The left’s myopic and toxic obsession with the poisonous identity politics is culminating in its inevitable conclusion: The imposition of ethnic identity tests on Americans.

This impulse was on display when Bloomberg columnist Mark Halperin recently requested that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) demonstrate his Cuban bona fides in an interview so insulting that even Think Progress determined it was vaguely racist. Halperin decided to force Cruz to demonstrate to his satisfaction that the senator’s heritage was deeper that blood by displaying on command knowledge of Cuban food, music, and the Spanish language.

There is hope for the country yet in that Halperin’s spectacle was so condemnable that it resulted in near universal condemnation; at least, it did outside of tightly knit journalistic circles. If only Bloomberg had a public editor, as does The New York Times, the reproach the columnist received would have been more formal.

But The Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has her hands full these days with matters pertaining to her own paper’s stable of reporters. The latest infraction, similar to Halperin’s in a way, is the complaint submitted by a Ph. D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, who alleged that a reporter working with The Times forced him to undergo an insulting “Jewish litmus test.”

As part of a series of interviews conducted for a New York Times front page piece on how “campus debates on Israel drive a wedge between Jews and minorities,” one reporter apparently sought to hammer that wedge in a little further herself. For that piece, Jewish student and a supporter of Israeli divestment movements, David McCleary, was subjected to a variety of insults from Bay Area-based reporter Ronnie Cohen.

Sullivan noted that Cohen went too far in her interview with McCleary when she “asked him ‘insulting and demeaning questions,’ including whether he ‘looked Jewish,’ after telling him that his name didn’t sound Jewish and asking if he had been bar mitzvahed.” In the end, neither McCleary’s comments nor any other Jewish supporter of divestment was quoted in that story.

Sullivan cited a number of Times readers who complained that the narrative presented in that story — that minorities supported divestment and American Jews opposed it — was contrived and deeply injurious to racial comity in the United States. Sullivan chalked the decision not to include any quotes from Jewish supporters of divestment in this piece up to an overabundance of material, a gracious gesture on her part. “As for the interview questions that Mr. McCleary complained about,” she concluded, “they were indeed unprofessional and unacceptable.”

Sullivan lets her paper and the culture it represents off the hook far too easily. The Times readers who reached out to her after being offended by this article correctly identified the problem here. Times reporters, stringers, and editors all encountered information that contradicted their preferred thesis: That support for or opposition to Israel falls neatly along racial lines. When they discovered that this was not the case, some unidentified figures within The Times rubric simply excluded it from their final report. That’s more than a little scandalous.

The juvenile need to reduce infinitely complex human behaviors to a result of a person’s innate and hereditary traits is as repulsive as it is dangerous. Sullivan wouldn’t dare address that reality lest she accuse her paper’s employees of a grave offense to human decency. But in the same way her reporters learned today, Sullivan will find that attempting to bury inconvenient facts does not make them go away.