The U.S. has become engulfed in a fixation about your race and ethnicity. Governments and many private entities (especially universities) are terribly concerned about where your ancestors came from in their quest to find a supposedly ideal mix — “diversity.”
In a recent book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, law professor David Bernstein examines the history and consequences of this rather recent obsession. Another law professor, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, talks with Bernstein about the issues he raises here.
Apropos of the legal battle now in the hands of the Supreme Court over racial preferences by colleges and universities that receive public funds (which looks to clearly violate the law), Bernstein says, “Today, universities pursuing ‘diversity’, prefer the 500th Mexican-American applicant, as adding to Hispanic diversity, over the first (white) Afghani or the first (Asian) Hmong, who, in their tunnel-visioned perspective, make the class less diverse by adding the white or Asian American populations. This is absurd and should not be permitted.”
Indeed.
Read the whole thing.