Who Is Asian? Hispanic? Native American?

by Steve Sailer

Published in Greensboro News & Record, 3/24/91, 900 words

Affirmative action was invented to help African-Americans, but the concept has since been stretched to cover other minorities and one majority (women). Roughly 70% of the current U.S. population now qualifies for affirmative action, and several billion foreigners are potential beneficiaries. Despite the financial importance of ethnicity, government bodies have made only whimsical attempts to rationalize their racial definitions. The result is endless amusement for connoisseurs of bureaucratic befuddlement:

Immigrants. Since employers can count immigrants, no matter how new, toward meeting their government-mandated racial "goals," affirmative action encourages immigration, legal and otherwise, from most countries outside Northern Europe. Yet the government simultaneously spends hundreds of millions annually trying to round up and ship back "surplus" immigrants. (How all this helps African-Americans remains obscure.)

Who is Hispanic? The official but vague Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) definition is: "All persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race." State and local bureaucracies have concocted more specific guidelines. For example, "Hispanic-surnamed" is popular, although blatantly sexist. A red-haired friend of mine qualifies because his father was Mexican, though his mother was Icelandic. Why should the government care which parent was which?

A competing definition is "someone who grew up in a Spanish speaking household or was born in a Spanish-speaking country." This favors recent immigrants over longer-resident, English-speaking Hispanic families. It also discourages families from teaching their kids English. Further, it would exclude plenty of obvious candidates. For example, the late musical prodigy Ritchie Valens (Ricardo Valenzuela), a hero to Mexican-Americans, was raised speaking only English (he learned the Spanish lyrics to "La Bamba" phonetically). Finally, it includes Spaniards and Teutonic Paraguayans named Klaus who don't like to talk about what their fathers were doing 1933-1945.

In practice, just about anybody with an imaginative lawyer has a fighting chance to be Hispanic. For example, the Federal Communications Commission awarded a sizable tax break after conceding that a radio station buyer, a Polish-born man named Liberman, was Hispanic. (Some of Senor Liberman's ancestors were Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.) In the notorious Wedtech minority set-aside scandal, the central crook, John Mariotta, was of Italian descent and surname and was born in New York. Since his parents were born in Puerto Rico, however, his firm qualified for massive noncompetitive government contracts.

Marlo Thomas, Asian. Despite their rapid progress, Asians are still favored by some hiring programs. However, since Asia sprawls from the Bering Sea to the Suez Canal, a remarkable variety of people are either currently covered or could logically demand to be classified as Asian. The EEOC presently lumps together East Asians with Pakistanis and Indians, despite the fact that many Indians are descended from the Indo-European proto-race that also overran the Roman Empire and settled Europe. It seems doubtful that bureaucracies that consider Indian Caucasians as Asians can long resist granting favored Asian status to all Asians, including our rapidly growing Middle Eastern population.

QUESTION: Which celebrities are of Asian extraction: consumer advocate Ralph Nader, M*A*S*H cast member Jamie Farr, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, White House chief of staff John Sununu, quarterback Doug Flutie, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, former California governor George Deukmejian, or former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze?

ANSWER: All of them.

Racial Purity. One bureaucratic rule of thumb requires that a candidate for minority status have at least one minority parent. But how "pure" must that parent have been? Sir Winston Churchill, the grandson of a duke, might well have qualified: he was 1/16th Iroquois. In contrast, a blue- eyed contractor named Jon McGrath has obtained $19 million in municipal works minority subcontracts for being 1/64th Cherokee. (More somberly, the requirement that they must choose only one group can emotionally brutalize biracial children, who often feel they must decide which parent to reject.)

The Ultimate Loophole. According to the EEOC, you can belong to any protected minority with which you "identify." Since most people identify with their self-interests, anybody can plausibly claim to sincerely identify with anything. The Corsican Buonaparte, the Austrian Hitler, and the Georgian Stalin, for example, had little trouble identifying with the French, Germans, and Russians (respectively) when circumstances required.

Why haven't government agencies rationalized these crucial distinctions? Probably because there is no ultimate rationale behind the concept of race. Examined closely, any government policy of classifying individual humans along racial lines turns out to be arbitrary. Now that even the Republic of South Africa appears inclined to stop classifying by race, it's time for Americans to strongly question the affirmative action programs that make this task necessary (but no less hopeless).

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Steve Sailer (steveslr@aol.com) is a businessman and writer.