Posted on 03/21/2016 6:32:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
At Milton Academy, the tony Massachusetts prep school, the longstanding "one boy, one girl" rule requiring equal representation on the student council has been scrapped. The student government voted this month to move beyond what the council's cochairman refers to as the "archaic norms" of male and female, and instead "accept the world and the people within it the way they are now."
To which I say: Out of the mouth of babes.
To be sure, there is nothing archaic about the labeling of human beings as either male or female. The distinction between the sexes is objective and fixed, and written into the DNA of every individual. (In rare cases, congenital irregularities can cause an infant to be born with intersex ambiguity.) Nevertheless, Milton's well-intentioned student leaders want to be as accommodating as possible toward students who are transgender or "grappling with their identities." Hence the vote to repeal the student council's gender-based quota proviso.
In practical terms, nothing will change at Milton, where the student body is divided equally between boys and girls, and no one has much difficulty telling one from the other. But let's give the kids credit for a sound insight: As a matter of fundamental fairness, quotas should not be tied to rigid classifications that cannot be clearly defined.
Do gender quotas pose that problem? No. But racial quotas certainly do.
American society is awash with race-based quotas, check-offs, preferences, and diversity policies. In countless settings — from college admissions to workplace hiring, from government contracts to legislative redistricting — opportunities and benefits are tied to racial percentages. Twelve decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious Supreme Court decision in which eight justices upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, Americans are labeled and sorted by race more obsessively than ever. It was in Plessy that Justice John Harlan delivered his ringing dissent: "Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. . . . The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color."
Harlan's fierce insistence that Americans are not to be treated differently on the basis of race became the great objective of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. "Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life," argued Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. "There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race."
Marshall's statement was even truer than he could have imagined. Today we know for a fact what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Race is not biological. It is a social construct, not a genetic reality. The DNA of blacks cannot be distinguished from the DNA of Asians or the DNA of whites. Unlike our sex, which is stamped in our chromosomes, our racial and ethnic identities are purely subjective.
"I am an African American, but in parts of Africa, I am white," says Stanford professor Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine. When research in West Africa requires her to fly from California to France to Senegal, she told Harvard Magazine in a 2008 interview, "My race changes as I cross the Atlantic." In the United States she is black; in France she is considered métisse, or mixed-race; in Senegal, everyone regards her as white.
Of course human beings vary widely in their appearance. Populations from different parts of the world differ notably in their skin color, facial features, and hair texture. But those distinctions are superficial, not racial. They have no immutable significance. They contribute no more to "diversity" than right- and left-handedness do. To rely on such criteria when hiring employees or drawing electoral maps or assessing a corporate board is about as sensible as consulting a Magic 8 Ball.
Racial definitions change constantly. The US Census Bureau has regularly revised the categories it uses to measure race. In 1890, census enumerators divided Americans into eight racial groups: "White," "Black," "Mulatto," "Quadroon," "Octoroon," "Chinese," "Japanese," and "Indian." The most recent census, in 2010, generated data for 63 racial categories — "six single-race categories and 57 different combinations of two or more races," as a government press release announced at the time. Orlando Patterson, the prominent sociologist, has observed that federal immigration authorities used to classify Irish, Italians, and Jews as separate races.
With millions of Americans marrying across the color lineand raising biracial or multiracial children, our ubiquitous affirmative-action check-offs and diversity quotas become more nonsensical — and unjust — by the day. The present fashion for treating "Hispanic" as a quasi-racial category exacerbates the problem. Hispanic identity is not a distinctive and heritable characteristic; it's an ancestral affiliation that fades over time. That is why immigrants from Latin America commonly describe their identity with reference to their Hispanic origin, while a majority of their grandchildren call themselves simply . . . American.
What is true of Hispanics is true of other racial/ethnic groups. A study published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that when respondents are asked to specify their race, 96 percent immigrants from Asia self-identify as Asian. But that rate falls to 79 percent for their children, and only 58 percent for their grandchildren.
In the ways that matter most — how they label themselves, whom they marry — tens of millions of Americans have no use for racial pigeonholes. To turn those pigeonholes into litmus tests for employment or voting rights or college admissions is, as Thurgood Marshall said of Jim Crow, "irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life."
In a nation that aspires to meritocracy, quotas of any kind are an embarrassment. Racial quotas should be unthinkable. Our DNA has always known that race is only a delusion. When will our law and public policy catch up
Right, there are no differences in the races, we all act, sound and live alike.........
“The DNA of blacks cannot be distinguished from the DNA of Asians or the DNA of whites” -— That is not true.
Sometimes certain demographics exhibit the same traits over and over again especially if they have exhibited the same unique traits for a significant duration of time.. Most often we notice the negative ones because they affect us directly. Traits like viiolence, criminal behavior, gang behavior, etc...and we regard them as a demographic with undesirable traits. Are we being racist.? No we’re being observant.
Oh brother, here comes the lame “race is merely a construct” people.
It’s laughable, at this point, to entertainthis leftist propaganda.
Are you being snarky or being serious here? Race itself is a construct of Satan. Jesus never made ANY distinction in the way someone looked, their features or the how much melanin they have in their skin. If you really believe in the concept of "Race" then you need to pray and search your heart why you feel you need to think that way. Cultures, absolutely different but we ARE all the same under our skin, we share the same anatomy, same brain, same everything. Only morons and imbeciles cling to the concept of race.
Racism is from the Tower of Babel.
Wait wait wait wait wait.... hold on... wait... I thought sex (as in gender) was a choice. We have politicians all over the country saying men can go into women bathrooms if the CHOOSE to be women. Bruce Jenner is called "she" because he "chose" to be female. Now this yahoo is saying sex is somehow genetic and not a choice? ppphhhhttttttt
Agreed. Sickle Cell comes to mind right off the bat.
Why do you feel you need to cling to the construct of race? Can you point me anywhere in God's book where he distinguishes race? I'll take his word over your OPINION, an uneducated and racist one. If there is one segment of people which need to be purged from our movement it's redneck imbeciles and closet racists who really do hate people darker or different themselves and use welfare as a canard for their hatred.. Do you believe Jews are a different race? If you do, you have something in common with Himmler. Margaret Sanger was a big believer in racism.
This thread is a moron magnet. Of course there are DNA difference, just like your DNA differs from your spouse and any of your relatives. We all have different DNA. Are you saying black, Asian, Jews, etc are DIFFERENT than you? Don’t be obtuse. do you really think a person with more melanin in their skin is genetically different on a fundamental level, like there are subspecies of people? Charles Murray’s book is the most misquoted and misinterpreted.
I do not “cling to the concept of race”.
I cling to the concept of science, and this article is full of falsehoods.
Smart people can separate science from politics.
In fact etched into all animal DNA is measured sexual diversity. The way nature works to maybe better the species, or not.
Folks with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry get a disease called Tay-Sachs at a far higher rate than non-Ashkenazi ancestry folks.
I guess that’s all just a construct, and people who point that out, like doctors and scientists, are rayciss.
An individual, a family, a nation cannot function, that rejects fundamental realities.
NEWSFLASH! Male/Female is settled science. Gender deniers are worse then flat worlders. Even flat worlders knew if they were boys or girls!
No, you’re being racist. Those elements are cultural and learned.
But perhaps you know better than Jesus??
It would be better to say “cultures.”
This is nonsense. Scientists can tell the race of a person just from a sample of blood. Furthermore, their are race specific medicines designed for different races of people.
there
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