This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 28th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The feds would like to create a new racial

category for government surveys, this one for Middle Easterners and North Africans.

Cato's Alex Narasta has looked at the arguments for such an expansion of racial classification

and found them wanting.

His new paper on the topic is available today. We spoke earlier this week.

Where did the US get racial classification? Why, why was that, why did that become a thing?

So it's been created over a very long period of time,

by government rules going back in the census a very long time.

There are different categories of race, white, black, American Indian,

then different categories of Asians over time that have evolved in the later half of the 20th century.

The government did add some additional categories like Hispanic, which is based on language.

So it's not, but it appears as an ethnic category.

So it includes people from Spain

as well as any Spanish speaker in the new world.

And in addition, they added a category of Asian,

which includes people from Pakistan and the West

to Japan in the East and everything in between.

Vastly different groups of people who have basically nothing in common

except they are on a big landmass called Asia,

but not all Asians of course, just from Pakistan East. The reason why

Pakistanis and Indians are included in that Asian category due to lobbying in

...