Barack Obama hasn’t earned the moniker “Divider in Chief” for nothing. Over the course of his time in office America has witnessed a surprising rise in racial tensions that many Americans had assumed were dwindling as newer generations of Americans are growing up in a post-segregated society. Even though institutional racism is a thing of the past, Obama, ever the master of identity and grievance politics, helped to erect the notion that Americans, specifically white Americans, are just a racist as ever. In fact, he just declared, “We have by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism.”

So when news comes out of the creation and introduction of a new ethnic minority group identity by the Obama administration, one can’t help but question the true motivation behind the action. This new and rather dubious “ethnic” classification for Americans is known as MENA, which is an acronym derived from Middle Eastern and North Africa. Similar to the 1970s created official ethnic identifier “Hispanic,” this new classification lacks any truly anthropologically unifying characteristic. In truth, the only unifying identifier which would actually qualify is geographical. Given the great ethnic diversity within this MENA classification, one might just as well classify Californians as a minority racial group based upon similar regional grounds.

What is the real point behind the push to create a new official ethnic classification? Politics. For identity politics to work, various groups of people must be taught to primarily identify with a common minority group, with a shared set of values and grievances, and to distrust other racial groups. That way, if someone represents your group, you’re committed to them, not because of the ideas they may be presenting but because they’re a member of your group.

In the Supreme Court decision Holder v. Hall (1994), Justice Clarence Thomas summed up the problem of promoting racial identity politics when he stated, “Our drive to segregate political districts by race can only serve to deepen racial divisions by destroying any need for voters or candidates to build bridges between racial groups or to form voting coalitions.” Sadly, many Americans have never taken Thomas’s warning seriously. And Obama is only furthering the division on his way out of office.