Who benefits from racial divisiveness?

Victor Davis Hanson points out that

In an ever more racially diverse society where intermarriage is routine and assimilation often rapid, we have no discernible rules for what determines one’s race.

The charlatan Ward Churchill, a noted activist, tried — and succeeded in — fabricating a Native American identity to land a job at the University of Colorado. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren invented a Native American pedigree and so became Harvard Law School’s first recognized Native American professor. When other elites hyphenate their last names and accentuate first names, they remind us that without such IDs, one might not otherwise learn — or care about — their particular racial pedigree.

But even if some can prove ethnically pure heritages, who gets an edge in racially mixed-up America and who does not — and why?

Will the tens of thousands of Central American children who recently crossed illegally into America soon be eligible for affirmative action? If so, on what grounds? That America welcomed, fed, clothed, and schooled those who were all but driven out from their oppressive Central American governments?

Will these newcomers soon be eligible for special consideration in a way that Syrian refugees who are scheduled to arrive legally to the United States will not?

In truth, the criterion for affirmative action is not superficial appearance. (Syrians are perhaps as much non-white in appearance as Central Americans.) It is not past discrimination. (Central American dictators have been as unkind as Syrian dictators.) Nor is it present prejudice. (Both groups are new to the United States and not past victims of American discrimination.)

Why continue with divisive racial self-identification?

Too many of our ethnic aristocrats and politicians benefit from a fossilized system of a past century that is now largely irrelevant in 21st-century America.

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