Race, we’re often told, is a social construct. Sometimes it’s even more arbitrary; it’s a government construct. Since the days of slavery, governmental units in the US have assigned people racial designations based on bizarre criteria. The civil rights era and the introduction of affirmative action only made it crazier. Iranians, Afghanis, and Arabs aren’t Asian, even though they’re mostly from Asia. Instead, they’re “white.” You can be from Spain, yet not be Hispanic. Native Hawaiians aren’t Native American. Members of recognized minority groups lobby to keep other people from being recognized as minority groups.
Official designations of racial and minority status in the United States are insane, but David E. Bernstein keeps a straight face as he documents them in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
No one government agency defines racial categories, and the same person may belong to different races for different purposes. Some people are “white” just because there’s no other designation for them. Sometimes the basis is appearance, sometimes geography, sometimes demonstrating a history of discrimination. Bernstein writes: “Modern American racial and ethnic classifications do not reflect biology, genetics, or any other objective source.” In some cases, it’s necessary or helpful to have a letter of acceptance from a recognized ethnic organization.
Many people in the United States are multiracial but are required to pick a category they belong to. Which one do you pick if your mother and father come from different continents? The OMB ruled that if someone declares as both white and a minority race, that person is designated as the minority race. This sounds disturbingly like the South’s old “one drop” rule.
It’s just as disturbing that the government issues a Certificate Degree of Indian or Alaska Native Blood, which qualified people can obtain after filing lots of paperwork. The Cherokee Nation has, as recently as 2011, demanded this certificate as a way of excluding descendants of Cherokee-held slaves from tribal membership. Whether a person counts as an “Indian” can affect whether the person is tried in federal or state court when accused of a crime. This obsession with human genetics should have died with the eugenics movement.
The government engages in Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) preferences, which are racial discrimination by another name. In many cases, they aren’t connected to past discrimination against the designated groups. “Within a generation or two,” Bernstein says, “a large majority of Americans will be eligible for MBE preferences.”
At least as bad is the government’s requirement that researchers report pseudo-scientific racial classifications in their results. The FDA and NIH set “Hispanic” (which is considered an ethnicity, not a race), “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Black or African American,” “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” and “White” as recognized categories, even though they have little connection to genetic variation. Using them can result in misleading conclusions and even inappropriate medical treatment.
Bernstein notes that the state of affairs in the early and middle 20th century was poor. Testing was conducted largely on whites, on the assumption that the results applied equally to everyone, or else black people were made into unknowing guinea pigs. The reporting requirement has some value in ensuring that testing covers a broad cross-section of the population, but treating different results for different racial groups as significant is dubious. Suppose, for instance, a study finds that “African Americans” are prone to a condition. Which African Americans does that apply to: descendants of West Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, or East Africans? They’re very different groups genetically.
In the concluding section, Bernstein looks at racial classification’s negative consequences to society. He notes that a broad collection of people with obvious physical differences is called “white” and argues that this encourages people to think of themselves as “white” rather than some other classification. He says — and my impression agrees with him — that “many progressive social theorists applaud increasing white racial consciousness.” The idea seems to be that if people think of themselves as white, they’ll start feeling guilty. But people tend to take pride in their group memberships, and today’s American culture encourages that. White supremacist thought has risen in recent years. Bernstein says that “racially conscious whites are much more likely than other whites to to believe themselves to [sic] the victims of minority groups’ political gains.”
Bernstein shies away from the suggestion that the United States should get rid of official racial classifications, as France and some other countries have done. He sees value in them at least for measuring the existence of discrimination. Even there, he says, updating the categories would serve the purpose better. Certainly the existing ones are senseless. Race is a fiction, and official “races” are defined by politics. That’s not going to change soon, and tweaking the categories can’t get around their basic arbitrariness. The best we can do is recognize how ridiculous the classifications are and stop taking them seriously.