The Case For Citizenship Over Race: A Path To National Unity

For decades, the United States has divided its citizens by race and ancestry. These classifications appear on school forms, police reports, job applications, and census surveys. They shape public policy, drive political narratives, and, increasingly, distort our understanding of the country itself. But it is time to stop. The better path forward is to treat citizenship, not race or heritage, as the defining civic distinction among people. Who belongs to this republic is a matter of law and allegiance, not of skin color or ancestral origin. If policymakers insist on maintaining racial or heritage data, then there must be a single national standard for doing so, uniform across federal, state, local, and private institutions. Anything less is dishonest and dangerous.

The case against race-based classification begins with a simple question: what, exactly, do these categories describe? The government itself admits they are not scientific. The Census Bureau warns that its racial and ethnic labels are “social and political constructs” that change over time. Indeed, they have. Italians, Jews, and Lebanese Americans were once listed as nonwhite; today they are counted as white. The label “Asian” now includes both a farmer in Vietnam and a tech entrepreneur from Bangalore, two individuals whose cultures, languages, and histories share little beyond geography. The term “Hispanic” is even more incoherent. It lumps together Argentinians of German descent, Afro-Dominicans, and indigenous Guatemalans under one box. A category so elastic that it describes millions who look nothing alike and live nothing alike can hardly serve as the basis for policy.

These artificial groupings are worse than meaningless; they are divisive. They teach Americans to see themselves as fragments of a tribe, not as citizens of a shared nation. The constant focus on skin tone and ancestry invites resentment. It implies that opportunity, justice, or identity depend on biological inheritance rather than character and conduct. When the state divides its people by color, it signals that color matters. That belief corrodes social trust and undermines the constitutional promise of equality before the law. The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection, not equal categorization.

Even Justice Neil Gorsuch has called current racial boxes “irrational stereotypes.” They are irrational because they pretend to measure something real while actually measuring something arbitrary. The human genome confirms that genetic differences within any so-called race are greater than the average differences between races. Racial classification, therefore, does not describe human biology. It describes political fashion.

Worse still, these boxes have been manipulated to justify lies. Nowhere is this clearer than in crime and victim data. Democrats often claim that the Department of Homeland Security and local police are unfairly targeting “brown people,” a term they use as a rhetorical umbrella for Hispanic immigrants. Yet when police arrest a Hispanic murderer, more than 90% of US jurisdictions classify that offender as white. This distortion allows politicians to point to law enforcement statistics and falsely claim that immigrants, legal or otherwise, commit almost no crime. The public sees charts showing a disproportionately high rate of white offenders and a disproportionately low rate of Hispanic offenders, not realizing they are the same individuals recategorized for political convenience. The result is an illusion of innocence that collapses under scrutiny but persists because the system rewards imprecision.

The same problem plagues education, employment, and health data. One agency records a person as Hispanic, another as white, a third as “other.” When the categories shift from form to form, so do the conclusions drawn from them. A program meant to close racial disparities cannot succeed if the underlying numbers are corrupted by inconsistent definitions. It is as if a doctor diagnosed patients using a different thermometer each time.

If the government insists on collecting racial or heritage data, then consistency is the minimum standard of integrity. There should be one set of categories used by every institution, public and private, nationwide. The categories should be rational, comprehensive, and mutually exclusive. An example of such a system would include: White (German, Irish, English, Italian, Russian, Israeli, etc.); Black or African American (African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali, etc.); American Indian or Alaska Native (Navajo, Cherokee, Mayan, Inupiat, etc.); Asian (Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Nepalese, etc.); Asian Indian (India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives); Middle Eastern or North African (Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Turkey); Pacific Islander (Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Chamorro, Fijian, Marshallese, etc.); and Hispanic or Latino (Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin). At the same time, every dataset must record citizenship status: US Citizen, Lawful Permanent Resident, Temporary Visa Holder, Refugee or Asylee, Temporary Protected Status or DACA, or Illegal Alien.

With one unified structure, we would eliminate the statistical chaos that currently pollutes our policy debates. We would know, for example, how many crimes are committed by citizens versus non-citizens, how many victims fall into each legal category, and whether disparities truly exist. A lawful system depends on accurate data, and accurate data depend on shared definitions. Truth should not differ from one county to another.

But even a standardized racial scheme is an imperfect solution to a deeper problem: the moral error of dividing citizens by race at all. To record a person’s color is to treat it as relevant. Yet under the Constitution, it is not. The government has no business ranking its people by appearance or ancestry. The founders spoke of equality before God and law, not equality between racial categories. In the American creed, citizenship is the highest civic identity. It is the bond that makes a nation out of many backgrounds. E pluribus unum means precisely that: out of many, one.

The emphasis on citizenship also restores focus to legitimate distinctions. Citizenship is a legal status that can be earned through allegiance and naturalization. It carries duties and rights: the duty to obey the law and defend the nation, the right to vote and hold office. Race carries none of these. Citizenship defines the relationship between a person and the state; race does not. By elevating citizenship, we strengthen the unity that allows a pluralistic nation to function.

Critics will say that ignoring race blinds us to discrimination. But the opposite is true. When race becomes the measure of every outcome, it obscures the causes of inequality rather than revealing them. Economic mobility, education, and crime vary more by culture, geography, and family structure than by pigmentation. A citizenship-based framework would allow policymakers to address problems of law, economics, and assimilation directly, instead of chasing phantom injustices hidden in statistical fog.

France understood this long ago. After World War II, it outlawed the collection of racial and religious data in order to prevent division and discrimination. Every person in France is simply a citizen. The law forbids government from asking who is Arab, who is Jewish, or who is black. The result has not been the elimination of prejudice, but it has eliminated the machinery that turns prejudice into policy. The American system, by contrast, institutionalizes racial thinking. We may condemn racism rhetorically, yet our official forms and databases perpetuate it bureaucratically.

The United States should aspire to a colorblind government. That does not mean pretending that culture and heritage do not exist. It means refusing to let them govern how we see or treat one another. Citizenship, not race, should define who belongs, who votes, who serves, and who benefits. Every citizen is equal under the law because each owes the same allegiance and enjoys the same protection. That is the only line that matters in a republic.

In the long run, the choice is between cohesion and fragmentation. A nation that obsesses over race will fracture into grievance groups. A nation that values citizenship will hold together through shared loyalty and common purpose. The former breeds resentment; the latter builds strength. If America is to remain one people, it must abandon the politics of pigmentation and return to the principle of citizenship.

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