Like White, Black, Pacific Islander, etc….
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In the modern era, it’s important for governments to be able to track progress on a huge number of metrics. Even if race is a social construct, racism (and also ageism, sexism, ableism, and a million other -isms) is still a thing which regularly happens in all sorts of areas, and the best way that a government can check if it is failing its people in a way they might never have thought of is to keep statistics and then send them for analysis.
By doing that, they may then be able to, for example, see that a certain suburb is becoming majority X and it can be attributed to a rise in group X being employed in industry Y sort of work. Or they might see that numbers of group Z using government service A are falling and normally that might be bad but in this case that’s actually a good thing because group Z is becoming wealthier on average and moving away from the poverty line, and so fewer of them need it. Or whatever.
That then allows them to specifically target certain services, or advertising, or whatever, at certain demographics to try to make sure that everyone gets as good access to what they need as possible.
Because people are interested in knowing if there are huge differences in life outcomes depending on race. Do only black people get the flu? Do Pacific Islanders make more money than other groups? Can only white people get a certain job?
This is especially common in the US because of slavery and civil rights. Both maintaining slavery and civil rights meant keeping track of where black and white people were and how they were doing. So discrimination and anti-discrimination are the reasons why the state is interested in the social concept of race.
It’s probably also the case that this information isn’t always strictly necessary: people who make forms are notorious for over collecting information. Why do you fill in your gender, age or name? Are they always necessary?
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