George Will says that a public policy based on racial preferences is unsustainable:
demographic facts say race is rapidly becoming more and more irrational--indeed, unintelligible--as a basis for government actions...The increasing arbitrariness and unreality of official racial and ethnic categories will become apparentWill doesn't say this, but it occured to me while reading his column -- at some point the very definitions of racial categories will have to be challenged in court. At the risk of making a prediction, I predict that the next battleground in the "diversity wars" will be over the question "who qualifies for preferential 'diversity' treatment?"
Although racial preferences have been around for a while, Monday's Supreme Court ruling will no doubt be perceived as cementing limited forms of racial preferences as a kind of entitlement. And with entitlements come eligibility guidelines, and with guidelines come challenges to stretch the guidelines. And given that the federal definitions of ethnic minority groups [scroll down to Categories and Definitions] are so imprecise, it can't be that hard to claim membership in a minority category. For example, "Black or African American" is defined as
A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.There is, of course, the trivial claim that the origin of humankind is in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, making us all African Americans. But even if we ignore that, I'm sure we all know people who look 100% white, yet have some black ancestry. Are they legitimately black for purposes of racial preferences? Who is to decide?
"Hispanic" is defined as
A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.That would have to include anybody of Spanish ancestry, including Basques (Spanish Basques, but not French Basques, I guess) and Sephardic Jews. How far down the family tree does the nearest Spanish relative have to sit in order to be considered legitimate, and who decides? According to family legend, one group of my ancestors left Spain during the Inquisition and eventually settled in Poland. All of my other ancestors are eastern European Jews. Am I Hispanic? Most people would probably say no, but I stick to my claim of "other Spanish origin", and I'm no less proud of my Spanish roots than my Lithuanian shtetl roots. So why should my Spanish heritage be any less relevant to law school admissions than that of someone whose ancestors immigrated from Spain to the new world in the 1500s?
Here's another good one. I have a friend whose biological parents are northern European, but whose adopted father is an immigrant from South America. Is she Hispanic? If you believe that nurture is more important than nature, then of course she's Hispanic and I believe that's how she considers herself. (On the other hand, a black person who is adopted by a white family will almost certainly be universally recognized as black).
Now that there is every advantage in declaring oneself to be a member of an underrepresented minority, and absolutely no disadvantage in doing so, what's to stop people from discovering that they have black, Spanish, Algonquin or Hawaiian ancestors? Only a few people will lie outright, but family legends about mysterious great-grandfathers will grow in importance until every other Norwegian Lutheran in Minnesota starts thinking of himself as part Spanish and Native American. And who is going to dispute any of these claims? At a certain point, this is all going to wind up in the Supreme Court and Sandra Day O'Connor's less fossilized successors are going to have to conclude that racial classifications are too vague to be of any use in public policy. Either that, or when the University of Michigan Law School notices that 75% of their applicant pool claims minority heritage, they are going to realize that "racial diversity" doesn't make sense. The only solutions would be to abandon racial preferences and limit any preferences to those who can document economic disadvantage. Or better yet, just maintain high standards for everybody and even those with real or perceived disadvantages will rise to meet them.
UPDATE The Wall Street Journal also asks How Far Does Diversity Go?
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 25, 2003 06:53 AMOne could also (radically) suggest that a "diverse" society composed of ethnic groups with demonstrable differences in capabilities and performance is "unsustainable" as well, as long as you have people who suggest differential outcomes across racial and ethnic lines are instead (of course) the result of inherent unfairness and discrimination, and therefore who continually push for divisive social remedies like affirmative action.
Posted by: ns on June 25, 2003 04:51 AMI recall about 10 or so years ago an applicant to Georgetown Law School indicating that he was African-American. It caused a controversy because he was white. Why then would he call himself African-American? Because he was born in South Africa.
Posted by: Mark on June 25, 2003 10:03 AMSouth African apartheid was a system based on several racial categories, not merely black and white. As I recall, different sets of rules (usually disqualifications) applied to different racial categories (e.g. "black" versus "mulatto"). Given their English and Dutch colonial past, I believe that the South African whites established a formal judicial system wherein racial classifications could be challenged (due process and all that).
Given the litigiousness of American society, and given the value of the entitlement flowing from the racial classification, can there be any doubt that the South African model won't be adopted?
This happened in the San Francisco Fire Department several years ago. Officers of Spanish (i.e. Iberian Peninsula) heritage pursued administrative relief to change their classification from Caucasian to Hispanic in order to receive affirmative action bonus points on the captain's exam.
Keep up the good work,
Fred Jacobsen
San Francisco
For statistical purposes, they could always ask for 1% or greater type of things, or tribal affiliation if one can claim Native American ancestry.
As for colleges, there's a better idea. Instead of quota type things or tie breaker type things, you can go by schools or zip codes. Perhaps giving people who lived in a certain zip code preference. Or perhaps having 20% of all accepted applicants be chosen by zip code and the number of applicants applying from such.
For example, let us say a college accepts 10,000 students. 2,000 would be accepted by zip code in my example, whereas the other 8,000 are accepted by their merits. Those 2,000 slots would be given to the remainder of the unaccepted students. It would use zip code as a way to decide. So if there are 5,000 unaccepted students, then only 40% are going to get in. So if 35 students from a given zip code apply to a given school, then 14 out of those 35 students get accepted from that zip code.
Instead of zip codes, school districts could be used instead. That way school districts which do poorly or whatever still have some of their students going to top of the line colleges.
Posted by: Anon Ymous on July 25, 2005 06:38 PM