Washington Post columnist George Will says that America “urgently needs” what author David Bernstein provides in his new book Classified: “a lucid explanation of the long and tangled intersection of racial classifications and the law.”
Today, your race may determine whether you qualify for loan forgiveness, win a government contract, or get into a good school. Many argue that the use of racial classifications is necessary to build a more equitable society. And yet the classifications the government uses are crude, arbitrary, and incoherent—which perfectly illustrates why categorizing people by race is never a good idea.
On Tuesday, July 12, David Bernstein joins Peter Wood from the National Association of Scholars and PLF attorneys Joshua Thompson and Chris Kieser for a conversation about how the United States uses flawed racial categories to distribute government benefits and burdens.
With Harvard’s affirmative action case poised to come before the Supreme Court this fall, now is an ideal time to take a hard look at the racial classifications that the government and other entities use to distribute benefits and burdens.
