The Washington Post has a fascinating, and I think deeply depressing, article today about Latino immigrants who arrive in the U.S. and are surprised to discover that they are are black. The confusion is nicely, if unintentionally, captured in the headline, “People of Color Who Never Felt They Were Black.”
“People of color” is, of course, the newer, politically correct version of “colored,” which was replaced by “Negro,” and then “black,” and then “African American.” Recently, with a bow to multiculturalism, it has been broadened to include Native Americans, Hispanics (at least sometimes), and occasionally even Asians, although not for college admissions. It is, as postmodernists and others are fond of saying, a social construct, not a genetic category or even a description, since many “people of color” are physically indistinguishable from whites. Nevertheless, according to the Post’s headline, the category is real, and the article documents that it classifies and comprises many people who do not think of themselves as belonging within it.
It is impossible for me to read these articles, and the similar ones about racial classifications in the census, without thinking how counterproductive it is for our law affirmatively to assign people to racial categories they reject, and how much more difficult the assigning has become as increased immigration and intermarriage have both muddied and increased the categories.
If we insist on staying on our current (and, I think, highly misguided) course of racial classifications, we ought to take some of the burden off admissions officers, employers, etc., and at least issue racial indentity cards to everyone. Liberals have traditionally objected to national I.D. cards on privacy/civil liberty grounds, but that seems increasingly to conflict with their insistence on “taking race into account” at every turn.
