I don’t disagree with George Will on many days, but — probably because I’m still in my Black Michigan Monday funk — today is one of them. Actually, the column in question is now several days old, but I’ve just gotten around to reading it. (There are about two zillion to which I haven’t yet gotten around).
Will takes a cheerful (in the circumstances), silver lining, glass-is-half-full approach to the Michigan mess by observing that the Court’s offensive ruling will be done in by rapid demographic change before it can do much damage.
But America’s fast-unfolding future will outrun the capacity of litigation to stay pertinent. What are called “race-conscious” remedies for social problems are going to seem increasingly problematic because race and ethnicity are increasingly understood to be not fixed but extremely fluid, hence dubious, scientific categories.
African Americans include descendants of African slaves, recent voluntary immigrants from Africa — and from the Caribbean. The single category “Hispanic” sweeps together such very different groups as Cuban Americans, Dominican Americans, Guatemalan Americans, Salvadoran Americans, Mexican Americans. And immigrants from Argentina — but not from Brazil.
Rapidly rising rates of intermarriage further the wholesome blurring of the picture of the nation. So does the fact that many Hispanics — and Arab Americans — chose “white” or “other” when asked to pick from among the 63 categories on the 2000 census form.
The increasing arbitrariness and unreality of official racial and ethnic categories will become apparent. After all, 100 years ago, Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants were considered three different races.
Will may be right. Demography surely is rapidly making race as a category “more and more irrational–indeed unintelligible–as a basis for government actions.” But I’m afraid he is being much too Pollyanna-ish insofar as he assumes that the damage of SanDra’s opinion will die as soon as it becomes demographically irrelevant.
The rationale of SanDra’s defense of racial preferences–that the right to be free from racial discrimination must give way before the need of colleges to compose a racially diverse student body–is much more destructive than the particular policies it protects. Much of American history can be characterized by the continuing ability of our revolutionary idea of equality to have effects that were either unanticipated or unwanted, or both. Slaveholders embedded a powerful ideal of equality in the Declaration of Independence that led, eventually, to the abolition of slavery. That same “American Creed,” as Gunnar Myrdal accurately predicted in 1944, worked as an acid that eventually destroyed segregation.
I’m afraid that the ideas underlying the defense of diversity discrimination are similarly acidic.
I agree with you here. More than anything, we ought to remember how the Fourteenth Amendment came into being. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died establishing the principle of legal equality in a war between states that very nearly destroyed the country. To blithely brush aside the monumental importance of a principle that was worth so much to affirm is a culturally suicidal folly. Dare we play self-serving little legalistic games, and shrink from the insight contained in that principle, for a second time?
Perhaps the only legitimate defense of O’Connor’s cowardly dodge was written in Charles Krauthammer (his column for today, probably in the WaPo and certainly at Townhall). You ought to check it out, John.
Sage – Sage comments indeed. I’ve just seen the Krauthammer column, emailed it to myself, and will comment on it asap. He makes a good point.