[brorfred]

The importance of collecting race data is because of a history of systematic discrimination based on race. It's not for example Black or Hispanic groups that decided that those categories are important, it was the people creating Jim Crow Laws, Redlining, Bank discrimination, unequal resource distribution to schools, racial discrimination of public pools, racially based differences in policing strategies etc. The reason to ask these question is to make it possible to identify such discrimination.

Sweden is a great example of why this is important. There it is much harder to identify such kind of discrimination due to poor data. See for example the treatment of Romas or Afro Swedes.