University administrators are bad and incompetent racialists.
University administrators are bad and incompetent racialists.
I t’s not just that colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin. They do it badly.
This is one of the themes that emerged in the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases last week.
The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers, an arbitrary mess mostly left over from the work of federal bureaucrats in the 1970s that can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.
The administrators who rely on these categories are beholden to senseless and unscientific distinctions — they aren’t even competent or rational racialists.
Justice Samuel Alito raised this issue in the arguments, pretty clearly relying on the work of George Mason University professor David Bernstein, who eviscerated the categories in an amicus brief and has written a book on their origin and implications, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
The categories throw together a kaleidoscope of races and ethnicities in six neat categories: Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, White, African American, and Native American. Created for federal bookkeeping purposes 50 years ago, they long ago hardened into orthodoxy, with some adjustments here or there.
If you think it makes sense to — as the Bernstein brief puts it — throw 60 percent of the world’s population into one category as Asian, or to consider white Europeans, indigenous Mexicans, and Afro-Cubans as all Hispanic, you must work in a university admissions office.
“These racial categories are rife with inconsistencies and lack parallel construction,” scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant have written. “Only one category is specifically racial, only one is cultural, and only one relies on a notion of affiliation or community recognition.”
Consider the Asian category. It doesn’t make sense to many of the people collected under it. One study found that less than 40 percent of Indian, Chinese, and Filipino respondents considered themselves Asian or Asian American.
East Asians and South Asians are yoked together under the category, even though they have nothing in common, and South Asians have formed their own representative organizations. It used to be that South Asians were considered white, but they shifted over to Asian to gain the status of a minority group (it turns out that they chose the wrong group).
On the other hand, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander used to be subsumed under the Asian category, until these groups realized it was better to have a category of their own.
Yet, Filipino Americans, who would seem Pacific Islanders by definition, are still “Asian.”
Got it?
Then, there’s the Hispanic category, which is sweepingly inclusive of anyone whose family comes from a country with a Spanish culture, regardless of race or anything else.
Jonathan Borak and his coauthors wrote in the journal Epidemiology, “The term ‘Hispanic’ was created by the U.S. government; the population so identified is, in fact, an artificial rubric for a set of diverse populations that resulted from the mixture of indigenous American peoples, African slaves, and Europeans.”
The result is that no white Europeans are presumed to contribute to diversity at colleges except white Europeans from Spain.
As the Bernstein brief notes, the Hispanic category “includes people whose ancestors’ first language was not Spanish and who may have never spoken Spanish. This includes immigrants from Spain and their descendants whose ancestral language is Basque or Catalan. It also includes indigenous immigrants from Latin America whose first language is not Spanish, whose surnames are not Spanish, and whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not Spanish.”
White is just as capacious, including not just Europeans but people from North Africa and Asia west of India. It comprises, as the Bernstein brief relates, “Welsh, Norwegians, Greeks, Moroccans, Chaldeans, Afghans, Iranians, and North African Berbers.”
A freshman dorm could be hugely diverse drawing from this “white” category alone.
Of course, universities are making admissions decisions based on these random boxes, reducing enormous complexity to a few simplistic, often misleading choices.
“Neither Harvard nor UNC,” the brief points out, “has explained why a white Catholic of Spanish descent, classified as Hispanic, gets an admissions preference for contributing to educational diversity, but a dark- skinned Muslim of Arab descent, an Egyptian Copt, a Hungarian Roma, a Bosnian refugee, a Scandinavian Laplander, a Siberian Tatar, or a Bobover Hasid—all classified as ‘white’—do not.”
“Similarly,” it continues, “it is hard to see how diversity is better accomplished by admitting an additional ‘Hispanic’ student of Mexican ancestry over an equally or better qualified student whose parents immigrated from Turkmenistan, who would be the only Turkman in the entire student body, because the Turkman is arbitrarily classified as ‘white.’”
There is a good case for rationalizing and updating all of this, but an even more compelling case for scrapping it altogether.