Mike Lind: The future Left and Right in America will both be children of Trump”

In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget under orders from the Nixon and then Ford White House, [had] orders to get a bunch of anthropologists, bureaucrats, and sociologists together, Lind explained. We can’t have a hundred ethnicities and set-asides, said their higher-ups. So come up with a few races for official government affirmative action purposes.

What they came up with, explains Lind, is what another historian of race called the “ethno-racial pentagon”: five broad categories: white, black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Native American.

“They lumped together Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban into this new Hispanic category, said Lind, which the Hispanics were not asking for.”

At the time, Lind notes, organizations like LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) and the GI Forum had demanded to be recognized as Americans of Mexican descent.

Left-wing Hispanics, like the Chicanos in the Southwest, were Mexicans, explains Lind. They wanted to rebuild Aztlan, the Aztec Empire. They had nothing to do with Afro-Europeans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans and didn’t want to be lumped in with them.” And yet that was what happened.

Then, once the racial categories were in place, they became the foundation for civil rights enforcement. A pivotal legal shift, Lind explains, was the Supreme Court’s 1970 ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which established that employment practices could be found discriminatory based on statistical outcomes alone, even absent any intent. In other words, if 11 percent (in 1970) of your company s employees weren t black, you could be considered to be in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

via www.public.news

I have a nightmare in which historians of the future of poking through the intellectual rubble of the old American empire. Asking the natural question, What went wrong?, they settle on the crack pot theories of a few law professors and some dimwitted Supreme Court justices. Ah, they say, this must be it.