There are five races in America, according to the US Census Bureau: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.

In May, however, there are only four. May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, when the last two races condense themselves so we can celebrate them more easily.

In effect, there are six races in America. Since the rise of affirmative action in the 1970s, the Census has split “Hispanic” from “Non-Hispanic White”.

The US government has yet to explain why speaking Spanish can change your race, but it is generous with incentives to do it. Minority status confers an edge in federal hiring and contracts, college admissions and job searches.

In a 2021 survey, 34 per cent of white college applicants admitted to falsely claiming minority status on their applications. Eighty-one per cent said they did it to increase their chances of getting in, and half of them did it to fraudulently obtain financial aid.

Elizabeth Warren GettyImages-1404440252

US Senator Elizabeth Warren

The most popular adopted racial identity was Native American (48 per cent). After all, it helped Elizabeth Warren to claim Native American ancestry on her application for a highly competitive professorship at Harvard Law (though a DNA test did show she had a small but detectable amount of Native American DNA),

Jews are currently white: “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” Still, many Jews don’t look it; nor do most Egyptians.

But the Census is a numbers game, the prize being preferment from a government constitutionally committed to treating us as equals regardless of race, except when it is committed to treating us differently according to race, whatever that means.

The 2015 Census sifted Americans into “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” and non-Hispanic. If you were the former, you could specify Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Argentinian, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadorean, or “Spaniard”.

Bizarrely, Brazilians, the most numerous Latin American population, were not mentioned, possibly because they speak Portuguese. Nor are Lusitanians Hispanics, possibly because the Census is devised by monoglot halfwits.

The 2015 Census then gave the racial options: White, “Black, African Am., or Negro”, “American Indian or Alaska Native” (with a requirement to name your tribe), Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Other Asian (Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian), Native Hawaiian, Guamanian, Samoan, Other Pacific.

The Census doesn’t have a category for Jews. It tells you to “self-identify”. I always self-identify as Pacific Islander, in solidarity with other tiny nations who struggle with their weight. Now, however, I am about to obtain some racial justice. The Biden administration, zealous to cultivate an Arab-American bloc vote, has committed to invent a new category of clients for federal largesse.

Soon there will be a seventh race in America: Middle East North African (MENA).
When MENA goes into law, I will wake up one morning and find that I am transrace. So will all the other non-Arab persons having “origins in any of the original peoples” of MENA-Land: Berbers, Kurds, Persians, Armenians, and Copts, for instance.

The administration’s pledged to commission an independent study into how to subdivide MENA “for purposes of ensuring equitable access to federal procurement opportunities”. Whatever “equitable” means, it’s always bad for the overachieving “model minorities” like the Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Chinese.

We may be obliged to take one for our new MENA team. Then again, America’s Jews have insisted they are an original people from the MENA region with increasing fervour since 1948, so we can hardly complain now.

And precedent suggests that if the government creates the incentives, people self-identify accordingly. Affirmative action inverts the “one-drop” laws that held that a single African ancestor made a person “Black” in law. Prove you have a one-drop MENA ancestor, and your college and job prospects will improve. The number of American Jews may be about to rise sharply.

What will we be called in our imminent racial future? Perhaps the Democrats will add a sub-category for “Semites”, like Europe in the old days.

Perhaps the party’s left will prevail, and herd us into a single box for “Jewish/Israeli/Palestinian”, which would be fair in that it will offend all parties equally. But if originality is the key to federal support, then I henceforth self-identify as “Canaanite American”, with a requirement to name my tribe (Judah or Benjamin). Now show me the federal money.

Dominic Green is a British historian based in Boston.