PocahontasThe one-drop rule
If, writes Dalrymple, Elizabeth Warren could prove that at some time in the past, however distant, one of her ancestors belonged to what the people of Hindustan—the real experts in human classification, having had millennia of practice at it—call the ‘scheduled castes’,
some extra moral authority would be added unto her.
There’s no racist as fanatical as an anti-racist
It demonstrates, Dalrymple says, how racialised liberal thinking—liberal in the US, not in the classical, sense—has remained in America. He observes that
once you start down the road of equality of outcome as the measure of justice, rather than equality under the law, you start dividing humans into groups, and one of the most obvious ways to do so is race. So, having spent years denying that there is any objective reality to racial classifications, liberals start sifting people into racial categories with an obsessiveness that puts South African policemen under the old régime to shame.
Race, among other classifications,
becomes a lens through which the whole of social life is examined.
