Take Your Boxes and . . .

WHEN the Michigan decisions were handed down—the ones that upheld affirmative action—many Americans underwent a bout of race-pondering. Of course, race is never far from our eyes: It’s on our forms, for one thing. When applying to college, for a marriage license, for a loan: There are those boxes, demanding that we check White, African-American, Aleut, what have you.

A lot of Americans don’t like this very much—and not all of them are lily-white. Ward Connerly, remember, is the force behind the Racial Privacy Initiative in California. This is the measure that would prevent governmental bodies from classifying individuals by race (with some prudent exceptions). Connerly wrote a piece for NATIONAL REVIEW on this subject titled “Don’t Box Me In”—a phrase that captured the restless desire of many people to get free of color, to the extent possible. The magazine ran a cartoon with the piece that had a woman filling out a form and asking, “Can’t I just check ‘American’?” (The answer, madam, is no.) The ACLU has attacked Connerly’s initiative as—natch—”racist.” Thus is black white and white black (so to speak).

About the Author

Jay Nordlinger

Jay Nordlinger was a senior editor of National Review and a book fellow at National Review Institute.

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WHEN the Michigan decisions were handed down—the ones that upheld affirmative action—many Americans underwent a bout of race-pondering. Of course, race is never far from our eyes: It’s on our forms, for one thing. When applying to college, for a marriage license, for a loan: There are those boxes, demanding that we check White, African-American, Aleut, what have you.

A lot of Americans don’t like this very much—and not all of them are lily-white. Ward Connerly, remember, is the force behind the Racial Privacy Initiative in California. This is the measure that would prevent governmental bodies from classifying individuals by race (with some prudent exceptions). Connerly wrote a piece for NATIONAL REVIEW on this subject titled “Don’t Box Me In”—a phrase that captured the restless desire of many people to get free of color, to the extent possible. The magazine ran a cartoon with the piece that had a woman filling out a form and asking, “Can’t I just check ‘American’?” (The answer, madam, is no.) The ACLU has attacked Connerly’s initiative as—natch—”racist.” Thus is black white and white black (so to speak).