IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. IT HAD TO HAPPEN. AND FINALLY, it did. Two pink-skinned, fair-haired firemen have created quite a ruckus in Boston. They were hired under a minority preference plan, and therein lies a sad tale of woe.
Twins Phillip and Paul Malone have now been suspended from the Boston Fire Department. It is alleged that they misrepresented their race as a minority in order to qualify for acceptance in their jobs. As a result of this brouhaha, no less than 36 other firemen are under investigation. According to department officials, they, too, may have misled authorities as to their racial background in order to obtain employment. So far, 11 of them face disciplinary hearings.
The story of the Malones goes back a few years. They first applied to the Boston Fire Department in 1975. At that time, they identified themselves as white. But their scores on the state civil service exam were below the cut-off point for acceptance for this racial group; thus, they were not hired. In 1977, they took the test again, this time identifying themselves as black, and passed, due to the lower requirements demanded of members of this group. (They later explained that in the interim, their mother had told them that their maternal great-grandmother was black.)
According to a fire department spokesman, the two brothers “look like 6'2" white guys, Irish guys, maybe a little German.” And, stated a Boston City Councilman, “it’s a very serious situation.” Very serious? More like all but intractable, at least in terms of people who may or may not have in them that proverbial “one drop” of black blood, as claimed by these firemen. How do you tell the difference between blacks and whites of this sort? Do you look deeply into their eyes or ears or other orifices? No differences have been discovered there either. Maybe athletic tests can accomplish this goal. Do you put candidates on a basketball court or watch them run a 100-meter dash or throw them in a swimming pool and record the differences?
Merely to mention these possibilities is to show how ludicrous an enterprise it is. People on the borders, such as these, cannot be scientifically distinguished on the basis of race, and any attempt to do so is to leave the realm of science and enter that of superstition. In fact, before our own, there were only two societies of note in which this distinction was a burning issue. The first was in the U.S., during the slavery and post-Civil War, Jim Crow period. In order to enforce these institutions, it was crucially important to determine who was white and who was black. So imperative was this distinction that a whole literature arose out of this question. Distinctions such as “octoroon,” “quadroon,” “mulatto,” and “high yeller” were brought to the fore. Black people tried to “pass” for white and were sometimes blackmailed due to these efforts.
Then, of course, there is South Africa. How can a system of apartheid be run if those in charge cannot even tell who is white and who is black? Here, too, a plethora of rights depends intimately upon race: where one can live, what kind of job one is qualified for, and what restaurant one can legally be admitted to. Again, we find people trying to “pass” as a member of a certain racial group, with all the concomitant chaos which inevitably follows in the wake of legislated racism.
It is to the eternal shame of the U.S. and Canada and other western democracies that we have now joined the Confederacy and the Republic of South Africa in legally imposing racism. Now here too there will be people trying to “pass.” True, they will not be blacks trying to pass as whites. Instead, it will be whites, such as the Malone brothers, trying to pass as blacks. But the principle is the same. This is something the human rights, civil liberties, and other such groups who favor racial quotas and affirmative action have not yet incorporated into their world view. It is time that this whole spate of legislation be reconsidered.
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Fraser Forum (October 1989).