David Bernstein | 6.5.2024 11:10 AM

When I started researching my book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, the law review literature asserted that racial classification, in practice, was almost entirely a matter of self-identification. While federal law specified the classifications and their definitions, in practice people could check whatever box they wanted, and no one ever checked. In fact, according to the relevant literature, there was only one case, ever, in which an individual's self-identification was questioned. This was an infamous case involving two Irish-American firefighters in Boston who claimed to be African American to take advantage of the fire department's affirmative action policies.

I was confident that there were more such cases, in part because Eugene Volokh once blogged about such a case involving whether New York State could constitutionally decide that a contractor of Spanish descent was not Hispanic for state purposes, even though........

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