Dartblog

For those among you in need of a non-narcotic sleep aid, or desirous of seeing how things work in the nether intestinal regions of the federal government, or simply in search of evidence for how screwed up things can be, I give you the Department of Education’s 13-page guidance on racial data collection for educational institutions.

However, before you begin thinking about the document’s content, please reflect on how many hours (and dollars) it took for a small army of DOE attorneys to draft this material, solicit comment from all of the well-meaning groups with irons in the spoils fire, revise it endlessly, and then finally publish it so that Dartmouth could then hire more people to work in the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity to gather information and allocate students to their appropriate racial category. Nero fiddled all the while.

We have previously reported with approval in this space on President Kim’s distaste for the manner in which races are classified and the overall approach to diversity on America’s campuses, but the Department of Education’s guidelines seems to harken back to a different time. As Circuit Court Judge Boggs wrote in his dissent in the Gutter case regarding affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan, such characterizations are not without precedent:

The Law School gives no explanation of how it defines the groups to be favored. This means that ultimately it must make, on some basis, a decision on who is, and is not, an “African-American, Hispanic, or Native American.” … Such judgments, of course, have a long and sordid history. The classic Southern Rule was that any African ancestry, or “one drop” of African blood, made one black. The Nazi Nuremberg laws made the fatal decision turn on the number of Jewish grandparents. “Hispanic” background may, I suppose, depend on which side of a pass in the Pyrenees your great-grandfather came from.

So would Tiger Woods be considered Asian or Black under the federal guidelines, or both? Damned if I can figure it out. But we can all agree that he is a gentleman and a fine golfer. That’s enough for me.

Addendum 01.27.2011: An alert reader from the Class of 2011 has pointed out that the above post has been overtaken by events, at least as regards Tiger Woods’ status as a gentleman. Please consider the penultimate sentence in this post to be replaced by the following:

But we can all agree that he is at heart a cad and a bounder, even if on occasion a fine golfer.