Race and Ethnicity

These days I attend a summer school in the US. The organizers have conducted a demographic poll among the participants, a poll that I found quite unusual. In fact, the poll concerns the race and ethnicity of each attendant. The organizers claim that this is information useful for the National Science Foundation (NSF). I have thought a bit about it, and I am still shocked by the kind of questions in the poll. Independently of sociological definitions, why on earth is it important to classify people by their race and ethnicity? It must be that I understood very little about the US and its culture. (Or that I am too used to the European way of thinking.) This is even more extreme in the case of the summer school I am attending, which has attracted participants from both Europe and the US almost in equal proportions; in some sense, this sort of questions would have been more understandable if the audience were mostly composed of US citizens.

Let's take a look to the questions and their possible answers. The first two concern the country of citizenship and residence of each participant. These are questions that I find completely normal. Then you should indicate your race; options included: white european, pacific islander, asian, african, native american, mixed race, and other. I chose mixed race, with the absolute understanding that we all belong to some mixed race, whatever race means. Afterwards, you should indicate your ethnicity; options included western european/north american, north asian, central/south american, eastern european, among several others. This seemed to be a geographical concept, and so I naturally chose central/south american. The last question asked whether I am the first member in my family to attend college. The answer was no. 

I have no problems to answer this kind of questions nor I find them racist in any way. I just find them quite odd to use this kind of information in some sort of government-related statistics (the background of participants in NSF-sponsored events?). My first thought was that this poll looks like something used like 30 or 40 years ago, not something I expected to see in 2011. I thought that in the in the US everyone was an american, independent of their origins or ancestors. So I wonder: what is the point of reminding everyone that, at the end, there is indeed something that makes us all different? What is the point of collecting information based on those differences? Will someone find that information useful in the future?