> recording attributes like race, skin color,

The only reason we ever started doing this was to track ex-slaves and their descendants, and after-1965 every other possible grouping of people started begging for a category that it could use to get government grants in some way.

The irony is that now, when censuses somehow desperately need to figure out if you're Armenian or not, they don't count the descendants of slaves at all, preferring to lump them in with every dark-skinned person of partial African descent, but sometimes not the Spanish speakers(?!).

The US Supreme Court made a good decision (on admissions, not on the need for the approval of redistricting maps in places that have continuously attacked slave and Jim Crow descended voters.) The government needs to get out of the race and religious science business. Elected and appointed officials are openly claiming jihadi eschatology as the reason that they're supporting Israel, and openly explaining how the culturally varied mix of people who happened to live in land that Zionists wanted, or the Chinese, are inhuman races that are a threat because of their inhuman behavior and their inhuman values. We've woven church and race deeply into the government again.

The idea that preferential admissions to elite schools was going to somehow offset slavery was laughable anyway. It was just a grievance engine that gave people on top an excuse to feel downtrodden during the one of the most and the first vulnerable times in their lives - when they find out they're too stupid or boring to get into the college they want. I've always been partial to the libertarian solution to the problem of US slavery - Murray Rothbard and others said that according to the Libertarian homesteading principle, slaves should have been awarded the land and the factories that they worked. That it was an injustice that would lead to (what was in his view) catastrophe, such as how the freeing of Russian serfs in 1861 without any of the land still controlled by their ex-masters led to the Russian Revolution 50 years later.