“I have given orders to my Death Units to exterminate without mercy or pity men, women and children belonging to the Polish race. It is only in this manner that we can acquire the vital territory that we need. After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?”

—Adolf Hitler August 22, 1939

The racist government policies of Germany and Japan during WWII led to excruciating brutality by both nations during the war. That brutality and the Armenian massacres mentioned in the quote are some examples of the disaster of mixing race and government. In our century, far more lives have been lost in the world from failing to separate race and state than from failing to separate church and state.

I am left with a little question regarding these past racial policies.

That question is: “where have all these races gone?”

Our government vigorously keeps track of races in America. If you want to know the racial breakdown of the police department in Atlanta or the students at ISU, just ask the government. But the races the government lets us choose from on official forms doesn’t include Armenians, Polish, Aryans or Japanese.

Where have they gone?

Today we have “White” and “Asian” on government racial check-off boxes, but not these others. Aren’t they races anymore?

Why doesn’t the United States government have a box for them on the “salmon sheet” forms we all fill out?

This ethnic neglect surely would have upset Hitler. After all, Hitler was not a WHITE supremacist, he was an ARYAN supremacist.

Likewise Japanese leaders used claims of Japanese superiority rather than Asian superiority in their war propaganda.

So today, why don’t we know the exact number of Japanese and Aryans who have applied to be bus drivers in Seattle?

For that matter, why don’t we list “colored” as a distinct race as was done in South Africa.

I am told South Africans think it strange that we consider an entertainer such as Whitney Houston to be black when she has mixed racial ancestry.

Should we start adding more races? After all, the way official races are determined has all the scientific basis of astrology.

A government can make up as many new races as it wants. There are even governments like Brazil that have dozens of official racial categories.

I think our government should go the other way. There has been a call for the addition of a “people of color” option on the racial check-off boxes.

These are the familiar boxes that the government uses to keep track of our race on job and university applications. People of mixed ancestry could check a “people of color” box so they would not have to choose one parent over the other.

But an even better outcome could come by having this box added.

A huge number of people could fit under the classification “people of color.”

The fewer racial classifications needed to separate us the better.

Maybe in the future someone in our government will have the courage to do away with those silly little racial check-off boxes altogether. Then there will be only one race in the government’s eyes: the human race.

Would that have made Hitler mad, or what?

Race should be handled the same way that Ronald Reagan handled communism.

Dinesh D’Souza discusses this eloquently in his new Reagan biography.

In 1981, when other leaders seemed resigned to Soviet communism as something we were bound to live with far into the future, Reagan predicted its downfall in this way:

Reagan said to an audience at the University of Notre Dame that, “the West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

Reagan was right and the Soviet empire imploded within the decade.

Government racial policies need to finally be brought to a close.

To do this, the government needs to not simply transcend racism, but to transcend race as well.

That is, end resentment-building and stigma-building government preferences based on race.

And get rid of those silly little boxes.

Government-defined racial grouping, like astrology, is an unscientific concept best left out of public policy.

It is time to separate race and state.

It is time we finally learned from history.

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Ben Studenski is a senior in industrial engineering from Hastings, Minnesota.