Scott Alexander’s review of Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke is useful less as a grand origin story than as a case study in how official categories become absurd once the state routes liability, recognition, and resources through them.
The garden version: racial categories are administrative software pretending to be anthropology. Once they become legally consequential, every weird boundary condition starts mattering.
Asian American
They created the concept of “Asian-American” by combining the old category “Oriental” together with Indians, Pakistanis, Thais, etc. Then, under pressure from the Hawaiian delegation, they added Pacific Islanders to create an even more heterogenous and meaningless category of “AAPI” (Asian American or Pacific Islander). Then, under more pressure from Hawaii later, they separated out “Native Hawaiian” again.
The result is that Pakistanis, Koreans, and Tongans are the “same race”, but Hawaiians and Samoans are “different races”.
Hispanic
They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans — previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians — into the new race “Hispanic”, adding in all of South and Central America for good measure.
Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics and they would lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race.
So a white Spaniard from Spain and a white Spaniard from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity.
White
Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9/11, they did not have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white.
According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about, for example, Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this.
The Payoff
All of this means that a company with 10 Pakistanis and 10 Afghans might get classified as “too white” and get sued for failing to hire enough Asian-Americans. But a company with 20 Pakistanis, or 10 Pakistanis and 10 Koreans, would be fine.
This is the absurdity of pseudo-diversity under bureaucratic categories. The schema sees compliance buckets before it sees people, histories, languages, religions, regions, or civilizational difference. The label becomes morally charged because the database makes it operational.
The category is not ridiculous despite being official. It becomes powerful because it is official, then everyone has to pretend the ridiculousness is science, justice, or common sense.
References:
- Scott Alexander, Book Review: The Origins Of Woke, Astral Codex Ten
- Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke