George Will says that the time has come to stop making obsolete and rather silly racial classifications on Census forms.

However, because Hispanics have supplanted blacks as America's largest minority, it is time to remove the race question from the census form. This would move race more toward the margin of American consciousness, where it belongs, and would be more true to racial and ethnic realities. And it would fuel the wholesome revolt against the racial and ethnic spoils system that depends upon racial and ethnic categorizations.

So argued Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer in the fall 2002 issue of the Public Interest, an argument pertinent to Supreme Court deliberations about the constitutionality of the racial preferences in college admissions. Born irrational, the classifications are rapidly becoming anachronistic.

Irrational? Glazer asks: "Why does Hispanicity include people from Argentina and Spain -- but not from Brazil or Portugal? Are there really so many races in Asia that each country should consist of a single and different race, compared to simply 'white' for all of Europe and the Middle East? Why indeed do people of Spanish origin merit special treatment, as opposed to people from Italy, Poland or Greece?"

Sort of makes you wonder, doesn't it?