“POTENTIALLY 2022’s MOST CONSEQUENTIAL AMERICAN BOOK”: Okay, this counts as shameless self-promotion, but how often do relatively obscure academics like myself get praise like that from someone as prominent as George Will, in a column devoted to said obscure academic’s book, no less? Money quote:
This story-beyond-satire of government is recounted in Bernstein’s slender (185 pages) Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, potentially 2022’s most consequential American book. It reveals the rickety foundations of today’s identity politics. And because it is distilled in an amicus brief he filed for the Supreme Court as it considers racial preferences in college admissions. The brief demonstrates that such preferences depend on irrational classifications that mock their users’ intellectual and moral pretenses.