By Dominic
Pino
Thursday,
June 29, 2023
In the
Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions,
Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Neil Gorsuch devoted a
portion of his concurrence to skewering the absurdities of classifying humans
by race.
He notes
that college applicants could choose between “American Indian or Alaska Native;
Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander;
Hispanic or Latino; or White” as their race. “Where do these boxes come from?”
Gorsuch asks. “Bureaucrats. A federal interagency commission devised this scheme
of classifications in the 1970s to facilitate data collection.”
There is
nothing preordained or scientific about these categories — which the creators
of the classification scheme were careful to point out in the 1970s, as Gorsuch
notes. But their warnings have been ignored. As a result, absurdities abound.
Gorsuch
writes:
These classifications rest on incoherent stereotypes. Take the “Asian”
category. It sweeps into one pile East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese)
and South Asians (e.g., Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), even though together
they constitute about 60% of the world’s population. . . . This agglomeration
of so many peoples paves over countless differences in “language,” “culture,”
and historical experience. . . . It does so even though few would suggest that
all such persons share “similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences.”
This
isn’t even crude stereotyping based on skin color. It’s solely based on the
continent from which someone’s ancestors came. Asia is the largest continent,
accounts for a majority of the world’s people, and contains more cultures and
languages than one can count. Chinese and Indians are very different groups of
people — as any Chinese or Indian will tell you if prompted — but in our
racial-classification system, they are considered the same.
Note
that we don’t do this with our own continent. North America includes Canada,
the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean. Imagine a white Francophone Canadian and a
black Bahamian. Those two are obviously of different races, you might say: They
have different skin colors, speak different languages, and have completely
different cultural traditions and histories. But every part of that is just as
true of a Bangladeshi and a Korean, yet they are both considered to be of the same
race.
As
Gorsuch notes, when these classifications are modified, it’s not because of
better anthropological research:
Consider, as well, the development of a separate category for “Native
Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” It seems federal officials disaggregated
these groups from the “Asian” category only in the 1990s and only “in response
to political lobbying.” . . . And even that category contains its
curiosities. It appears, for example, that Filipino Americans remain classified
as “Asian” rather than “Other Pacific Islander.”
Filipinos
are a perfect example of the problem with our classification system. It fails
to account for the fact that other countries are multicultural and have complex
histories and ethnic profiles too. In the choice between “Pacific Islander” and
“Asian,” for example, do Filipinos have more in common with Hawaiians (safely
“Pacific Islander”) or with Chinese (safely “Asian”)? That’s an absurd
question, but it’s the kind of thing you have to ask if you want to check one
of the race boxes on a form in this country.
Brazilians
are another illustrative case. Brazil is the largest country in South America,
but its language isn’t Spanish, so Brazilians can’t be “Hispanic.” Brazil is
itself a nation of immigrants, with large populations that came from Europe and
Asia. A person of Japanese descent, born and raised in Brazil, doesn’t have
that much life experience in common with a Japanese person born and raised in
Japan. Would both be considered “Asian” upon moving to the U.S.? The question,
again, is absurd.
Gorsuch
picks apart the problems with “Hispanic” as well, writing that it “covers those
whose ancestral language is Spanish, Basque, or Catalan — but it also covers
individuals of Mayan, Mixtec, or Zapotec descent who do not speak any of those
languages and whose ancestry does not trace to the Iberian Peninsula but bears
deep ties to the Americas.” It is for this reason that, for example, Mexicans
in Mexico do not consider themselves “Hispanic,” but instead separate into
categories such as “Mestizo” (Mexicans with Spanish and native ancestry) that
do not exist on classification forms in the U.S.
“White”
in the U.S. doesn’t make any more sense, as Gorsuch points out. It “includes
those of Welsh, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Turkish, or
Iranian descent. It embraces an Iraqi or Ukrainian refugee as much as a member
of the British royal family.” The “Black or African American” classification
“covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the
rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a
Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a
typical American suburb,” Gorsuch writes.
All of
this nonsense gets even crazier when people of different races start families
together. Gorsuch writes:
If anything, attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have
become only more incoherent with time. American families have become
increasingly multicultural, a fact that has led to unseemly disputes about
whether someone is really a member of a certain racial or ethnic group. There
are decisions denying Hispanic status to someone of Italian-Argentine descent .
. . as well as someone with one Mexican grandparent. . . . Yet there are also
decisions granting Hispanic status to a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors fled
Spain centuries ago . . . and bestowing a “sort of Hispanic” status on a person
with one Cuban grandparent.
Throughout,
Gorsuch relies on Classified, the recent book by George Mason
University law professor David Bernstein that explores the history of U.S.
racial classifications. (You can hear Bernstein talk to John Miller about it on
the Bookmonger podcast here.)
As Rich
Lowry wrote last year about the
racial-classification system, “There is a good case for rationalizing and
updating all of this, but an even more compelling case for scrapping it
altogether.” Gorsuch doesn’t go that far, but that wasn’t the point of this
case, and he reasons that using this system as a basis for admissions decisions
doesn’t make any sense. He points out that it encourages applicants to game the
system by taking advantage of the ambiguities when selecting one’s race. “Paid
advisors, in turn, tell high school students of Asian descent to downplay their
heritage to maximize their odds of admission,” he writes.
It’s all
nonsense, and Americans should reject being classified by arbitrary,
bureaucratic definitions that were never intended to be so significant.
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