Curbing Racial Classifications

• Pages: 385-393
• Date: 01 July 2024
• Published date: 01 July 2024
• Author: Jonathan Berry
• Subject Matter: Derecho Público y Administrativo

Curbing Racial Classif‌ications

JONATHAN BERRY*

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385

I. THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE CREATED OUR CURRENT RACIAL

CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM AND NOW REQUIRES IT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386

A. The creation of our modern racial classif‌ication scheme . . . . 386

B. Racial classif‌ication mandates .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388

II. RACIAL CLASSIFICATION CREATES MOMENTUM TOWARDS RACIAL

DISCRIMINATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389

A. A Private Sector Parable: How DEI Took Over Companies . . 389

B. Public Sector Application: The DEI Infrastructure of

Agencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

C. Case Study: The Lifecycle of a Racial Classif‌ication . . . . . . . 392

III. RACIAL CLASSIFICATION ITSELF MUST BE EXPELLED FROM OUR

GOVERNMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393

INTRODUCTION

Harvard’s aff‌irmative action woes have sparked a new national conversation.

In that context, I would like to look upstream from aff‌irmative action or other pro-

grams that assign benef‌its or burdens on the basis of race, to the very act of classi-

fying by race.

In my view, an original sin—a root of the evil of today’s diversity, equity, and

inclusion regime—is the act of classifying all Americans on the basis of race and

ethnicity and reporting the results. The administrative state plays a crucial role in

spreading classif‌ication. As Professor David Bernstein has ably documented, the

administrative state has transformed race into a comprehensive, bureaucratic sys-

tem which entailed drawing somewhat arbitrary lines. By doing so, it made racial

and ethnic sorting “legible” and thus able to be acted upon by both governmental

and private decisionmakers. Unsurprisingly, just about every imaginable apparatus

* Jonathan Berry is managing partner of the law and strategy f‌irm Boyden Gray PLLC, and is the

former head of rulemaking of the U.S. Department of Labor. © 2024, Jonathan Berry.

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