One of the many problems with Grutter is that, far from putting racial preference behind us, or even putting it on the road to being behind us, it simply added many items to the to-do lists of professional diversifiers.
One of them is Jonathan Alger, now vice president and general counsel at Rutgers but who, as assistant general counsel at the University of Michigan, coordinated Michigan’s legal efforts in Gratz and Grutter. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Putting Grutter Into Practice,” Alger discusses a long list of issues he and his colleagues are working on in the wake of Grutter. Here, for example, is one of them:
When might it be appropriate to subdivide large racial categories like “Asian-Americans” into smaller groups that have different backgrounds and circumstances? How should colleges consider individuals of mixed race? Educators and lawyers are working together to define and answer such questions.
Perhaps those “educators and lawyers” could learn something from another group of administrators who have a good deal of experience classifying people on the basis of race — prison administrators. Although prisons would seem (to some) to be the opposite of universities — in prisons, after all, “diversity” is often deadly — their administrators have learned that race and ethnicity are not always reliable proxies for the culture-bearing qualities college diversifiers so frantically seek.
In the Supreme Court case, discussed below, dealing with racial classification in the California prison system, prison officials were quoted on the perils of assuming that common ethnicity assures affinity:
“You cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. They will kill each other,” an associate warden testified in a passage cited by the court. “The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos.”
Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections in Sacramento, said prison officials sometimes separated inmates of the same race or ethnicity.
“Southern California Hispanics and Northern California Hispanics don’t get along, and you can’t put them in a cell together,” she said.
It’s hard to know which is more appalling: the enthusiastic insouciance with which university “educators and lawyers” engage in the practice of dispensing racial and ethnic preferences, or the offensive shallowness of their assumption that race and ethnicity sufficiently define people for the purpose of insuring “diversity.”
“offensive shallowness”. Ha. In the good old days, it would have been called simply “racism”, no?
After living in a neighborhood full of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, any white American would learn every quickly that the groups do not like each other and are not homogeneous. But maybe that is a hard lesson for the ruling elite to learn white at Sidwell Friends Andover, etc.