Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black, or Hispanic, or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. However, those cracks tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.Laws, regulations, guidelines, and judicial opinions are social artifacts which provide evidence about how a society deals with certain perceived problems. Laws are designed to serve social purposes and change as the purposes change; the specific form they may take reflects a need for congruence between laws as instruments of policy, and the purposes of policy. A survey of laws on race and ethnicity suggests three different policy aims: (1) laws mandating separation and disparate treatment, (2) laws prohibiting disparate treatment, and (3) laws encouraging aggregate changes in ethnic representation. Each purpose had a corresponding form of definition. If the purpose of a law is to mandate diverse treatment of individuals based on race or ethnicity, the law must be quite precise about who falls into which category, because an administrator is expected to make clear distinctions in individual cases.
Ethnic and Racial Definitions as Manifestations of American Public Policy