astro
April 5, 2003, 12:50am
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The essay below by Nat Hentoff addresses the question how the government will decide who is a minority and who is not regarding the application of affirmative action remedies.
How do you decide this issue? What would be a fair way to make this determination in an increasingly racially blended society?Who Decides Who’s Black or Hispanic?
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An especially challenging question concerning affirmative action was not addressed at all by the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan case in oral arguments last week. Indeed, most of the supporters of affirmative action have also evaded that question entirely.
The first reference I found to the question was in Justice William O. Douglas’s dissent in Defunis v. Odegaard (1974). (A white applicant to the University of Washington Law School in Seattle claimed he was rejected because of the school’s racial preference policy.)
Douglas wrote that in this kind of case, “one must immediately determine which groups are to receive such favored treatment and which are to be excluded . . . and even the criteria by which to determine whether an individual is a member of a favored group.” (Emphasis added).
In his book The Minority Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2002), John Skrentny, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, became much more disturbingly specific: “Policymakers or the courts will have to decide just how much of a minority one has to be to qualify, and how the government can verify minority status. This decision will require what policymakers have avoided from the beginning: a massive study of which groups are actually discriminated against and to what degree—when, where, and how.”
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