American apartheid

The controversy over a multiracial category on
census forms shows that racial and ethnic advocacy groups
aren't worried about fairness
as much as they're worried about spoils.

By David Horowitz

Jul 18, 1997 | a Clinton task force has unanimously recommended against adding a multiracial category to census forms, which now only list four official races: white, black, American Indian and Alaskan Native, and Asian and Pacific Islander. According to the Los Angeles Times, the recommendation marks a victory for "traditional civil rights and ethnic advocacy groups -- such as the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza" -- because a multiracial category would dilute their numbers and decrease their benefits. The wrangling over whether to add the category pitted these older civil rights groups against newer multiracial advocacy groups. Welcome to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the new American apartheid. Begin anywhere: Asians, to pick only one of those official categories, are not a race. The NAACP is not an ethnic advocacy group -- it is concerned about a race. The National Council of La Raza ("The Race") is an ethnic advocacy group, but neither Hispanics nor Latinos -- the ethnic constituencies it claims to represent -- are actual ethnicities, in my opinion. They are language groups, and in the case of Latinos, not even that. Moreover, the terms Latino and Hispanic cover not only different but polarized ethnicities, nationalities and races (e.g., the Mexican Indians of Chiapas and their European-descended oppressors). Finally, neither the NAACP nor La Raza are concerned for civil rights these days, judging by their advocacy of racial and ethnic preferences generally, and the zeal with which they have opposed the civil rights claims of multiracial Americans in this case. As the multiracial latecomers have discovered, there is no room for them at the (so-called) civil rights table. Despite creating their own advocacy institutions modeled on what has become of the civil rights struggle, (including a march on Washington to protest their under-representation), they have come up virtually empty in their quest for a census box. There is not going to be a Tiger Woods band in the American rainbow -- no designation for the one-quarter white, one-eighth black, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-eighth Indian American. Of course, Clinton administration liberals didn't neglect to throw a crumb to the multiracial latecomers, namely, the ability to check off multiple boxes if they so choose. A spokesperson for a multiracial group, Susan Graham, president of an organization called Project Race, welcomed this small victory while insisting that her troops would continue to pursue the multiracial category: "As it is, my children cannot be multiracial children. My children can be check-all-that-apply children and I do not consider that fair." Well, it's not really about fairness, Susan. It's about a racial/ethnic (check-one-of-the-above) spoils system, which is the sorry mess that civil rights advocacy has become since the assassination of Martin Luther King. What is at stake here, of course, is not rights but entitlements: the set asides, grants, voting district lines and other government (and now private) handouts that serve as payoffs to the racial/ethnic grievance-mongers that a disintegrating civil rights movement has spawned. Otherwise, who could be against a multiracial census category that, if adopted, would embody the celebrated "American mosaic"? Actually, I would be against it. I say this not only as a veteran of the once venerable civil rights struggle, but as the grandfather of three beautiful granddaughters who would qualify for the box that will not appear on your next national census -- and thus will not qualify for the affirmative action perks, the special even if you don't really need them scholarships and the minority even if you have to subcontract them to someone who is actually qualified to do the job contracts. Of course, my granddaughters will be able to fill a racial box anyway (which happens to be black) and qualify for all these perks if they just tick off the category that includes that part of their racial/ethnic (take-your-pick) chromosomes that make the Clinton liberals and other social engineers of the new American apartheid feel good about themselves. I use the word apartheid advisedly, because apartheid in its origins as well as its development was nothing more than an affirmative action program for the Boer minority (oppressed by the English), and because the term multiracial as a government category immediately brought to my mind a trip I took to South Africa in the last days of the system where I encountered the term "colored" or "mixed-race" as an emblem of the extreme to which affirmative action programs can eventually lead. The current multiracial census fiasco ought to set off an alarm bell to the nation that we are headed down a terribly wrong path. We have already become a race-conscious society in a way that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago, when the phrase "without regard to race, color or creed," was still invoked whenever anyone wanted to sum up the American Way. Where will the present path lead -- down a road to deeper and more bitter racial divisions, ugly struggles over diminishing racial spoils, increasing civil conflict and eventually a South African future? Or perhaps just further into the realm of the ridiculous, and the just plain stupid? I have no idea. But you can check one of the above.

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