Isn't that simply a matter of the process by which racial categories were constructed by the government in the 1970's? David Bernstein has an extremely interesting book about this: Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. South Asians and East Asians, who have little in common, were conflated as "Asian American." Jews specifically did not want to be in a category of their own: imagine the anti-Semitism that would result from accurate counts of Jews in academia, medicine, law, etc. Thus for purposes of government statistics, Jews are "white," along with other peoples with origins in the Middle East. If you're going to have diversity requirements for Hasidim, you would need to have such requirements for, say, the Welsh and Catalonians too.

It's in the context of the general anti-religious Jew trend that the Grey Lady has had since forever. But your comment about how "just hasidim are irked by this" is flat out wrong. For one, Algemeiner is a secular Jewish paper that frequently publishes anti-Hasidic content itself.