Oh, I beleive that. But you still have to have the PhD, right, and skills, right, and qualifications, right? Perhaps “the mossy forest” is different than everyone else in the real word- I am not being sarcastic, but yes, I could see a small niche of time and a small slice of a particular job market where being a woman, or gay, or black or even a left-handed transexual Anabaptist could be an advantage. But there’s no significant real advantage overall. In fact, I’d bet that most real Black posters would claim there is a disadvantage.
I can and do check the box “Hispanic” but it doesn’t seem to have been any advantage at all for me, even though I am a “minority”- although my boss does say he can get me a small bonus if my Spanish was fluent instead of barely passing. But that’s adding a skill, not being a member of a minority.
I wasn’t “a former administrator at the EOC”- I was on the EEOAC; that’s the EEO Advisory Commitee. It’s an “other duty”, it’s volunteer, and it’s for one or two years, taking maybe 25% of my work time. This sort of thing is pretty standard in the Government field. If you are working for a Public Institution of Education, you likely have seen similar positions open?
There’s also a huge incentive for institutions to screen out the cheaters. If Diversity University claims to have 50% of its faculty as minority, but they all look like John Q. Whiteman, then they’re a laughing stock. So yes, there could be some level of cheating, but there is a positive feedback mechanism to keep that cheating at a low level. I suspect that the classification of “Hispanic” is the most vulnerable to gaming the system. There is a lot of intermarriage between Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites, so you get guys who look like Robert Redford, but have the name Robert Gonzales, and they’re in like Flint (for whatever that gets you).
And here’s the other thing- for those sorts of jobs, there will be an interview. If you check the box “African American” and come in with typical Caucasian features, they will likely just look at you, double check to see if they read it correctly, and if they are charitable, they’ll assume you just checked the wrong box thus you’ll have exactly the same chance you had if you hadn’t checked the box. If they are feeling uncharitable, they’ll assume you are a cheating BS artist trying to game the system, and you’ll have no chance.
If they do (unlikely) ask you why you checked the box, and you give that explanation- they will then assume either: you are a loon, or you are a cheating BS artist trying to game the system, and in both cases you’ll have no chance. There is no chance they’ll debate the point with you.
Thus, IRL there won’t be any advantage. It’s a “break-even/lose/lose/lose” proposition.
DrDeth I will say this, African-Americans come in lots of shades of white and still self-indentify as African-American. I think it would be a mistake to assume that just because the guy’s got blue-eyes and blond hair, he’s not a brother or at least considers himself to be.
It’ll be more than ironic, for an institution to be sued for discrimination, because they felt a candidate didn’t look “black” enough, to be hired for a position designated for an African-American.
It’s not just “checking the box” that African Americans have to do. There’s also the issue of all these years of training, etc. you describe. The “benefits” of being African American in such a scenario only exist after the person accrues all the other qualifications. Maybe these colleges should do more to invest in/encourage more African Americans to go into this field to begin with?
Funny, p r r, because I can raise your anecdote with several of my own. My institution decries the difficulty in finding people of color for faculty positions, occasionally hires people for lecturer positions, while each year a number of doctoral grads of color go elsewhere. I can think of at least five White women who are at my institution - their advisors have them working as postdocs, or they’re on revolving lectureships.
As I’ve said several times before my peer group is largely African American and Latino. At least a dozen have graduated in the past three years. I can only think of one who got a job instantly - back in his hometown at his undergrad institution. Everyone else applied for jobs, got rejected without interviews, got invited to give job talks, missed out on the job, and ultimately got jobs somewhere. Every single person I can think of, with the exception of three of the twelve, did not get their first choice job. One of my buddies finally got the job he was aiming for at graduation - four years later, once the institutional politics improved. Before then he was an adjunct at a small college.
I should note these are top-flight grads (articles, presentations, even books) of one of the top three schools in the nation in our field. When I get out I will let you know how it goes… but all of the myths of being a person of color in grad school have been debunked for me.
I didn’t get full funding. I didn’t qualify, or get, any affirmative action fellowships or aid (despite being a first-generation college student, from a solidly working middle class background, and excellent undergraduate grades and work experience - no worries, I did get a very good aid package after my second year and demonstrating academic excellence). I’ve missed out on fellowship opportunities, opportunities to teach, and other forms of recognition at my institution - and I know from the faculty that I am considered one of the top students here. As far as I know the prospects for people in my field are difficult, unless you are in certain “hot” specialities. I thought people would be beating the doors down of talented graduates of color from an Ivy League institution, but it hasn’t quite been that way so far.
Minor quibble: The sickle-cell gene is also found in Southern Italy (and, I presume, elsewhere in N. Africa / the Mediterranean), historically prone to malaria. It is just P. falciparum that is historically limited to sub-Saharan Africa. A reference found by googling.
Sorry to hear it, Hippy Hollow. If you’re getting a degree in English or writing or lit or anything related, e-mail me, and I’[ll be happy to tell you one institution that would be happy to look at your application favorably. I can’t imagine why your experience and mine would be so radically different.
White guy claims to be African-American on his application, the department head salivates and calls him in for an interview. He shows up at the interview all white-looking, department head figures he’s a BS artist and rejects him.
But what is that white guy going to do? Sue? Sure, he could sue…but then it would be up to HIM to prove that the department rejected him because he was black. He’d have to convince a jury that he was black, and that the department head rejected him because he was black. And there’s no way that would ever happen, the jury would just laugh.
So the department doesn’t have to prove he’s not black to reject him for not having enough negritude, they can reject him, then it’s up to him to seek a remedy for discrimination against his people.
Now, if the department head wanted to go along with the charade so they could improve their statistics, well, I suppose they could. But when the dean looks over the statistics, then meets the lily white professor, then he’s going to give the department head some trouble.
So yes, the system can be gamed. What prevents gaming the system in most cases is that in Academia your reputation is all important. Get a reputation as a lying race-fibbing statistics-gaming weasel and your career is finished. Or maybe the dean smiles broadly at your entreprenuerial spirit and you become his new favorite. But really obvious cheating is self-limiting because no one wants to be exposed as an idiot.
So when someone who looks like Lena Horne or Ed Bradley or Cameron Diaz shows up and identifies as black or hispanic a few minutes of investigation are in order. Or you could just shut your eyes and think of the minority employment statistics.
No, the other scenario, the one where the dean beams on the entreprenurial department is more likely. Why do I claim this, even though my department hasn’t been able to hire anyone claiming to be A-A the last dozen ads we’ve run? Because if I read the dean correctly, and reading things correctly is my strong suit, we’ve been given all these chances to hire with the sub-text clearly understood that we were going to use it as a chance to diversify our department.
Ah, you say. How does hiring a white guy claiming to be black make the department look any blacker? How does the dean benefit from that?
Actually, the dean is interested in making the department look more black on the forms filed with the government as to 5 of black faculty, etc., not in any group photo. We’ve had five deans over the last decade putting us under this pressure to diversify–what each of them wanted was to be able to claim “I boosted the overall percentage of A-A faculty twenty per cent, etc.” on his own resume so as to move on to greener pastures himself. By the time all the lawsuits would be filed and finished, he or she would have been long gone.
Now, it’s true that if we hired six or eight faux-Blacks it would look pretty silly. But I think just hiring one black would allow the dean to claim the number of Black faculty under his administration increased black faculty in the English department by 100%.
In the short run, which is all these high-turnover deans can see, it’s a total win-win.
It’s happened at least five times in the past sixteen years (that I know of) in my university. Since the entire process is sub rosa (i.e., the deans never explicitly order us to hire Black faculty, they simply say in a stern and faux-serious tone, which they try to avoid using in normal conversation, “We certainly hope that this search will result in a more diverse faculty, and urge you to take the AA/EOE section of your ad very seriously,” for which no problems could ever accrue to them), how would you suggest I find a cite that you will regard as authoritative?
Now, it could be that my department simply has had bad luck, or is in some other way anomalous. But I doubt that.
I suspect, to the contrary, that Easy Bumfuck Community College has a much harder time diversifying than we do. We’re located in a large urban center with much culture, especially Black culture, around us, we pay a decent salary, we offer a graduate program and a teaching schedule of very few remedial courses and a managable teaching load (especially for incoming faculty) and we’re at least 0-for-5. (I can speak only of the search committees I’ve served on personally.) I can’t imagine all the colleges in East Bumfuck, North Dakota, being able to compete with that, and as I say we’re not very competitive, as to our result and our sincere desire to diversify.
John’s not asking for a cite that the administration puts pressure on the department to improve their “diversity” statistics. Rather a cite that this pressure leads regularly leads to the hiring of people with fraudulent self-reported ethnicity.
Obviously, we have people like Ward Churchill, so the number is greater than zero. But is it problem that demands a cure? Would the cure be worse than the disease?
I think we can state confidently that the cure would be much worse than the disease. Is Cameron Diaz hispanic? Her father came from Cuba, her mother is an American. Is Lena Horne black? To me she doesn’t “look black”…but back in the 1940s she was considered black under the one-drop rule, and suffered from Jim Crow restrictions on her singing/acting career. So any official definition of blackiitude is going to have to include Lena Horne, right? How do you define black, when people with more than 75% european ancestry have been and are considered black in our country? It can’t be by genetics, how can that be proved anyway?
The self-reporting criteria works because there are only a very few cases where being of a particular race or ethnicity gives you a substantial advantage, we can stipulate that competing for a job as a liberal arts professor is one such case. But you have to have an applicant with the stones to fraudulently self-report, a department head/search committe with the stones to swallow that fraudulent self-report, and a university administration with the stones to beam approvingly. And a community that doesn’t care either…is the local equivalent of Al Sharpton going to shrug his shoulders over the fraud?
If everyone goes along with the fraud, then the fraud is successful, and everyone lives happily ever after. But I don’t think this happens very often in real life, certainly not often enough that we need a government program to rigourously define “black”, “hispanic”, “white”, “asian”, and “native american”. Although we do have a rigorous definition of “native american”, any person who is an official member of a recognized tribe or nation, and we let the tribal governments worry about who does nor does not qualify.
This is the last word I heard on it as well. You can call yourself anything and it doesn’t matter in this country. They won’t check, you can still vote, and no one cares.
Well, then, say “bugger that for a lark” and fill out a new form for “ethic/racial identity” check the box “African American”, and turn it in, then. If they ask why the change, say “I was researching my heritage and have decided that self-identifing as African-American is my better choice”. Of course, there’s always that little part about your moral and ethical standards, but hey, that’s your choice. You do know you can change the way you self-identify, don’t you?
(I have done exactly that. I am 1/2 Hispanic, and have identified as “White”, then “Hispanic” then both. *"Respondents shall be offered the option of selecting one or more racial designations. Recommended forms for the instruction accompanying the multiple response question are “Mark one or more” and “Select one or more.” * )
I dunno. Has anyone done an academic study of this “problem”? If not, then maybe it isn’t a problem. Maybe at some point in the futuer it will be a problem and we’ll have to have more rigourous rules. But that’s going to be very difficult. Since almost every Black person in the US has some European ancestry as well, how do you define how much “Black blood” you have to have to be Black? Is one parent enough? What if that one parent is Tiger Woods (who is not even 50% Black himself)? Maybe we can copy the methods used by South Africa during Apartheid. Now, that would be a great improvement over the current situation, wouldn’t it?
I’ll tell you what I worry about. I worry that shape-shifting aliens from one of Jupiter’s moons are pretending to be Black in order to snap up all the AA slots in US universities. I can’t prove that it’s happening, but it could happen.
Indeed, and some Tribes even do make those who are “adopted into the Tribe” full members. So, without a “drop of Indian blood” you can legally be a “full-blooded Indian”. Depends entirely on Tribal Law, and such things are getting more rare, as the Casinos have made issues of Tribal membership more important.
I don’t really get why you’re so confident asserting that because you don’t know many examples personally (of something that is by its nature extremely underpublicized in order to be successful) you’re pretty sure it’s not a problem, and you’re insisting that I supply factual evidence that my own experience is widesperead nationally. Isn’t it sufficient, for the purpose of this discussion, that I’ve identified an abuse that I’ve shown could easily take place?
If I had good evidence that many self-identifying Black faculty were, in fact, as white as snow, I wouldn’t be yakking about the problem on some messageboard. What I have is a good faith suspicion that the abuse I’m describing is possible, and that there is very little motivation on anyone’s part to reveal it.
My larger point is that the atmosphere I’ve noticed in my own workplace is easily duplicable at other academic institutions, possible a large number of other academic institutions, and much more important, at almost any other place of work where jobs are difficult to get and the hiring party benefits by complying with Affirmative Action hirings. Since the best evidence I’ve been able to turn up here is that all identification of A-A hires is self-identification, the only people who could get hurt by this are
individuals who get exposed as falsely self-identifying as African-American (who upon exposure would be no worse off than they were --they need to find a jobin some other line of work, but they certainly couldn’t be prosecuted for self-identifying wrongly)
and
institutions that over-hired such faux-Black applicants as I’m suggesting. Without gross over-hiring (and I maintain that institutions probably have fewer members who self-identify as ‘black’ than they would like), who’s going to be upset that the institution is perpetuating a fraud?
If your answer to my last question is “Legitimate Black applicants or potential applicants would very upset that such a fraud is taking place,” then why wouldn’t those same people be upset by the concept that such fraud is possible?
Without even getting into the absurd example I raise of a lilywhite candidate like me being able to perpetuate such a fraud, how about my more realistic example of a white (let’s say a Southerner who may have some reason to think that one of his great-great grandparents might have been a slave) who decides to self-identify as “black” for the purposes of getting a job? I’d think that some Blacks would have a problem with a 1/16th Black (and 15/16ths white slaveowning) ancestry being a qualification for a decent job such as I describe? Maybe that would be fine with some Blacks, maybe not. But I think it’s a legitimate subject for debate, even absent concrete evidence of the problem’s prevalence.