The federal Office of Management and Budget has requested comments on several proposals to change the official federal racial and ethnic classifications. One proposal is to merge the ethnic question (are you Hispanic/Latino or not?) with the racial one (are you black/African American, white, Asian American, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander?), so individiuals would now be asked whether they are Hispanic, black, whites, etc. in one question. The underlying problem is that many Americans check the Hispanic box, but then find that as "mestizos" (people of mixed European/Indigenous heritage) there is no appropriate race box for them to check.
So here's what I wrote:
In this comment, I argue that the race and ethnicity classifications should not be combined into a single question. There is only one "ethnic" classification recognized by OMB, and that is "Hispanic/Latino." Hispanic/Latino is much too diverse to be considered a true ethnicity to begin with, and, as a classification that includes people of any combination of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian origin, with classification members whose appearances reflect the broad range of human appearances, it's absurd to treat it as akin to a race by placing it in the same category as "white," "black," etc.
