I am not an expert on this subject, so let me lay that out up front. I’ve always respected and enjoyed my fellow Americans who celebrate their national and ethnic cultures. They are interesting of their own accord, and it’s always a pungent reminder of how diverse our society is. I would always encourage this on an individual or group level. We have so much to learn from each other, and framing some of this wisdom in ethnic or national terms - though most wisdom is in fact universal - is fine with me. But when the Government steps in to manage and measure us by skin color (it’s not “race” - we’re all the same race) or artificial ethnicity (like Hispanic, or Pacific Islander, or even “white”), and this of course extends to the institutions they support, like universities, they merely create chaos and discord. Quotas by definition can never be fair. They only divide us and delay our progress as a society. In short, people should celebrate ethnicity as they see fit, and government should be agnostic. France, which does not keep statistics based on race, recognizes this. Sure there are disagreements there as here, but the absence of government gerrymandering forces disputants to debate ideas rather than reduce disagreements to artificial racial distinctions.
I am not an expert on this subject, so let me lay that out up front. I’ve always respected and enjoyed my fellow Americans who celebrate their national and ethnic cultures. They are interesting of their own accord, and it’s always a pungent reminder of how diverse our society is. I would always encourage this on an individual or group level. We have so much to learn from each other, and framing some of this wisdom in ethnic or national terms - though most wisdom is in fact universal - is fine with me. But when the Government steps in to manage and measure us by skin color (it’s not “race” - we’re all the same race) or artificial ethnicity (like Hispanic, or Pacific Islander, or even “white”), and this of course extends to the institutions they support, like universities, they merely create chaos and discord. Quotas by definition can never be fair. They only divide us and delay our progress as a society. In short, people should celebrate ethnicity as they see fit, and government should be agnostic. France, which does not keep statistics based on race, recognizes this. Sure there are disagreements there as here, but the absence of government gerrymandering forces disputants to debate ideas rather than reduce disagreements to artificial racial distinctions.