Nasdaq recently announced that it was going to require companies listed on its stock exchange to have a set number of racial minorities, women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals on their boards of directors.

Parroting the official government lingua on race, Nasdaq’s quotas for minorities were in reference to African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans. Other minority groups with far fewer people in the U.S. population and on boards of directors were excluded, just as they are excluded in all diversity initiatives.

As a general diversity rule, the smaller the minority group, the less it is counted in diversity initiatives.

Nasdaq is the same outfit that was founded and headed by Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme defrauded investors out of $50 billion. His buddies at Nasdaq didn’t have enough judgment to recognize that he was a scoundrel but now see themselves as experts in social engineering.

Like so many American institutions nowadays—especially big media, big corporations, big academia, and the big diversity industrial complex—Nasdaq doesn’t even have an objective, science-based definition of “minority.” It simply and thoughtlessly parrots the word willy-nilly and thus doesn’t know what it is measuring. It’s akin to the stock exchange not having a definition of “earnings per share” or “price/earnings ratio.”What is a minority? Is a minority a member of a racial or ethnocultural group that comprises less than 50% of the U.S. population, or that is economically disadvantaged compared to other groups, or that doesn’t have political power, or that has faced discrimination, or that has descended from slaves, or that has descended from natives who were conquered, persecuted and placed on reservations?

African Americans and Native Americans meet most of the above criteria (as groups, but not necessarily as individuals). But things get squishy after that.

Consider all of the diverse groups that are seen as part of the so-called white majority but individually comprise a tiny segment of the U.S. population. There are about 100 such groups, including Walloons, Bosnians, Tatars, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Karakalpaks, Persians, Egyptians, Kashubians, Greeks, Cypriots, Italians, Albanians, Abkhazians, Yakuts, Slavs, Occitans, Lezgins, Kumyks, Turks, Galicians and Moravians.

Although all of those named above are officially classified as white, none are Anglo-Saxon. The same for many other minority groups classified as white. Scores of them have faced discrimination or worse at the hands of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, including being victims in the early 20th century of the Progressive eugenics movement and of anti-immigration laws and nativist hostility. For example, Italians were considered an inferior race in the North and equated to blacks in the South, especially those from southern Italy and Sicily. Eleven of them were lynched in New Orleans.

The economic status of Walloons and the other above-named minorities is largely unknown today. The same for their political power and their representation on boards of directors.

That’s because they aren’t deemed important enough to be separately tracked by those who track such things. By government policy, they are aggregated with all other whites, as if they are homogenous in values, beliefs, ideology, history, religion, experiences, socioeconomic class, and skin shade. Then, due to their assigned race, they are stereotyped by the woke mob as having the same advantages, privileges and political power as blue-blooded, porcelain-white Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose lineage goes back to the nation’s founding, or whose forebears might have passed down wealth from dealing in cotton, tobacco, and sugar during slavery.

The aggregation of these diverse minority groups results in them being treated as if they are in the majority. By contrast, the aggregation of favored racial/ethnic groups into the contrived categories of Asian and Hispanic results in them being treated as minorities. As a consequence, to take two examples, Walloon Americans are not seen as minorities, but Mexican Americans are seen as such, although they vastly outnumber Walloons.

What explains this insulting and insensitive double standard and the associated bad math?

First, Asians and Hispanics had enough political and media clout to be added to the equal rights movement and legislation that had been originally intended for African Americans. This clout has carried over to the diversity movement.

Second, the diversity movement is based on the false premise that only non-whites are deserving of diversity initiatives, because they lack the privileges, power and wealth that have accrued to all whites, including white Walloons.

Never mind that East Indians, Han Chinese, and other racial/ethnic groups classified as “Asian” exceed whites, on average, in income and education. Never mind that many Hispanics are white and wealthy descendants of Spanish aristocrats. And never mind that plenty of whites are impoverished descendants of indentured servants and tenant farmers.

Another false premise is that an Asian or Hispanic on a board of directors, or in the executive suite, or in a college classroom, is representative of all Asians and Hispanics and thus can speak for everyone else. Under this convoluted thinking, a Japanese is the same as a Korean, is the same as a Cambodian, is the same as an East Indian, is the same as a Filipino, and so on. Likewise, a Mexican is the same as a Columbian, is the same as a Guatemalan, is the same as a Nicaraguan, is the same as a Cuban, and so on. And a Boston Brahmin is the same as a Walloon, is the same as a Kashubian, is the same as an Armenian, is the same as an Abkhazian, and so on.

Universities have not only bought into this gross corruption of sociology, anthropology, history, and math but have led the descent into the scientific malpractice.

Too bad for male Walloons. Because they are classified as white they won’t be counted as a racial minority in Nasdaq’s quotas. But at least they have other ways to be counted: They can change their gender or claim that they are gay, bisexual or transsexual.