Idle Doodle: Persians are white???

The senior VP of our satellite office is Persian. His family lives in Iran and he came to the United States to study when he was young. Today I learned that the US government, via the Census, classifies him as white. Arabs, Iranians, Lebanese, and Egyptians are all listed under "white".

What???

That makes absolutely zero sense.

So when Iranians have national pride, they can be labeled as "white supremacists"? Do Egyptians have "white privilege"? In affirmative action colleges, are Arabs deprioritized because they're "white"? When someone talks about white people, do they really think of Lebanese as part of that category?

It becomes even more confounding when the same Census form labels Pakistani as Asian. So an Iranian is white but a blood cousin from Pakistan is Asian? So we would have policies that group immigrant Germans and Iranians together while excluding Pakistanis?

Can we just recognize that this generic labeling of racial groups is a ridiculous notion, no one gets it right, and no person really understands it all? Can we recognize that people are cultural diversity is more complex than "Asian", "White", "Black", "Latino", and "American Indian"? This is as ridiculous as trying to classify every bird on the planet into four categories of "white birds", "black birds", "red birds" and "blue birds". The sooner we admit this, the sooner we can get to dissolving arbitrary preferential treatment along racial divides and treating each other as individuals instead of a race.

Can we trust statistics that include race at all? If a statistic says that white people compose x amount of a group, does that include those groups above? I suspect exceedingly few people would derive anything close to an accurate picture of what those statistics actually spell out. Here's a made-up statistic: 99.9% of immigrants from Iran are white people.

According to the US Census, that's pretty close to accurate. It's also pretty close to completely inaccurate to just about every person.

Hey, maybe if we tell that statistic to conservatives, we can open up some more immigration from Iran and de-escalate military tensions! Ah, touché, Census.