Choose Your Race

In his thoughtful reflection on the Supreme Court's affirmative-action ruling, Jonathan raises the prospect of people trying to fake membership in this or that race in order to achieve certain benefits. Jonathan writes:

If you think that I am being unrealistic and people won’t petition to change race to get benefits, you haven’t been paying attention to highly motivated parents who are getting their kids diagnoses of attention deficit disorder in order to get them more time on tests.

True enough. Also witness those who suddenly decided they were "Native Americans" after tribes were allowed to open casinos. Or, personally, I have a friend who has one white parent and one Asian one. When he applied to college, he carefully kept the Asian parent a secret -- and marked "white" on all the forms -- knowing that Asians, generally, are discriminated against in admissions, for fear that there are "too many" of them in higher education.

Is this healthy? Getting people to obsess over ethnicity, to deny their own family members and heritage? I'm with Jonathan, I don't want a government that looks at me as a member of a race, rather than as an individual.

Whatever happened to the content of our character?