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They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four
grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves.
07.01b. Affirmative Action: Defining Blackness. By
now the blogosphere has taken note of the New York Time article on
West Indians, Mulattoes, and Recent African Immigrants at Harvard.
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani
Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's
African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them
-- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their
children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
Racial definition is a tricky issue. One can even go beyond the question of who was a
descendant of slaves. I've heard that something like a quarter of the descent of the
average American black is actually white, and there is a good portion of Indian blood
too. The Old South had lots of problems with the definition too. Many people took what
I think is the modern position: even 1/32 black descent meant you were black. So it is
possible that affirmative action actually ends up helping the genes of slaveowners as
much as the genes of slaves!
That's a big problem for anyone who believes in reparations, too. Netting out being a
descendant of a slave and being a descendant of a slave owner, I wouldn't be surprised
if the big reparations might not be from Southern blacks and whites alike to the
Northern WASPS whose ancestors paid with lives and taxes for the Civil War (any my own
non-WASP ancestors who at least had to pay the taxes).
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