On the one hand, race and ethnicity identifiers are largely nonsensical from an objective standpoint. "Race" is literally a human concept, not something that biologists can actually point at, consisting of a huge variety of traits from a zillion points of human origin and notation and cross-breeding over many thousands of years that usually boil down to people pointing at someone and deciding by consensus that he is "black" or "white" or some other color based on gross physiognomy.
Things get even screwier with vague ethnicity / linguistic groups like "Hispanic" or "Latino," which imply some continuity and commonality of population from Tierra del Fuego to San Diego.
The problem is, humans do draw those identity distinctions, internal from themselves ("I am X") or, just as often, imposed from outside ("You are X"). This often leads to mistreatment and marginalization ("We don't want Xs moving next door. We don't want them electing politicians who promise expensive welfare programs to coddle the Xs. Xs don't vote for our party, so we need to suppress the X vote."). And the result is that tracking race and ethnicity helps both demonstrate that mistreatment and assists in programs and legal action to help mitigate it.
So then things get even weirder when you start seeing people who consider themselves to have a heritage from more than one of these groups, or who don't think the categories described accurately identify them, and, in growing numbers, begin checking off the box for "Other".
I mean, on the one and, it's kind of neat to think of an actual post-racial society — but I suspect that in certain quarters race will remain an oppressive measure, only it will be harder to detect from outside because of that categorization issue. (It's also likely that we'll discover that, once "race" stops being considered as important, we'll discover that a lot of it was a proxy for "class," which will be a whole new set of challenges.)
Anyway, it's worth noting that not only do demographics change over time, but what things we even include in demographics change as well.
More Americans Are Selecting “Some Other Race” on U.S. Census Forms – The Atlantic
An increasing number of respondents are checking “Some Other Race” on U.S. Census forms, forcing officials to rethink current racial categories.
