{"id":49638,"date":"2016-10-27T14:13:59","date_gmt":"2016-10-27T14:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=49638"},"modified":"2016-10-27T14:13:59","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T14:13:59","slug":"congress-should-tell-the-omb-to-stop-dividing-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=49638","title":{"rendered":"Congress Should Tell the OMB to Stop Dividing the Country"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.heritage.org\/research\/reports\/2016\/10\/congress-should-tell-the-omb-to-stop-dividing-the-country\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>Congress Should Tell the OMB to Stop Dividing the Country<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.heritage.org\" target=\"_blank\">The Heritage Foundation<\/a><br \/>\nIssue Brief #4614 on Office Of Management And Budget<br \/>\n2016-10-11<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.heritage.org\/about\/staff\/g\/mike-gonzalez\"><strong>Mike Gonzalez<\/strong><\/a>, Senior Fellow<br \/>\n<em>The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy<\/em><\/p>\n<p>On the first day of Congress\u2019s recess, the Obama Administration <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=49458\" target=\"_blank\">recommended the most sweeping changes to the nation\u2019s official racial and ethnic categories in decades<\/a>. The two most significant proposals were creating a new ethno\/racial group for people who originate from the Middle East and North Africa (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MENA\" target=\"_blank\">MENA<\/a>) 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\u2014the shortest window possible\u2014for what it described as a \u201climited revision\u201d 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gerrymandering\" target=\"_blank\">gerrymandering<\/a>. The American people deserve more than a month to debate such significant changes, and Congress must weigh in.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Racial Reclassifications<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Obama Administration\u2019s proposal would mean that, as early as the 2020 Census, those of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Middle_East\" target=\"_blank\">Middle East<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/North_Africa\" target=\"_blank\">North African<\/a> origin, who have been classified as white for over a century, would now be reclassified as a single and unified minority group. At the same time, people of Latin American or Iberian origins would no longer be able to declare whether they are also white, black, or another race, effectively making \u201cHispanic\u201d their only racial identifier. This would be the biggest change to the nation\u2019s official demography since OMB created Hispanics in 1977 and the Census divided the country into an ethno-racial pentagon that also included White, Black, Asian and American Indian in 1980. The Clinton Administration tried to create MENA and make Hispanics \u201ca racial designation rather than an ethnicity\u201d but failed, settling instead for the addition of \u201cNative Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander\u201d as a sixth group in 1997, the last major change&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.heritage.org\/research\/reports\/2016\/10\/congress-should-tell-the-omb-to-stop-dividing-the-country\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Congress Should Tell the OMB to Stop Dividing the Country The Heritage Foundation Issue Brief #4614 on Office Of Management And Budget 2016-10-11 Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy On the first day of Congress\u2019s recess, the Obama Administration recommended the most sweeping changes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,26,20],"tags":[25305,25306,248,249,25304],"class_list":["post-49638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-heritage-foundation","tag-mike-gonzalez","tag-office-of-management-and-budget","tag-omb","tag-the-heritage-foundation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49638"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49639,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49638\/revisions\/49639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}