My color 'tis of thee

...The alternative is to recognize that race is morally irrelevant and to insist upon a regime in which citizens are equal before the law and the government stops classifying and granting preferences on the basis of skin color...

...So nervous are bureaucrats about exposing the ambiguity of their racial classifications that no one has dared to go after his scalp...

...That is why, when the Census Bureau conducts hearings on whether it should stop categorizing citizens by color, the groups lined up in opposition are not the skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan but rather mainstream civil rights groups...

...He was right...

...Hispanic" too is not a racial but a linguistic classification, which refers to Spanish-speaking people of white, black, and native Indian heritage...

...Black" seems a comparatively clear category, but in fact it is no less dubious...

...The reason is the historical peculiarity of laws in the American South governing slavery and segregation...

...government," my poli-cy-wonk friend retorted...

...rather, the term is a continental description for such racially and culturally disparate peoples as the light-skinned Chinese and the dark-skinned Pakistanis...

...America runs the risk of developing its own version of the Nuremberg laws and thus inviting a grim future of balkanization and ethnic conflict...

...Dinesh D'Souza is John M. Olin scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The End of Racism...

...Since jobs and benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, these racial scams have become commonplace...

...Whatever the past justification for racial classification and race-based preferences, it should be apparent that, in a multiracial America, the system is bound to break down...

...My Color 'tis of Thee by Dinesh D'Souza Afew months ago a colleague who works at a Washington, D.C., research foundation asked me whether I considered my two-year-old daughter, who has a white mother and an East Indian dad, to be "white" or "Asian...

...Segregation institutionalized the infamous "one-drop rule," according to which a person was considered black if he possessed any evident trace of black ancestry...

...Despite their familiarity, consider how inappropriate are today's official racial categories: white, black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian, and "other...

...Not according to the U.S...

...Graham sighs, "My child has been white on the United States Census, black at school, and multiracial at home—all at the same time...

...And in the latest comic twist, Hawaiian groups have demanded that Hawaiians be removed from the Asian/Pacific Islanders category and reclassified as American Indians...

...Neither, I replied...

...Biologists and anthropologists tell us that the overwhelming majority of African Americans have both black and white heritage...

...Now for the first time, these official classifications are coming under serious challenge—from scholars who regard them as scientifically bogus, from parents of mixed-race children who refuse to make them choose between competing categories, and from citizens who have grown exasperated with the practice of allocating government benefits and privileges on the basis of pigmentation...

...Now as before, racial classification is the servant of state-sponsored discrimination, a term that accurately describes many contemporary affirmative action programs...

...government has been classifying citizens by skin color, a measure necessary to implement affirmative action programs, which affect public hiring, university admissions, contracting and set-asides, even the shape of racially gerrymandered voting districts...

...So-called Asians aren't a racial group...

...These groups insist that without racial classification it would be impossible to enforce racial preferences in government policy...

...Bizarre...

...So why are persons like Whitney Houston and Jesse Jackson, despite their mixed ancestry, automatically classified as black...

...For a generation now the U.S...

...now it works for us...

...She's beyond racial classification...

...Lots of anthropological sophistry is invoked to prove that the Hawaiians didn't really emigrate to this continent from Asia, but what's actually at stake are gambling privileges currently available to American Indians and not to Asians and Pacific Islanders...

...One regular recipient of federal and state affirmative action contracts is a fellow who looks very much like a white guy but who is officially considered a person of color because he claims to have 1/64th Cherokee Indian ancestry...

...I called the Census Bureau and was informed that little Danielle should be listed as "white," because mixed-race children are expected to take the race of their mother...

...The Arab American Institute now insists that citizens of Middle Eastern descent, who are currently counted as white, be given a separate affirmative action category of their own...

...In the era of Bull Connor, the old sheriff of Birmingham, the one-drop rule worked against minorities...

...Exactly," the Census official replied, adding in a low voice, "You see, in these kinds of cases we know the mother's background but we cannot always identify the father...

...It makes no sense to force this new generation of mixed-race citizens into the Procrustean bed of official racial categories...

...We are now living in a cafe au lait society where an increasing proportion of blacks, one-quarter of Hispanics, and one-third of Asian Americans marry outside their group...

...In the antebellum era, slave status passed through the mother, a system designed to ensure that the illegitimate offspring of a white planter and his black concubine remained in servitude...

...Amazingly, the rules developed by slaveowners and segregationists to define sharp lines of demarcation between the races and to enforce a thoroughgoing system of separation and oppression are the same rules used by government agencies to classify American citizens today...

...And consider the case of Susan Graham, a white woman married to a black man in Roswell, Georgia...

...Graham reports that although the Census Bureau counts her children as white, at her son's public school the teacher was asked to classify the child based upon appearance and decided that he was black...

...You mean," I said, "if her father were white and her mother were Indian, she would be classified instead as Asian...