimism is possible only if one takes the long view and ignores what’s going on during this administration.

But wait: There’s more – The Obama administration released last week its report on “Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement.” As you would expect, there is a lot in it on how important and desirable it is to have a politically correct racial and ethnic mix in police departments and how you should try your best to attain that mix, and lots and lots about how you must never ever do anything that is “disparate treatment” for, or has a “disparate impact” on, a group that is “underrepresented.”

But there is not one word in the report that reminds those in charge of the recruitment, hiring, and retention of law-enforcement officials that it is not just “underrepresented” groups that are protected from racial and ethnic discrimination, but all groups — even, say, Irish Americans who happen to be white. Indeed, footnote 119 leaves the door open to such politically correct discrimination.

So the end result is that the federal government is encouraging recruitment, hiring, and retention with an eye on skin color and national origin. This is a rather odd thing, one might think, for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the two agencies releasing the report, which have the duty of protecting all Americans from job discrimination — to do. Odd, but somehow not surprising.

P.S. Also last week, the White House likewise released this presidential memorandum for “Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce.”

One last item – A couple of months ago, the chief of staff of the Equal Protection Agency sent an email to all the agency’s employees that begins and ends as follows:

Dear Colleagues:

A professional, productive, and inclusive workplace is essential to our mission of protecting human health and the environment. Today EPA is taking a crucial step forward and playing a leadership role for the federal government in equal employment opportunity and diversity and inclusion by piloting the collection of voluntary, self-disclosed sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) workforce data. When collected, safely stored, and analyzed along with other demographic information, SOGI data serve as an important resource for developing workforce engagement strategies and improving organizational performance.

It concludes:

Thank you in advance for supporting this ground-breaking pilot.

Matt Fritz
Chief of Staff

I guess the Obama administration figures that the more boxes that we have to put ourselves into for the federal government, the better off we’ll all be.

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