How to Bust the ‘Race Is a Construct’ Myth

Rachel Dolezal was ahead of her time. A proposed regulation in Delaware would let public-school students choose not only their own sex and “preferred name” but also their race. The regulation would reportedly apply to students as young as five. What’s more, the new rule would not require that parents be notified of their child’s choices, so as to protect children who are “living in fear” because they don’t want their parents to know they are homosexual or transgender.

The premise of government rather than Mom and Dad acting as parents is ominous. The “Non-Governmental Organizations” lobbying for this regulation, including a group called “Equality Delaware,” are working to promote government involvement in areas no other generation would have tolerated. If this regulation is approved, once your child is sent to a public school in Delaware, he or she (or “ze” if certain activists get their way) is in some respects no longer yours. “Ze” could be officially recognized at school as a lesbian girl named Constanza, whereas you always thought he was a heterosexual boy named Fred. A judge has already stripped parents of custody for denying “hormone treatment” to a child who claimed to be transgender, so the implications of this regulation could be nightmarish.

One Republican official complained the bill is “taking our eye off the ball,” pointing out that the state should be more concerned about improving student performance than setting transgender policy. “We have one school that has a 3-percent math proficiency and there are issues educating our kids [across the state],” said State Rep. Rich Collins. Andrea Rashbaum, who has a transgender child, says the problem is that unless there are specific protections for such children, you can’t expect them to learn. “Similar to how hungry children can’t perform, a child who feels unheard and misunderstood can’t focus on reading or math scores,” she says.

Rep. Collins’s “3 percent” example was probably Bayard Middle School in Wilmington, which recently turned in that dismal performance for the second straight year. Contra Mrs. Rashbaum, the most likely explanation is not that 97 percent of Bayard’s students are unheard and misunderstood transgenders, but that the schools is almost entirely black and Hispanic. Perhaps, not coincidentally, the school is about 3 percent white.

Letting children choose their race, however, could have even more sweeping ramifications than letting them choose their sex or erotic orientation. Race stops becoming a “social construct” when it comes to divvying up resources, and there are clear advantages to being non-white.

For example, despite all we hear about the alleged oppression of Indians, tribal membership is jealously guarded. The Cherokee Nation only recently admitted defeat after a decade-long attempt to kick blacks out of the tribe; they were descendants of slaves owned by Cherokees. As even leftists admit, membership in an Indian tribe confers real benefits, which is why so many people are interested in finding Indians in their lineage. Membership is determined through descent, not through feelings. The Bureau of Indian Affairs issues an official document for this purpose called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood.

The rest of society is not so strict. For the most part, a person’s “official” race is, like what Aaron Burr once said of law: whatever is “boldly asserted and plausibly maintained,” though believability imposes some limits. Mixed-race people can choose whichever identity they “feel,” though there may be an element of calculation as well. As the authors of one study noted, “[S]elf-categorizing as minority may lead to practical benefits in the form of perceived eligibility for minority resources or affirmative action.” There can also be social benefits, such as being able to dismiss criticism as “racism.” “White privilege” is the privilege no one wants.

The line between delusion and belief can be thin. Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose claims of Indian ancestry have been mocked by President Trump and much of the national press, cried when she had to defend her claim publicly. As for Rachel Dolezal, her claim to be black was good for her career before she was publicly humiliated. She wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last to adopt a new racial identity.

The “flight from white” is even more plausible for Hispanics, who, according to the U.S. government, can be of any race. Jorge Ramos and Juan Hernandez have built careers by identifying themselves with the indigenous peasants of Latin America rather than the gringos they resemble.

If the Delaware regulation goes into effect, whites could take advantage of the system through what is known as malicious compliance: the practice of strictly following orders knowing that harm will result. In this case, if enough whites identity as the most politically advantageous race, they could blow up the system, in a kind of Cloward-Piven strategy for racialists.

In Brazil, dubious claims are so common that a board has been set up to investigate the racial ancestry of people who ask for affirmative action benefits. This assumes that race is an objective reality, not a social construct or subjective self-image. Those who say whiteness is a “social construct” are caught in a trap. If they impose a biological test for affirmative action, they are admitting that race is a biological reality. (They would also have to create a racial standard for “Hispanic.”) And the reason they would have to do this is because being recognized as non-white is a privilege, not a burden.

Of course, malicious compliance could have unintended consequences. Whatever the original intent, some poseurs, like Elizabeth Warren, start believing their own baloney. You don’t want your child to end up accusing you exploiting “black bodies” when all you wanted for him was a better shot at the Ivy League.

With enough science, though, anything is possible. As a Canadian columnist points out, “transgenders” became something real only when technology made it possible to “artificially mimic the opposite sex in self-presentation.” As she suggests, someone may develop medical implants or drugs that make people “transracial,” with such protection enshrined in law. At a time when even children are being pumped full of hormones to change their sex, it’s not hard to imagine “melanin implants” or skin bleaches or even facial surgery for wannabes who really want to look the part.

If this seems absurd, it is no more absurd than the reality young whites face every day. They are told they are privileged, but they are subject to government discrimination. They must never feel pride in their ancestors’ accomplishments but must pay for those ancestors’ crimes. Other races may take pride as their numbers increase, but whites must “celebrate diversity” as their numbers decline. The educational system’s approach to race is shot through with contradictions; the only constant is that whites are always at fault. This system must be destroyed. By exploiting and increasing its inherent contradictions, whites could bring the whole thing crashing down.