I was born in Georgia in 1977, and my birth certificate (as well as my school records through k-12) has my race printed on it.
I don’t see how anybody could ever be accused of lying one way or the other. Let’s face it. Transsexuals are, according to some of you, not limited by sex. So are they lying when they put female on an application even though they have a penis? According you your arguments, no. So how can lying be demonstrated about race?
The lines are so blurred now that the question is irrelevant.
I was born in California in 1962, and to the best of my recollection it either indicates my race and/or the race of both of my parents. Is it possible that this was not standard throughout the state?
Now that makes sense. That is the first time I’ve heard it explained that way. I still disagree with the concept but it’s nice to see a coherent argument for once.
Haj
Thanks for the replies, everyone. Gathering from all the replies it seems like you could lie, but you wouldn’t have a huge effect on your admission. This would be especially true for schools that look at the entire application, not just certain pieces of information (GPA, race, etc).
This brings up an interesting point. My forebears moved to California late 1800’s- early 1900’s,to have a new start and get away from the old guard of the East. My grandmother’s mother and grandfather’s father were half Native American, and chose to go somewhere where that wasn’t viewed as a liability. Much as ShibbOleth’s grandfather changed his name to gain a leg up in society, in the same cultural milieu.My grandmother did not have a birth certificate until she wanted to get a passport in her 40’s, because her mother didn’t want a racial box checked off from the git go. Must’ve been something in G’G’s past bad enough for her to avoid that simple paperwork.
That’s the sad fact of what many intelligent people had to do back then to get a better life. I suppose we can count it a great advancement that anyone with previously discounted minority blood can now proudly claim it, without repercussions.
I greatly appreciate Cranky’s, and ShibbOleth’s posts here. You’ve made me think in different ways about the topic. Shibb, yes there is something to be said about being counted, and being proud of one’s ethnic blood. I’m glad that times are such that we can say we ain’t all white without fear. I hesitated to use that word, but it’s the one that fits the bill.
That’s all good news, but there’s lot’s of work to be done still to achieve equality. I hope that racial designations are used for best benefit, until we have a level field of play.
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I brought up this very issue with a federal EO official out of the Washington, DC, office the other day.
While his answer is based upon hiring practices, it is his belief it should apply to college applications as well. According to him, since racial categories are technically used for statistics gathering purposes only, beyond that they have no legal force. In essence, anyone can claim any race on an application and it cannot be challenged and used against you. In hiring, such information cannot accompany a job application and the hiring official is not allowed to see such information.
Of course, usual disclaimers apply here. YMMV.
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Yeah, actually, they did. The term “African-American” means, of course, “black American.” It may be composed of a compound whose individual parts don’t precisely mean the same thing as the new word does, but then, “butterfly” doesn’t mean “butter that flies.”
Pretending the word “African-American” applies to white people is a tortured, lawyerly way to lie, since the word “African-American” has a particular meaning that doesn’t include white people. There is no linguistic basis to make the claim you’re making, as compound words very rarely actually mean precisely what the individual words that make them up mean.
Semantic trickery like this is the grown-up equivalent to crossing your fingers while you tell a lie. If you think you’re being subversive and creative, my own opinion would be that you are very easily amused. If you’re fraudulently lying on paperwork to benefit from affirmative action, that’s probably something you could be prosecuted or sued for.
Yes they did, you just pretended they didn’t. It’s what Excalibre said. I consider this lying because you know what they were asking and deliberately misapplied the term to suit your own purposes.
I don’t remember my own college applications too well, but don’t you have to sign something on the bottom indicating you told the truth?
IMO, it doesn’t seem right to me to lie about your race just to get through college. I could use my 1/16 of Native American, but I’m also half German, and it just wouldn’t be honest to put that down, especially since that isn’t a major part of my heritage.
Well give me the exact criteria for determining if someone is of a given race. Obviously, if all of you are saying that a white caucasian person is definitely not black, there must be something that defines what black or white caucasian is.
All of our ancestors seem to come from Africa. For some more recently than for others. For some, those african ancestors have ancestors that were always in africa. For others, african ancestors moved there from europe (white south africans). So is there a date like January 12th, 1534 before which your african ancestors no longer count?
Race is a ridiculous concept. Accusing me of lying when I claim to be “Black” just because all of my traced back ancestors lived in norther europe and were light skinned, is doubly so. I don’t claim I’m black, but if I did, I couldn’t possibly be lying since it’s not (and can’t be) defined in any verifiable way.
I’m 44 years old. When I was a teenager, I remember when applying to colleges I listed my race as “human.” To this day I still refuse to accept that the notion of “race” is scientifically coherent. I’ve been “owned” over my life by black cats, black and white cats, orange and black cats, and currently an orange cat. They are all just “cats”. Why should I consider fur color relevant when it comes to cats? I feel the same about human skin color. How is my skin color relevant to anything? While I recognize there are “homo sapiens”, that their skin color varies is no more relevant than the fur color of cats.
I’ve long entertained the idea of the possibilty some extraterrestrials might come to this planet, find me, and ask me to explain this human “race” notion. Where I with embarassment have to explain that some humans consider this important. Best I could do is refer them the writings of a great human philosopher, Dr. Suess:
http://staff.bcc.edu/jalexand/Reading-1-9A--Seuss-The_Sneetches.htm
I want to keep myself in the GQ mode, but are you serious? You know good and well you know what a black person is. And you know what a white person is, at least as defined by our social standards. You know you aren’t one of these groups and you know why this is so. If you can’t answer a simple question on an application truthfully–and you don’t have the common sense to just skip it (it is optional, you know)–then you don’t deserve to go to college. Really.
Heavens. If the year were 1805 or 1905, you wouldn’t be asking such a question. You wouldn’t be pulling out that wacked “We’re all black 'cuz we’re all from Africa” argument because you would know better. I suppose this is a sign of progress that a person would say such a thing. Maybe I should be happy for you instead of disappointed.
All I can say is that a person who can decide what race he wants to be and thinks he has a convincing argument (we’re all from Africa, dude!) for every challenge is a VERY lucky person.
I know multiple persons where one parent was “black”, and another “white”. Seriously, what race is someone whose mother was an obvious honky, and their father a Nigerian national? I personally know a teenage girl with such parentage. Based on “our social standards”, what should I tell her to answer on a college application? “Brownish?”
I would tell her to bubble in both, if this is her preference, although one could argue that “black” is the box that best since in the US, most black Americans are “mixed” to some degree.
The dilemma of a biracial person is understandable. But as far as I can tell, groman isn’t biracial. Thus, the dilemma he’s setting up is artificial, serving only to exploit or subvert the system an institution has set up.
If he sincerely sees himself as a black guy (and I know white-looking people who are black, so I’m not arguing that this isn’t possible), then he should check the “black” box. But if he normally identifies as white and is only “black” for the purposes of an application (or he knows his definition of “black” goes against the definition 99% of the population use for the term), then he’s lying. I don’t know why we have to view this as some deep, philosophical question with no wrong or right answer. It’s not.
PA in the 1980s didn’t list race on birth certificates either. Neither of my parents have race listed on theirs (40s and 50s). I’ve never seen my grandparent’s birth certificate but their marriage certificate (from 1945) doesn’t list race. Oddly I did have to list my race in order to register to vote!
Has anyone here claimed that the concept of “race” describes valid broad divisions of humanity? Of course not. But there’s a certain irony in a bunch of white folks arguing with Monstro (who is black) that “race doesn’t matter”, when in reality race is still a very salient issue in the United States. It would take a fantastical degree of ignorance to pretend that race isn’t relevant to our national discourse, because - whether the concept is biologically valid or not, it’s still a social distinction that people are only too happy to make. In fact, a study a few years back compared black homebuyers with white - the design matched black couples with white couples that were identical in every conceivable way. They were the same age, the same income, had the same amount of savings, and even had similar speaking styles and education. Nevertheless, black couples were shown fewer homes, were less likely to be offered mortgages, were charged higher mortgage rates and brokers’ fees, and were implicitly discouraged from purchasing in mostly white neighborhoods. The net result could be quantified as something of a “black tax” of several thousand dollars on home purchases.
There’s a certain head-in-the-sand attitude that makes many people imagine that black and white are no longer relevant issues in the U.S. We pretend that there are no racists outside a few rural towns in the deep South, and that it’s really only a question of socioeconomic status. But the science simply doesn’t back that up. And even though, in terms of genetic similarity, two black people in the United States may not be all that close, in the vast majority of cases, Americans will still quite easily decide who’s white and who’s black.
It might be a comfort to pretend that racial issues are gone, or that we can “science” racism away. But the fact that “black” isn’t a term with any particular biological validity doesn’t mean anything for it’s role in American society. Unless you had been under some prior belief that black people are biologically inferior to white people, the fact that the issue isn’t genetically sound is unimportant, because it still affects the experience of black people in the United States.
I’ve long believed in empiricism and the concept of responding rationally to what can be demonstrated to be true, because I understand how fallible human perception can be. Well, the empirical truth is clear - research demonstrates just how much of a role blackness plays in determining what happens to a person during their life. It’s irrational to ignore the data and decide that “it doesn’t matter anymore” and to try to subvert the few feeble attempts that exist to ensure that black people are given a decent shot in society. Research shows that blackness matters whether or not it reflects any biological reality. Our social context is far more complex than our biology, and it’s nonsensical to look to our biology and decide that our social environment must therefore mirror it.
Checking the “Asian/Pacific Islander” box just might hurt you. My wife is Chinese and when she was in school we found that many programs designed to help minorities explicitly exclude Asians. Presumably this was to keep Asian students from getting all of the benefits (the engineering department grad students were about 2/3 Chinese and 1/3 Indian). My wife did manage to get one scholarship despite being Asian; she was the only qualified person to apply for it that year.
A friend of mine checked the “Spanish surname” box on an employment application, which was worth 5 points (at the time) in the final evaluation. (Applicants were given a certain number of points for education, membership in professional organizations, prior jobs, and then some others such as being a veteran, etc.) She in fact had a Spanish surname, along with grandparents on both sides who exclusively spoke Spanish, being immigrants from Spain.
This actually worked against her, though, because she interviewed with a southwestern Hispanic who told her the kind of Spanish surname they were looking for was one from Mexico, or Cuba, or the southwestern US. Bzzt! points deducted. And she didn’t get a lot of points in the interview either.
How about a fellow from the Caribbean or Haiti? They’re not African OR American.