Last week’s column discussed whether it made sense to treat European ethnic groups and their New World descendants as a uniform and undifferentiated mass called the “White Race.” The question has interested me since hearing a lecture by John Hendrik Clarke, Hunter College’s Professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies and ranting racist.

The man Harvard’s Prof. Henry Louis Gates calls “the great paterfamilias of the Afrocentric movement” argued that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Slavic, Latin, Finno-Ugric, or Basque peoples. He was especially emphatic that the Jews were no less nasty than the rest of the white race; and that there was no good reason to believe they ever were or ever could be.

In fact, his reading of Jewish history would seem to make them worse. According to him the Africans in Egypt invited them in, gave them jobs, and food, and lots of straw with which to make bricks. Then they stabbed their kindly hosts in the back by joining the Hyksos invaders. Centuries later they capped this betrayal by pioneering the slave trade.

There are a couple of reasons not to dismiss Clarke as senile crackpot. First, he was invited to lecture at Middlesex College for a tidy fee as a multicultural gesture. It didn’t matter that he had dismissed the whole multicultural fad as devious scheme devised by the “Jewish educational mafia.” There was an Afrocentric faction in the counseling department and whoever decided to support their invitation with college funds probably thought it was a nice multicultural gesture.

Second, the Jews have experienced some earlier versions of diversity engineering with results which have not been comfortable. Jewish culture had evolved an intense commitment to education and intellectual pursuits. Harvard University, far more than Yale and Princeton, had committed itself to admissions according to merit, rather than ancestry. By 1900 the Harvard student body was seven percent Jewish. Twenty-two years later in grown to 21.5 percent. Only Columbia and Pennsylvania had a higher proportion.

The result was three Ivy League student bodies that did not “look like America” unless one believes that your complexion reveals your culture, and in fact, traps you in it. Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, wished to set a 15 percent quota on Jewish admissions. Since this was three times the Jewish percentage of the population you can’t call in rigidly exclusionary. In contemporary liberal terms, you might even call it “affirmative action” for WASPs. The Harvard faculty resisted this quota, so the Harvard administration had to find other means of containing the Jewish “over-representation” in the student body.

During roughly the same period a number of Eastern European nations imposed the numerus Clausus (“closed number”) legislation. This limited Jewish admission to higher education and a variety of profession (e.g., law, medicine). We might call this affirmative action for gentiles if it hadn’t turned into a kind of prelude to genocide.

Now it’s Asians who are undermining the dream of Ivy League student bodies that “look like America.” Asian-Americans make up 5.6 percent of America’s population in the 2010 census yet they are now 20 percent of the Harvard’s students. In 2008, half of the Asian applicants had exceptionally high SAT scores while only 17 percent of the entering class were Asian. It turns out that prospective Asian undergrads needed SAT scores that were about 140 points higher than the majority of the whites admitted.

These disparities have produced a lawsuit, filed on behalf of Asian-American applicants, offering strong evidence that Harvard engages in racial “balancing.” Admissions numbers for each racial and ethnic group have remained strikingly similar, year to year. Years when the university accidentally admitted higher number of Asians were followed by years when Asian admissions dipped.

It’s predictable that Harvard will defend itself by citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision that justifies racial discrimination as a multicultural benefit. A majority of the justices have ruled that schools have an educational interest in admitting a “critical mass” of minority students because of “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” The problem is that admitting Indian, Korean and Chinese students strictly on merit might reduce the diversity level. That is, the Asians could end up having less opportunity to interact with white students in a white majority country.

And there’s a political problem as well. Harvard has actively recruited “under represented” groups, so that it’s current freshman class in 12 percent African-American and 13 percent “Hispanic.” Since over half of Berkeley’s undergraduates are Asian Harvard could end up with a student body that is only 25 percent white, in a country that is 77.7 percent white. If the white population gets the idea that multiculturalism is primarily a rationale for discriminating against white people then things are going to get a little awkward for America’s cultural engineers.

Incidentally, the white share of the population falls to 62.6 percent if the Census Bureau if Hispanics who describe themselves “white” are excluded. But why would they be excluded? Readers will have to figure that one out on their own.