SCOTUS Should End Racial Categories
For justification, the Supreme Court of the United States should look at the discriminatory consequences of a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that attempted to define “white.”
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the constitutionality of racial preferences in college admissions. The case was brought on behalf of Asians but applies to all “races.”
The following related questions also should be addressed by the court.
First, does the categorizing of Americans into the six racial/ethnic categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American lead to more or less discrimination and divisiveness?
Second, of the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the US and world, which ones belong in which category?
Third, how do colleges and other institutions identify who belongs in which official category?
Those aren’t glib questions. They are critical questions in view of the fact that the six categories are used for more than college admissions. They also are used in hiring decisions, promotion decisions, and diversity and inclusion decisions.
Some say that race is obvious from physical appearance and is captured very well by the six official categories. For example, it’s obvious that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is white and Justice Clarence Thomas is black. Besides, the argument goes, it’s the reality of human nature to see race in people’s physical appearance.
The essence of this argument is, “We know one when we see one.”
But do we? Should we?
Take Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Based solely on appearance, she’d be seen as a white justice because she looks white—or at least as white as my Italian ancestors. But she is categorized as Hispanic, due to her ethnicity. Left without their own category are scores of other ethnic groups, many of which are mired in poverty and smaller in numbers than Hispanics.
Then there is the science. Physical appearance as an indicator of race is problematic in light of DNA. Of the twenty thousand or so genes in the Human Genome, only a tiny fraction determines skin color, hair texture, facial shape, and other superficial indicators of race. Also, about three percent of the genes of many people, including probably this writer, can be traced to Neanderthals. Moreover, there is the complicating factor of intermarriage, which is like putting genes in a blender and seeing what physical appearance is the result.
The intellectual somersaults of attempting to define race would be hilarious if it were not for the injustices that such attempts have produced throughout history. Woke Americans who believe that whites were immune from such injustices are embarrassingly ignorant of history.
A history lesson:
In the early decades of the twentieth century, “white” was defined very carefully, very narrowly, and very exclusionary in America. It was defined by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment to mean anyone who was Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Excluded from the definition were Jews, Poles, Italians, and other peoples from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Not only were these other people seen as non-white, but they were described in the vilest language possible as being genetically, cognitively, and culturally inferior to WASPs.
The definitional issue came to a head after the First World War, when a question arose about whether all non-citizen soldiers who served in the US military had a right of return to America and ultimately citizenship. It arose because an act called the Emergency Act was being considered in Congress to stop immigration for two years.
The case was brought on behalf of an East Indian who was denied a right of return and citizenship.
In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that of the non-native-born, citizenship was open only to whites and “persons of African descent.” (The latter were included because of legislation that had been passed during Reconstruction.) People of “Asiatic descent,” as the court referred to as the East Indians, were not white and thus ineligible for a right of return.
An aside: Ironically, East Indians now rank first in income in the US. Perhaps this is due to them not being treated paternalistically and not becoming dependent on the welfare state.
The WASP establishment quickly found ways of getting around the decision, in order to continue treating non-WASP Europeans as non-white. One way was to use the pseudo-science of Race Science—which was very popular at the time and endorsed by leading universities—to establish that Italians and others were of Asiatic descent. Another was to subsequently pass the Immigration Act of 1924 to restrict the emigration of people from non-WASP countries.
In the meantime, the State Department did what it could to classify non-WASPs as non-white. After a visit to Europe, State Department officials wrote the following about prospective European immigrants who were not WASPs: Sicilians were “small in stature and of a low order of intelligence”; Polish and Russian Jews were “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits”; and the people of Warsaw were “decidedly inferior . . . physically, mentally and morally.” (Source: The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent.)
Similar views formed the basis of the horrific Eugenics movement, a decades-long movement that was led by leading progressives.
The views were shared by leading newspapers, magazines, universities, and other establishment institutions. One of them was the New York Times, which warned that American institutions were being menaced by swarms of aliens who were bringing “diseases of ignorance and Bolshevism,” as well as “loathsome diseases of the flesh.”
Another was the Saturday Evening Post. Its purported expert on immigration was interviewed in Kennebunkport, Maine, by the Boston Herald. A few days later, the Herald ran the headline, DANGER THAT WORLD SCUM WILL DEMORALIZE AMERICA.
Many of those institutions still exist today but now see themselves as woke. As a result, they support racial preferences in colleges and in diversity and inclusion initiatives in government, industry, and elsewhere—preferences that exclude whites (and Asians). They don’t define “white,” but what they mean by the word can be inferred from the ethnocultural groups that they exclude from the preferences.
WASPs are one of the excluded white groups, ironically. So are Americans of Jewish descent and of Eastern and Southern European descent. The same for scores of other whitish-looking minority groups, such as Armenians, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, and Iranians.
One hundred years ago, whites were categorized in a way that furthered discrimination. Today, they are categorized in a way that furthers discrimination. Likewise for Asians.
This is progress? This is social justice?
It’s time for the Supreme Court to stop the intellectual acrobatics.
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Craig J. Cantoni is an author and former business executive who spent a career at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity.