Former President Donald Trump is taking aim at Vice President Kamala Harris’s most recent campaign strategy — her race. While speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in late July, Trump said of Harris that “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting the Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Actually, she’s Asian — at least according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And you wouldn’t know from looking but based on the arbitrary lines drawn by the federal government, she and I are the same. Kamala Harris has one ethnically Indian parent, and I have ethnically Chinese parents, but we check the same box on government forms.

Apparently, my social media is also aware of my racial connection with Harris. I recently paused my scroll for a sign-up poster featuring “AANHPI Men for Kamala Harris,” which calls Harris an “AANHPI sister.” In case “BIPOC” and “LGBTQIA” haven’t slaked your thirst for hard-to-remember-acronyms, allow me to educate you: AANHPI stands for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander.

This sham of an acronym represents the nonsensical construction of race in America. We are no longer one nation, indivisible, but a mess of tiny racial tribes growing more polarized by the day. And each progressive salvo breaks another group of Americans into a special interest group and labels them with an inconvenient acronym. If you can hear me from inside the AANHPI box, I’d like to get out now.

Kamala Harris doesn’t seem so concerned. She’s swapping racial identities like friendship bracelets at a Taylor Swift concert. She didn’t just have the AANHPI Men event, but also “White Women: Answer the Call,” “White Dudes for Harris,” “Win With Black Men,” “Latino Men For Kamala,” and much more. (For some reason, I don’t think a “White Guys for Trump” event would go over so well.) Harris’s strategy is simple: divide the nation up into nonsensical identity groups and have everyone thinking about race all the time (for White people, it’s to make them “check their privilege,” for others, it’s to make them feel like they are being oppressed).

The Harris campaign makes it glaringly evident that racial classifications are arbitrary. U.S. history confirms this has always been true. The categories we know so well today, like White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, didn’t come into official use until after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after which the federal government was forced to figure out how to create racial categories out of thin air in order to adjudicate claims of discrimination. The Asian category back then only included people that were then called “Orientals,” composed of East Asians and Filipino Americans, and also included Pacific Islanders, bringing us to the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander.”

Indian Americans (not to be confused with American Indians, the classification of which opens another can of worms) were once officially considered White. But Indian American entrepreneurs learned that the federal government’s Small Business Administration (SBA) offered special grants to minority-owned businesses, and advocacy organizations like the Association of Indians in America (AIA) lobbied to have Indians relisted in the Asian category. By the time the 1980 Census rolled around, Indian Americans could tick off “Asian” as their race. Thus, Harris and I are considered the same race, not because of some skull-measuring “race science,” but because lobbying groups made the federal government say so. That’s the federal government for you: always beholden to special interests.

These examples show just how arbitrarily people classify race in America, and how government-manufactured identities like “AANHPI” are used in our day-to-day lives, in an especially egregious example of manufacturing consent. When Donald Trump asked about Kamala Harris’s racial identity, he posed a question that the federal bureaucracy has debated for decades. Such answers are always subject to change.

Donald Trump can criticize Kamala Harris for flip-flopping on her race to gain votes, but she’s only doing what lobbyists have done for generations — wielding an identity card to gain favor. The real suckers are those of us who are compelled by her strategy. Rather than putting stock in an arbitrary list of letters to define our “interests,” we ought to invest in the common interests that bind us together as a nation.