The Clinton administration just doesn't seem to get it. They want us to believe that to right America's deplorable history of racial classification, we need to expand racial classification. Not only does America's "One-Drop Rule" -- one drop of black blood makes you black -- still reign, but now it also applies to all other federally protected racial minorities. The truth is, racial classifications are wrong. They were wrong when they omitted 2/5 of each black from the Constitution, and they are just as wrong today. No amount of hand-wringing or good intentions can change that.

The story of Bethany Godby is a case in point. With a black father and a white mother, she does not fit into any racial box. She does not regard herself as black or white, and routinely checks different racial boxes on various school forms.

In 1996, she was a 13-year-old ninth grader at Cloverdale Junior High School in Montgomery, Alabama. Cloverdale elected a white and a black homecoming queen. Each homeroom nominated one black and one white student for homecoming queen. On September 10, 1996, Bethany's homeroom voted her their black and white nominee. Ms. Lovrich, Cloverdale's homecoming director, told Bethany that she could run for one or the other, but not both: she had to choose black or white. At the urging of her homeroom, Bethany ran as the white nominee.

Ms. Lovrich, though, checked the Cloverdale computers "to make sure what [Bethany] was telling [her] was true." School records showed that Bethany was black, so she invalidated Bethany's nomination. Her homeroom held a second set of nominations the next day, and Bethany again won her homeroom's white nomination. Relying on their official records identifying her as black, and hence ineligible to be the white homecoming queen, school officials refused to list Bethany on the school-wide ballot.

This story is intriguing for several reasons. First, why did the school argue so vehemently for this segregation-era policy? Clearly, they could have simply let Bethany run as a white student. Her classmates had encouraged her to run as a white nominee. Aside from personal or societal prejudice, they had no reason to assume that Bethany's heritage made her black rather than white.

Second, what possible good could this policy serve? According to the school district, segregated extracurricular activities allowed students to "feel a part of the school." It gave them a sense of "'ownership' in the school." That line of reasoning, however, strains credulity. Nearly forty years after Brown v. Board of Education, exactly how does a segregated homecoming ceremony generate greater ownership? As in so many other cases, such segregation only perpetuates the divisive racial classifications that have marred our country from its inception.

Third, how did they expect Bethany to feel when they refused to let her participate in a school activity, just because her parents have different color skin? In effect, they were forcing Bethany to choose one of her parents, rather than allowing her to embrace complete heritage. They didn't even care about Bethany's skin color; instead, they focused on that of her parents. When the colors didn't fit their racial categories, they resorted to America's cherished One-Drop rule.

Experiences like Bethany's, and thousands of others like her across the country are why I think it is time to get rid of America's racial boxes. The self-anointed racial elite howl that such a proposition would gut our nation's civil rights laws. They are wrong. Preventing the government from classifying Americans into those silly little boxes will not harm our civil rights laws.

"Abolishing" the race boxes on government forms does not mean that this data will be unavailable. It only means that it will not be automatically collected. If, say, the Justice Department fears there is systemic racial discrimination in the banking market, they are quite capable of hiring a polling firm to get the baseline data they are looking for. The Justice Department could collect data about the specific practices and time periods under investigation using similar procedures. Moreover, by the time a case is referred to the Justice Department, Justice lawyers have essentially carte blanche access to the banks' records.

By forcing the various enforcement agencies to confront the costs of their research up front (as opposed to hiding its costs under the present system), we could force the departments to focus on the most egregious cases.

Apologists for the current system of racial classifications simultaneously argue that race is, and is not, a valid distinction to "allocat[e] public resources." One the one hand, they say that race is neither "scientific" nor "anthropological." On the other hand, race (now presumably called ethnicity) statistics allow us to see the various gaps in literacy and poverty. As justification for this collection, they offer the paltry hope that social science will cure America's racial ills. Any form of racial (or ethnic) categorization requires some rules that determine who fits into which category. In America, the long, sad history of our devotion to the one drop rule does not offer reason to maintain the hope that seems to burn so brightly in their mind.

The third, and probably most compelling reason, is that getting rid of racial categories will remove the stumbling block of race from the explanatory landscape. For too long, we have taken the easy route when trying to explain various differences. Race, meaning skin color, stands out so starkly, that we have ignored myriad other possibilities, and instead tried to coerce various determinative powers into skin color. Whether those determinative powers were the degraded physical and mental capacities pointed to under slavery and Jim Crow, or the legacy of oppression and discrimination highlighted since the advent of the civil rights bureaucracy, we have continued to focus on color. The bottom line is that color no longer has any bearing on one's ability to succeed. It does not determine access to wealth, it does not determine intelligence, willingness to work hard, or any other trait necessary to succeed.

Does this mean that America is a fair society? Is skin color as unimportant as eye color? No -- but it does not have the power Americans have ascribed to it for more than three centuries. Americans reject the One-Drop rule, we reject race preferences, and we reject those silly little boxes. In all three cases, the reason is the same: race simply does not matter.

In relying on racial classifications to dole out privileges to those approved of by the state, America has continuously refused to embrace Jefferson's Declaration that "all men are created equal." We have progressed in fits and starts from a country openly devoted to slavery towards a country open to all, regardless of skin color. Unfortunately, the last steps in that last journey are proving to be far more arduous than our predecessors could possibly have imagined. A bureaucratic racial elite has sprung up since the Civil Rights' movement's high water mark. By embracing the racial classifications their predecessors gave their lives to end, they have perverted into formulaic racial entitlements the equality towards which America has unceasingly striven.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, Americans finally began to recognize these race advocates for what they are. They began to recognize that the moral stigma of preferences is twofold. First, skin color does not confer qualifications, and should not confer privileges. Second, and more fundamentally, government-sponsored racial classifications demean both those classifying, and those being classified. Certainly Bethany's story proves that.

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