Encouraging grasping grievance groups. By George Will.
Anyone acquainted with human nature — and with government, which exists to cope with human nature — should not be surprised: When government allocates opportunities on racial grounds, dispensing lucrative preferences when awarding contracts and subsidies, this gives rise to rackets. …
Until a few years ago, Robert Taylor, a business owner in Washington state, identified as White. Then he realized that his insurance business could benefit if it were classified as a minority enterprise. A DNA test purported to show him 4 percent sub-Saharan African. Lots of litigation later, a federal court said the state nevertheless could deny his minority status. Elsewhere, Steve Lynn had better luck in the racial lottery. His business qualified as a minority business enterprise because his ancestors were Sephardic Jews who fled Spain centuries ago, making him, in the government’s squint, Hispanic.
Your government decrees that immigrants from India are Asians but their cousins from Afghanistan are White. In America’s benighted days of yore, hearings and trials determined racial identifies (octoroon, quadroon, etc.). In today’s America, such determinations are progressive because they protect the integrity, such as it is, of affirmative action programs. …
This story-beyond-satire of government is recounted in Bernstein’s slender (185 pages) “Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America,” potentially 2022’s most consequential American book. It reveals the rickety foundations of today’s identity politics. …
The post-1970s proliferation of government-preferred classifications means, Bernstein says, that they mostly benefit not African American victims of centuries-old abuses, but post-1965 immigrants and their descendants.
Furthermore, those inconvenient Asian Americans keep spoiling the progressive narrative: A New York Times story reported that Google offers “a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man’s world.” A few lines later, Bernstein notes, the Times stated that a third of Google’s American employees are Asian Americans. …
The racial/cultural/geographic/whatever spoils system is now so entrenched, it is too late for what would encourage a shared national identity: complete separation of race and state. Meaning, government abstention from racial and ethnic classifications.
Today’s ever-more-arbitrary system vindicates Bernstein’s warning that such classifications are “self-fulfilling”: They encourage people to think of themselves not as individuals but as members of grasping grievance groups. Young people are taught this unattractive orthodoxy at colleges that celebrate a “diversity” that is skin-deep.
Australia too is increasingly discriminating by race, with The Voice being but the latest example.
Perhaps to prevent cheating we should do what the old South Africa did, and issue everyone official government documents proclaiming their race. Then our government would officially be racist, though of course they would say the opposite.
