One Hmong Many…

As social movements age their intellectual arteries begin to harden and long-dormant contradictions begin to manifest themselves. The civil rights movement, which throughout most of its history argued for universal human rights, has in its old age declined into a racial interest group trying to protect assorted preferences based on race and ethnicity. This reversal required what should now be called the “self-styled civil rights groups” to abandon the principle of colorblind equality (the principle on which it had campaigned, successfully, for the passage of civil rights laws) — a reversal that in turn required the abandonment of many traditional civil rights arguments.

One of the most glaring of these reversals concerns the notorious “one drop rule” for determining who is black. Traditionally regarded, accurately, as a particularly obnoxious relic of a properly rejected racism, “civil rights groups” came to embrace it — and along with it the option of classifying oneself as belonging to more than one race — in order to inflate (or maintain, if you prefer) the number of blacks in various population groups so as to strengthen their argument for racial preferences for them.

Thus it comes as no surprise to find the Civil Rights Project at Harvard (a group that from busing on has never met a racial classification or preference it opposed) objecting to a revision of a Department of Education form. According to a report on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s news blog:

In an attempt to reflect the growing diversity of students attending the nation’s education institutions, the Education Department last month proposed new regulations calling for students to be asked two questions related to race and ethnicity when they fill out forms for the federal government’s data-gathering efforts…. Students would first be asked whether they are Hispanic, and then be asked to choose among five other designations: American Indian or Alaska native; Asian; black or African-American; native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; or white. Those who chose two or more designations in response to the second question would be lumped together in the category “two or more races.”

Since “diversity” is such an open-ended, and hence empty, rationale for racial discrimination, perhaps we shouldn’t make too much of a “civil rights group” opposing a diversity-enhancing proposal. But it is at least worth noting. So, let us note that the Civil Rights Project’s complaint is that

the proposed mixed-race designation “would be an essentially meaningless category for civil-rights and research purposes” because it would include so many different racial and ethnic combinations.

In other words, in the name of “civil rights” the group opposes a measure that would more accurately describe, and perhaps even enhance, racial diversity. In my view, this objection is not even reasonable on its own unappealing terms. For example, if one collects data only on the overly broad category of “Hispanics,” how could one possibly monitor, say, discrimination against Mexican-Americans and Guatemalan-Americans by Cuban-Americans in Miami? Or if all “Asian” are lumped together, how could one discover discrimination against the Hmong (no, that was not a typo in the title) by Chinese- or Japanese- or Filipino-Americans?

Or, for another revealing reversal, consider the matter of requiring photographs on various applications. Yesterday I discussed (here) a challenge to a racially exclusive program for minority journalists. A commenter to that post pointed to this application for a similar program, which requires the applicant to submit a photograph — presumably to ensure that the applicant is indeed a qualifying minority. Today “civil rights groups” invariably defend these racial requirements, but it was not always so. For example, here’s a typical argument from the late 1960s — given not because it’s so important but because it is typical and was quick and easy to find — from a 1969 article in the Journal of Negro Education, “The Use of Potentially Discriminatory Questions on College Applications in the Southern United States.”

The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent schools in the eleven state area of the ‘Old South’ were using potentially discriminatory questions on their applications for admission. Potentially discriminatory questions were defined in operational terms as questions regarding the race or religion of the applicant and requests for photographs of the applicant.

We have chosen the term potentially discriminatory on the assumption that in some cases these questions are simply anachronistic reminders of an earlier and less fortunate period in American history.

Had the author been prescient, he could also have referred to a later and less fortunate period in American history. In any event, he went on to note that “as far back as 1947” the use of racially identifying questions on applications had been discredited, referring to a report issued by the President’s Commission on Higher Education, entitled Higher Education for American Democracy. “This report said,” he quoted, that “Discrimination in admission of college students because of an individual’s race, creed, color, sex, national origin, or ancestory is an anti-democratic practice,” and it recommended

the removal from application forms of all questions pertaining to religion, color, and national origins…..

[I]t can almost be said [the 1947 report continued] that the request for certain information on application forms constitutes an all but prima facie case that such information is likely to be used for discriminatory purposes.

It was, and it is, “civil rights groups” now to the contrary notwithstanding.

ADDENDUM

In this regard, it is also worth remembering ANDERSON v. MARTIN, 375 U.S. 399 (1964), in which the Supremes held that a Louisiana statute requiring the racial identification of all candidates in primary, general, or special elections violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it places “the power of the State behind a racial classification that induces racial prejudice at the polls.”

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  1. anonymous September 27, 2006 at 12:48 pm | | Reply

    Not having read the Harvard statement I don’t know for sure, but it seems possible that their preferred option is to have either a) specific combinations broken out or b) let the most stigmatized status trump all else (i.e., the one drop rule). Obviously option “a” provides the most detail but it’s also rather cumbersome and is so specific as to prompt privacy concerns (how many black-API-white people are there?). There were very similar debates about how to interpret the 2000 Census. My recollection is that the Census provided “a” data but different end users interpreted it either with the “b” rule or the multiracial catch-all. Generally speaking, the left favored “b” and the right favored the multiracial catch-all category.

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