I find this an utterly bizarre issue. Why does the government even need to know this? How do you deal with people of mixed ethnicity? Do you tick all the relevant boxes? Can't you just fill in "human"?<p>As far as I know, the Dutch government doesn't register any "race" for its citizens. It used to, and in WW2, the nazis used that to easily figure out who was Jewish, so a lot of people feel it's better not to register anything like that at all. Some political parties are in favour of removing gender registration as well.
Like school grades, competitive sports, policemen, and war, race is an idea that only serves to divide us. I want to see humanity reach its true potential, and not be endlessly mucking about over rank and status (or ownership of resources).<p>I've struggled to stop identifying as white, and to not think "black" when I see a black person. But I was raised in the white supremacist society that is the united states, and the programming/brainwashing runs deep.<p>This article reminds me of the work we still need to do. And how close we are to presiding over another holocaust.
I'd like to address this specific portion of the article: "Ignatiev quotes John Finch, an Englishman who travelled the US in 1843, saying: “It is a curious fact that … the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are greater enemies to the Negro population … than any portion of the population in the free States.”"<p>On the surface it might seem that one downtrodden group would instinctively support another one out of solidarity, but in reality a lot of racism has its origins in economic competition. The Irish and African Americans were competing for the same menial and manual jobs in many places, which lead to distrust, anger, fighting, and racism. You could see some of this happening when mining companies would bring in African Americans as scabs during strikes which lead to violent brawls. The Irish weren't fighting a WASP for a job, they were fighting other immigrants or ethnic groups.<p>This same reality continues to this day in many places. Ask someone who works in a field where an undocumented immigrant might compete with them for a job how they feel about it and compare that to someone working at Facebook or Google who isn't worried about the cleaner taking their job as DBA.