Farrel Lifson serves up one of those bizarro-world headlines that you’ll only find in race-obsessed South Africa: “Chinese fight to be black”.

The story is eerily reminiscent of the row over coloureds being denied the full benefits of affirmative action, on the grounds that they weren’t “sufficiently disadvantaged” prior to ‘94. That debate, which saw public officials parsing the relative levels of oppression of different groups, is one a free society should never have to have, and the same goes for the Chinese issue. As I wrote when the Eskom story first broke (which helped to kick start the debate over coloureds and made it a cause celebré for solidarity):

[T]his is the natural outcome of making race the decisive factor in choosing who to promote, or deciding who gets what: you’re always going to get people who try to game the system by claiming a greater or lesser degree of racial purity than others… I’m reminded of a chapter from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, in which he describes the absurd legal spectacle of defending an Indian man who had been incorrectly classified as black.

These issues should have been left behind as part of the wrecked detritus of apartheid, not carried forth into the new era. The attempt to racially “classify” people is both wrong in principle and impractical in implementation because the lines between races are not as clear as the bureaucrats and functionaries who implement such schemes would wish. Despite the wishes of “purity”-obsessed wackos like the old (and to some extent the new) government, people of different races are capable of mixing. Assuming the Chinese get their wish, would someone who is half-Chinese, half-white also be classified as “black”? If not, why? Why should the racial lineage of one parent affect an individual’s legal standing in any way? Alternatively, if we were to consistently apply the “one drop rule”, it would require the reclassification of much of South Africa’s white population as black.

These various layers of absurdity raise the important question of why any of this is necessary. The simpler option is to treat people as formally equal regardless of race or any other accident of birth. (This also has the advantage of not being a racist policy, for those who still care about such niggling things.) This would not prevent the government from undertaking social policies to undo the damage of apartheid. It could still develop black areas by building houses and setting up water pipes and electricity lines, improve schooling in majority-black areas, set up grants to send children of poor families (the vast majority of whom, as a result of apartheid policies, are black) to university, and provide large-scale technical-skills training to the unemployed. All of this would do far more to uplift impoverished black communities and “redress the wrongs of apartheid” than the current misbegotten policies of AA and BEE (which are designed as much to establish a patron-client relationship between the government and elites as anything else). And crucially, they could achieve all of the above without compromising the core policy of non-discrimination against individuals on the basis of race.