{"id":57516,"date":"2019-02-07T02:06:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T02:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57516"},"modified":"2019-02-07T02:06:59","modified_gmt":"2019-02-07T02:06:59","slug":"inside-the-us-government-agency-where-identity-politics-was-born","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57516","title":{"rendered":"Inside the US Government Agency where Identity Politics Was Born"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside the US Government Agency where Identity Politics Was Born<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Quillette<\/a>
\n2018-10-23<\/p>\n

Michael Gonzalez<\/strong><\/a>, Senior Fellow
\nThe Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy<\/em>
\nThe Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The phrase \u201cgrievance studies<\/a>\u201d recently has entered public discourse thanks to a scandal<\/a> by three liberal academics who set out to expose the vacuous nature of critical theory, post-colonial studies<\/a>, queer theory<\/a> and other sub-disciplines within the social sciences. Mathematician James Lindsay<\/a>, writer Helen Pluckrose<\/a>, and Portland State philosophy professor Peter Boghossian<\/a> spent a year writing fake papers, which they then pitched to journals specializing in these fields. Seven passed peer review and were accepted for publication. As various commentators (including several here at Quillette<\/em><\/a>) have noted, the hoax has shown what many have long suspected\u2014that ivory-tower<\/a> academics who study in fashionable fields inhabit ideological domains far removed from those of ordinary people.<\/p>\n

But while observers have correctly focused on the lessons that may be inferred about high academic culture in the United States<\/a>, it should be noted that the drifts of the liberal arts into postmodern gibberish has not been an isolated phenomenon. The trend also has its cheerleaders in government, even in Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> very own Washington D.C.<\/a> backyard.<\/p>\n

Few Americans have heard of the Census Bureau\u2019s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations<\/a> (NAC). But when it comes to policymaking, the NAC effectively acts as a support network for grievance studies. Along with bureaucrats in other agencies, and various non-governmental \u201cstakeholder\u201d groups on the left, the NAC has for decades controlled the policy by which demographic data\u2014the seedbed of identity politics\u2014is collected and interpreted.<\/p>\n

One ongoing dispute helps explain what the NAC does and why that work is important. In Jan., the Census Bureau (whose director is a presidential appointee) rejected<\/a> two important changes to the 2020 census that had been proposed by the NAC. The first would have created yet another identity group, this one for Americans whose ancestors originate in the land between Morocco<\/a> and the Iran-Afghan border<\/a>, which were to be designated as MENA<\/a> (for Middle East<\/a>, North Africa<\/a>). The second would have elevated another pan-ethnic group, Hispanics, to the status of a category on par with biological races. The NAC has bitterly opposed the Trump Administration\u2019s decision not to go along with these initiatives, but that dispute was largely ignored by the media in the shadow of the much more high-profile issue<\/a> of whether the census should ask residents whether they are U.S. citizens…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few Americans have heard of the Census Bureau\u2019s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations (NAC). But when it comes to policymaking, the NAC effectively acts as a support network for grievance studies. Along with bureaucrats in other agencies, and various non-governmental \u201cstakeholder\u201d groups on the left, the NAC has for decades controlled the policy by which demographic data\u2014the seedbed of identity politics\u2014is collected and interpreted.<\/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":[29416,18075,27470,2546,5367],"class_list":["post-57516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-michael-gonzalez","tag-nac","tag-quillette","tag-u-s-census-bureau","tag-united-states-census-bureau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57516","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=57516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57517,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57516\/revisions\/57517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}