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
You may as well say all breeds of dogs are the same. I mean they’re all dogs aren’t they. Poodles and pit bulls are the same thing.
I have eyes -—— and when I meet someone, I can tell what color they are because I am looking at them. I can tell if they are black, white, brown or yellow or whatever.
But when we start talking together, I see the real person and that is what counts. It is what is inside that person I relate to —— not the outside.
Actually, world history is all about race. Race is the defining differentiation between nations. Race and the religious racial traits are what form politics and nations and the wars to maintain those differences
The modern attempt at racial integration is a foolish attempt to rid the world of war. The attempt at racial integration in The United States is the nutshell example to extrapolate around the world.
Although there are many many success stories that speak well for the attempt, the Africanization and decline and even destruction of America’s great cities belie the fact. The cities are in many ways the retribalization of the African based people into neo african society. The very population that was supposed to benefit has set its self aside back into segregated and then failed cities.
Race is infact not a mental construct but the very basic genetic differentation among humans. To say otherwise is just ignorance
Ok, I’ll bite, where in the Bible does it say race is a construct of Satan?
Race isn’t just “skin color”. That’s a lie liberals have been pushing for the last hundred years.
Yes but when a bitch is in heat, the breeds of either the males or that female involved makes no difference. The deed will be done.
Sex is Etched in Our DNA, But Race Is All in Our Heads
A self-evident statement. And, what we call race is not race. Cut any person and he will bleed one of the four blood types. What really divides us is culture.
Jesus didn’t say anything about race. He did call the Caananite woman a dog however and the Phraisies children of Satan. He also said he only came for “the House of Israel” implying that he wasn’t here for everybody. So if anything is looks like Jesus was a racist.
it’s possible Jesus did not grasp the complexity of racial complexity beyond his very limited knowledge
“So if anything is looks like Jesus was a racist.”
A racist blasphemer eh.
Son of Satan?
Dog of the devil?
Or just ignorant and proud of it?
I always write Human for race when I get those forms from the government
Excellent point.
Really? So skin color, facial features, diseases, ethnic culture etc are all just a figment?
One of the biggest lies of our time.
Very snarky.
Did Jesus call the Caananite woman a dog yes or no?
Did Jesus call the Pharisies children of the devil yes or no?
Patent nonsense.
That's a construct of culture, not of race. As Dr. Thomas Sowell pointed out, there were segregated black schools in various cities which academically outperformed their white counterparts before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. The reason was not race, but a culture of parents who had high expectations and valued education.
Unfortunately, for most of Black Americans, the yahoo culture of single parenthood, government dependence, rap and hip-hop overwhelmed the culture of parents who had high expectations and valued education.
You accept the differences between the sexes but refuse to see the more subtle differences between the races, you need to be praying for wisdom.
he epithet “RACIST” doesn’t mean any thing any more.
There are distinct differences beteween the races that doctors need to take into account when treating patients.
However, it is wrong and unconstitutional for government to give out special favors to some individuals based on their race.
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