Today I got an e-mail asking if the fifth digit in my social security number is odd or even.
The e-mail claims that the government and interested corporations have tracked African-Americans for years. Supposedly, if the fifth digit is even, you’re African-American.
I first thought, ‘bullshit’… but then…
It just so happens I’m black and have the ‘even’ digit. So did the person who e-mailed me and her 7 respondants, and the three family members I asked at random.
Coinikidink? Or conspiracy?
hmm, I’m white and mine’s odd.
Damn, for some reason I thought you wrote 3rd. My 5th’s even. There goes that theory.
My 5th is even and I am white.
My 5th is even, and I’m white as well.
I’d say the coinikidink is what applies here.
I’m as white as they come, and unless something’s changed recently and nobody told me, ‘6’ is an even number.
Snopes say this is bull, as the 5th digit is determined by when the number was registered. The particular number given is determined by a complex system, that I won’t go into, but is given on the website:
http://www.snopes.com/business/taxes/blackssn.htm
The upshot of it is basically most people should have even numbers, because most of the early numbers handed out have been even. It will eventually even out, but the even’s have a head start.
Thus it shouldn’t suprise you that most black people have even fifth digits, as that is true of most people, according to snopes.
My fifth digit is even. I’m white.
Cecil has discussed the actual meanings of SSNs.
I just got an ah-HAH! moment here. My fifth SSN digit is 4, an even number. This just goes to show what I’ve always maintained: we Sicilians are really African.
I should have just gone ahead and checked snopes.com first as I intended, instead of wasting everyone’s time with this. THANKS.
FWIW they used to do something similar in Sweden. Not sure when they stopped, but during the last 30 years. People not born in Sweden had a 9 as the first of their “four digits”. This included children born of Swedish parents abroad, internationally-adopted Swedes etc. It’s previous existance and present non-existance leads to my Swedish wifey having a 9 and me (not Swedish) not having one. Confusing 
In spite of shaking off our Apartheid legacy, South African Identity numbers do still contain racial data - they work as follows:
a) six digit number representing DOB - yymmdd
b) four digit number representing gender - ladies 0-4999, gents 5000+
c) two digit number representing race - 08 is european/white; don’t know the rest
d) one digit random number
Grim
I’m 100% Irish, and my 5th digit is 2, an even number.
I DO know that the first few digits of the SSN reflect the region of the U.S. in which you first applied for a Social Security card, so the number has some geographical significance. But there’s no racial or ethnic significance.