"His first idea: racial warfare. By 2050, whites will no longer be a majority in the United States and Hispanics will make up an estimated 29 percent of the population. 'Most violence is committed by males 18 to 35,' Schwartz explains. 'Now picture a very large, low-employed Hispanic population of males not too pleased with their lot or their ability to control a white-dominated world. . . . That population then becomes violent and disruptive. And now you get into racial and identity politics--it's all those illegal immigrants we let across the border.'"

If this did happen, it would be the result of suicidal national policies that increase the degree of race-consciousness in American society. In my youth, "Hispanic" was not a federally counted category, and it wasn't a category in the MINDS of most people who lived then in the United States. (How many of you are old enough to remember the first clumsy category of "Spanish-surnamed Americans"?) Once upon a time, people now categorized as "Hispanic" mostly categorized themselves as "white," with some localities being prejudicially aware of "Mexicans," but anyway the overall aspiration was an aspiration of assimilation, not of "racial warfare." Let me tell another story about that.

I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.

One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking.

I am appalled that forty years later, a typical college applicant has to wonder, "What 'race' should I mark on my application form?" and "Can I just leave that question blank?" Current federal policies are not helping us regard our neighbor Henry as Henry. They are not helping us regard all our fellow citizens as fellow citizens. That's an intentionally risky policy.

P.S. Does anyone else remember when all south Asian people were reclassified as belonging to the "Asian" race rather than the "white" race? That's an example of how arbitrary the federal categories are.

Here's the latest federal regulation on the subject:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/rewrite/fedreg/ombdir15.html