Who gets to be a minority?

Two letters to the editor in the latest Maroon argue that Asians should be considered an underprivileged minority because, while Asians are on the whole better-off than whites in this country, some subsets of the huge category that is "Asian" are in fact worse-off. This is terrible logic; some segments of the white population are also worse-off, some segments of the Latino population (say, South American socialites), better-off, and so on. Affirmative action involves putting people into huge categories with the knowledge that many individuals will not be under- or overprivileged in ways that their group membership would imply. As someone with a real distain for putting people into categories that have nothing to do with their own actions but have everything to do with their race, self-proclaimed or perceived, I don't know whether I'd rather see people divided into Vietnamese and Japanese, Jewish and Nordic, African and Caribbean, or just into the big, broad categories of black, white, Asian, Latino, and Native American. I'd rather see none of this. I'd also rather not be at the library right now, but if the Jews are going to stay an overrepresented minority, stay at the library I must...