"Direction" of (fake or real) ethnic identities

In My Humble Opinion
21

It used to be that restaurants and clubs would not allow women without male escorts after 4pm. Women-only parties could come in for lunch, but not supper. Most places that were open for both lunch and dinner closed from 3pm-4pm, and that was the time for women-only parties to leave, and not return. Men-only parties were welcome, but not women-only, or women alone.

This is the origin of the butch-femme couples in lesbian culture, where one woman really tried to pass as a man, and the other dressed very typically straight-woman, as a distraction. If the non-butch woman looked even slightly androgynous, it might lead to suspicion of her partner. They might both be more androgynous during the day, but in the evening, they went all butch-femme to get into restaurants and night clubs.

22

It’s very similar the the Hebrew word for “blessing.” Is that in fact what it means in Arabic? If it does, than it’s comparable to being named “Benedict.”

23

Yes, as you can see in Barack (name) - Wikipedia. Both Hebrew and Arabic are in the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It’s not surprising that many words in them are similar in sound and meaning.

24

Of course nothing is ever that simple - there is always a whole host of emotions and mental baggage around race. But this is how your typical Americans identify race and this identification triggers how they interact with you and think of you.

25

That makes more sense. Race isn’t determined by appearance, but that is largely how other people identify it (in the US). Though like other people said, it can also be affected by name, accent etc.

I remembered another example I read about: a Brazilian family who were considered white in their home country moved to New York, and were surprised to find out their new neighbours considered them not just Latino, but black. So what race were they really?

26

And has changed over time. It was only 100 years ago or so that the Irish and Italians as well as most Eastern Europeans were seen as of a “lesser race” by WASPs in the United States. And of course, the reception of color is relative to place and time. My father’s darker skin, deep brown eyes and broader nose gave him away as “other” 60 years ago when he was young (he’s Roma/Slavic) in Minnesota where almost everyone is German/Scandinavian and caused some issues when we moved South where some people assumed he was mixed race.

27

Because people judge race based mostly on appearance, not so much on what people say about themselves. But suppose someone changes their appearance to look like another race, then they will indeed be treated like a member of that race. So their experiences will now reflect being that race, same as for Obama. Then why shouldn’t they be eligible for scholarships, preferential admissions etc on that basis?

28

There is no “real” race. Race is entirely socially constructed, and varies by society and culture.

29

Then how can someone be said to be faking it, if it’s not real in the first place? Doesn’t make any sense.

30

Hint: Human society doesn’t make any sense. It just is. It’s riddled with contradictions, non sequiturs, and fallacies. Yet somehow we are all embedded in it and must live out our lives swimming / slogging through it.

To answer this specific question:

As to scholarships, pref admissions, etc., that’s intended to right two different wrongs with one blunt tool.

  1. The minority person is likely to be poor, have ill-educated parents, perhaps only one parent, and have gone to crappy schools.
  2. The minority person is likely to face discrimination in admission and at school because of their sheer minority-ness beyond the issues in item 1.

Some comfy-class white person crinkling their hair and adopting blackface and AAVE speech to game the system is baldly cheating on item 1. While, as you say, both suffering from item 2 and gaining from those remedies intended to offset item 2.

At the same time a genuine e.g. black person raised in comfy-class surroundings by two educated parents with all the advantages of their white neighbor, is in effect gaming the same system when they get admissions preferences. They don’t need the help on 1, but they do need the help on 2. And always will.

Further, they’re not actually “gaming the system” because they’re not doing anything dishonest. Just like making use of a feature of the tax code or of your employment benefits, using whatever benefits are out there is totally legit. Rest assured all your competitor of whatever color and background are using whatever advantages, official and unofficial, that they can grab.

Recognize also it would take only a tiny fraction of comfy whites faking minority-ness to overwhelm the actually small number of comfy non-whites getting a leg-up they may not fully need.

Minimizing the unjustified benefits for the fairly few well-off minority folks is a lot of why these preferences are now smarter or more detailed than the simple “skin-color confers benefits” that were first tried 50 years ago during the first halting steps of the Civil Rights era

31

Read @iiandyiiii again.

Note the quotes? Race is a social construct. Social constructs are real, for a sensible definition of real. Racists generally want or assume that “race” is real in a different sense. Social constructs are also complex, which allows for a lot of silly nitpicking if communication about it isn’t restricted to scientific papers with a two page rigorous definitions section. (Those can of course also be nitpicked. People just seem dumber if they do, to the people who understand the reason for the definitions section.)

32

Because of the Blur-principle:

Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you’ll never get it right
'Cos when you’re laying in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your Dad he could stop it all
You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do what common people do

33

Because they faked a past, faked their own experiences, faked their own history, etc. Generally to create some sort of fantasy of persecution. No one I’m aware of says “I’m black because I say I’m black, even though for my entire life everyone treated me as a white person” (that’d be very dumb too, but very dumb for different reasons). The fakers say “I’ve always been black, and always been treated as black”, and those are lies.

34

The laws, currency, and borders of a country are social constructs. They don’t arise naturally from physical laws. Racists believed that race was not a social construct. They believed that from looking at the genetic heritage of people it was possible to divide them into groups with strict boundaries. By saying that race is a social construct, one is saying that there are no such strict boundaries on people’s genetic heritage.

35

I think you mean the Pulp-principle

36

Right … I’m of the right age to be expected to know the difference, but didn’t care enough at the time. Mea culpa! :smiley:

37

No love for the Shatner Principle?

38

That’s really succinct. I could think only of something pretentious-sounding, like “race is existential, not essential,” or, “Race describes a paradigmatic quality, not an ontological one.” I also had something in there about racists “reifying” race, and that’s really what science doesn’t allow for.

I’m copping to it, because that’s how my mind works, but I also want to go on record as saying that naita said it so much better.

At any rate, if you look at the backstories of people assuming a racial identity they don’t have, they are inventing experiences, and that’s where the real lying comes in, because race is experiential.

Just as an example, and I realize that anecdote is not datum, but it’s just to illustrate my point about race being experiential.

My cousin’s husband, M, is Israeli. He’s half Ethiopian, and half Sephardic. His Sephardic father is actually darker skinned than his mother, and has curly hair, so M, who now lives in the US, is identified as “black” by most Americans. It’s not an identity he had in Israel. It’s not that Israel is some race-free paradise, nor that people with African ancestry haven’t faced prejudice. There are plenty of racial issue in Israel, but it doesn’t have the particular baggage that Israel has, and the same people are not necessarily identified by the same kinds of terms as in the US.

M has said a few times that he “wasn’t black until he moved to the US.” When people ask him what he is, and they are pretty clearly fishing for an answer like “black,” or “biracial,” he answers that he is “Israeli,” and you can see the wrench fall into their cognitive processes.

My point is first of all, that some cultures have more of a need to apply these labels than others, and the US cultures, and there are several, but this is a common trait of them, is this need to label people racially.

Racial labels are really experiential, though, no matter how much we try and deny it. If M had grown up in the US, he’d probably “feel black” in a way that he doesn’t not having grown up here, because he would have been treated that way his whole life. He also would have had access to a subculture that would reinforce the identity.

So, yeah, you can pretend to belong to a race, or to an ethnicity, by lying about experiences you don’t have.

And before anyone says you have to have dark skin to belong to some races, I have known seriously light-skinned black people, who have shown me pictures of family, and they might be otherwise termed “biracial”; they choose to identify as “black,” though, and with their experiences, it’s hard to argue. Likewise, I know some very dark-skinned people who are “white,” or at any rate, Caucasian.

39

In Hillary Baldwin’s case, it is strange that her Mom and Dad, a doctor and lawyer respectively, two educated, respected and completely culturally American professionals didn’t tell their daughter that becoming a part-time pathological liar in order to seem more exotic, sophisticated and worldly wasn’t going to end well for someone who isn’t extremely consistant and devoted to her bullshittaree.

She may well always be rich and physically beautiful, but for the rest of her life, in the back of her mind she will always hear people laughing at her behind her back, and that has to eventually take a toll.

40

It does, but one of them looking totally white (though less so as a child) and one looking obviously mixed-race white and African or Afro-Caribbean, they’ll have been treated very differently their entire lives.

My family lore was that my grandmother was mixed - specifically, part lascar (Bangladeshi sailor) and part something like North African, as well as some white. The way our family looks sort of fitted with that, because we have dark curly hair and my Dad was sometimes mistaken for Moroccan when he got a tan while on holiday there (that’s a facial feature thing too - his happen to look similar to many Moroccans).

But to me it was interesting trivia rather than anything more, because I’d never been treated as anything but a white person.

And it turns out to be completely and utterly untrue. We’re as white British as you can possibly be (DNA tests and genealogy research). Most of our ancestors for the past few hundred years are even from the same small area of the country.

Aaaanyway… The reason there’s been a change is that there is a small level of deserved kudos associated with being from an ethnic minority and doing well despite prejudice. It’s valid - in practically every field in majority white countries, it’s harder to do well if you’re not white. That’s improving, but it’s still an issue.

For the people that grew up white but want to ID as not white, they’re trying to get that kudos without having to deal with the difficulties that are the reason the kudos is awarded. They get all the pluses without any of the minuses.