IF RACE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT THEN CONSTRUCT YOUR OWN

What the Supreme Court doesn't know about race (Paul Greenberg, June 30, 2003, Jewish World Review)

I am sitting here tying to think of when I became race-conscious. And I can't. Maybe I never did - another of my numerous failings. I've gone all the way back to childhood, to the kitchen behind the shoe store on Texas Avenue in Shreveport. And I can't find that one decisive moment, that loss of innocence recorded in portentous tones in one Southern novel after another.

Now, roughly ages later, I sit and read a Supreme Court decision that says race matters after all. It matters so much that you need a certain number of this race and that race in law school classes in order to, yes, break down artificial racial categories. You've got to discriminate in order to end discrimination. It may be the funniest Supreme Court decision I've ever read, if unintentionally so.

What's more, you need a certain number of black students in law schools in order to form a "critical mass," whatever that is, but it doesn't take as many Hispanic students to do so, and it takes even fewer American Indians. I give up. Here is still another foreign language. Only this one doesn't make sense, as if it were written for some purely abstract world that exists out in space, or only in law books.

It's all so much hocus-pocus to me, like the idea of race itself so long ago on Texas Avenue. I sit here reading Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion, and I'm puzzled. I can't get my mind around it. I laugh out loud here and there, and think: Shoot, I knew better than that when I was 6 years old.

Here's what we'd like to know: do college admissions departments do geneaologies and blood tests? Why don't white kids just start saying they're African-American or Native-American or whatever ethnicity is stylish these days? Who's going to check up on them? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 30, 2003 9:53 AM