Early Thursday, an odd story went up on the BBC’s website: “Bobby Jindal presidential bid sparks Twitter mockery.”

The mockery in question wasn’t because Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, is a mere footnote in the polls. Nor was the mockery about Jindal’s seriousness as a political figure.

Rather, the mockery consisted of explicit racism. And the story was odd not because of the existence of the tweets (welcome to the Internet, governor!) but because it was a positive story, with the Beeb openly praising the bigotry.

(The article extolled one line of ethnic sneering as “a series of hilarious tweets.” Sample: “Bobby Jindal spends 2 hours a day in the shower scrubbing his skin with a brush & screaming ‘why won’t it come out?’ #bobbyjindalissowhite.”)

The reason Jindal has come in for such treatment is because he’s an eloquent advocate for integration and the promise of America. They’re not making fun of his background — they’re treating him like the Indian Clarence Thomas.

The Washington Post caused a bit of a stir earlier this week with a story on Jindal that featured a (white) American college professor declaring, “There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal.”

What are all these liberals so bothered by? It’s passages like this, from Jindal’s recent comments: “We’re not hyphenated Americans anymore.”

Jindal’s argument is clear: Your ethnic or religious heritage doesn’t make you any less fully American. You don’t need a qualifier just because your parents or grandparents were born elsewhere. This is America, after all.

For the left, being “American” insufficiently describes you for the cultural commissars of modern identity politics.

So who’s right? Is a racially colorblind and ethnically integrated society America’s future? Or are we headed for a balkanized culture defined by our differences?

The answer, strangely enough, could come from the way the next US Census questionnaire is worded.

The Census is taken every 10 years, and the next one is scheduled for 2020. The federal government is considering taking two possible changes, and is sending out test surveys this fall.

One possibility is for the question about the Census respondent’s race to be worded as asking for the subject’s “race or origin,” with racial options as well as ethnic and national-origin choices.

Another possibility is to get rid of “race” altogether as a category. It would expand the identity portion of the Census by asking something along the lines of: “Which categories describe Person 1?” And it would add a category for those of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

That latter proposed change makes a lot of sense — so much sense that it’s hard to believe the government will actually do it.

The fact is, race in America is far more complex than it once was. This is to our country’s credit: Racial integration, plus welcoming immigration policies, has meant that racial identity is no longer so — forgive me — black and white.

For example, this year the Fieldston Lower School in The Bronx undertook a bizarre experiment in which the school’s liberal social-justice administrators decided to segregate the kids, once a week and starting in third grade, according to race.

This was ostensibly to get that “honest conversation” leftists are so fond of, but it hit a wrinkle. One mother — a supporter of the program, I should note — told New York Magazine she identifies as “ethnically Dominican and racially black.” But presumably, her kid would have to choose.

In an effort to make youngsters racially aware, the school was having them erase part of their familial identity so they’d fit in neat boxes.

This is the logical endpoint of the liberal identity-politics crusade. Leftist school administrators will constantly remind kids with darker skin that they stand apart.

And now they’re doing the same to Bobby Jindal. Even though Jindal was born in the United States, they won’t allow him to simply be “American.” They refuse to let him identify by his country of birth, instead forcing him to identify by the birth country of his parents.

It’s bitter, and it’s bigoted, and it’s extraordinarily unseemly. But it’s also enlightening, telling us what leftists really think about the American melting pot: They don’t like it one bit.

Seth Mandel is The Post’s op-ed editor.