The Sotomayor nomination — since the media focused on her ethnic profile rather than her solid credentials — has had the unintended effect of reminding the nation how strange the politics of racial identity have become, especially in a society where social status and material well-being are not necessarily predicated on being “white” (cf. per capita incomes of many Asian minorities), and the notion itself of “race” is now problematic with so many Americans of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 racial heritage. Are we really to believe that Geraldo Rivera’s high profile on Fox News lends “pride” to those who are of 1/2 Puerto Rican background, or does he resonate as Gerald Friedman with the Jewish community for his half-Jewish ancestry? Or is he just Geraldo, whose background is inmaterial?
One wonders whether affirmative action and diversity preferences are any more predicated on past collective suffering? If so, why has the UC university system in the past tried to find insidious ways of limiting Asian “overrepresentation” (given ample bias against Chinese and Japanese), or why is a Barack Obama, of half-African ancestry, a beneficiary of efforts to offer recompense to those of the African-American experience?
Or perhaps the problem instead is supposedly present individual discrimination? Yet does a Justice Sotomayor encounter today more bias than does a dark-skinned Punjabi, Egyptian Copt, or Syrian-American — members of groups that do not warrant special consideration and preference? If the past prejudice of the Mexican-American experience justifies race-based preference, to what degree do other Hispanics — Cubans, Brazilians, Spaniards, Costa Ricans — piggy-back and find themselves counted as “minorities” to meet “diversity goals”, as if a university is relieved that no federal agency checks to see whether a well-off, blue-eyed Spaniard immigrant like José de la Cruz is actually not Mexican-American.
No need to cite the obvious — a Travis Thornberry living in Bakersfield, part of the Oklahoma Diaspora, poor and without educated parents, is entitled to no affirmative-action execmptions, but perhaps an illegal alien who crossed the border yesterday does become a “minority” by the very loose association with the Mexican-American experience? So we use increasingly baffling circumstances to dictate who and who is not deserving of special consideration.
In theory, the children of a Eric Holder and Colin Powell could prove racially-based handicaps that call for government intervention while, say, far poorer children of Punjabi and Arab-Americans parentage — in some cases more readily identifiable as non-white — could not. From past experience in the university, I can attest that the darker-skinned Mexican-American student of mixed parentage who spoke Spanish, was poor, but had an Anglo father and no desire for tribal identification — resulting in a name like a Joe Baker — had a harder claim than a lighter-skinned Latina, whose Mexican fides were on the paternal side and who sought such bumper-sticker identification, such as a Yolanda Trevino. The scoundrel Ward Churchill reminded us how such faux-identities can be constructed for careerist purposes.
In short, with so many races, so much intermarriage, so much mixing-up through popular culture, so much disconnection between class, status, and race — and so much evidence from Iraq, the Balkans, and Rwanda about the perniciousness of tribalism — the industry of racial identity should have long ago been shut down, especially since it is often championed by white elites, who, not putting their own children in the public schools and not living in racially mixed neighborhoods (both very concrete ways of helping the “other”), seem to find psychological atonement in advocating diversity preferences, while assuming their own wealth, connections, and education ensure their own privileged offspring the same exemptions. The children of someone like a Ted Kennedy, after all, enjoyed affirmative action long before it was predicated on race.
Seeking a racial identity in “diversity” has become like Marxism in the old Soviet Union — a doctrine that everyone praises, while privately realizing that it has devolved into a useful tool for careerist advancement.