Are we supposed to be impressed by the possibility that a white supremacist from Africa decided to come to the US and be a white supremacist here as well?
There was a story going around my university when I was there in the 80s similar to this. a student spent his entire life prior to attending college as a missionary kid in China and spoke a couple of Chinese languages fluently. He was a white/Caucasian person who naively tried to join the Asian Pacific Student Alliance and was shouted out of the room. I always suspected that the story was apocryphal.
Here’s the original article. Looks like the survey was conducted with Pollfish, which appears to be a marketing-driven polling platform.
Their description of their methodology comes down to,
They’re not big enough to be rated by 538. I can’t quite figure out what they did, but it sounds like they may have had a banner ad somewhere online that recruited people to answer a poll, then asked people if they’d applied to college. It was a single day survey.
I’m just a teensy bit skeptical of the rigor of their process.
Edit: reading more, it sounds like this is a DIY survey platform. No professional pollsters or statisticians appear to have been involved. Julia Morrissey, the contact person listed, appears to do a lot of articles like this, in which she does a DIY survey using Pollfish and then writes a provocative press release about the results.
Now I’m curious. Googling “Julia Morrissey Pollfish” returns results from julia@intelligent.com, but also julia@trees.com and julia@onlinetherapy.com. I wonder if she works for Pollfish, or if she’s carved out a niche as a super-low-cost pollster who uses Pollfish instead of any platform with any rigor? Weird.
I also wonder if there is some confusion about race vs ethnicity. It’s perfectly reasonable for Guadalupe Martinez Gonzalez, a first generation student whose Mexican-born parents speak no English to identify as “white”, to have put “Caucasian” on their application, but also checked “Hispanic” in the ethnicity portion.
A poorly written poll might have flagged that as a “lie”, if they though “Hispanic” was a race.
I will say, in general, the “Hispanic” tag is the hardest to identify. If you mom spoke Spanish because she was born in Venezuela and learned to speak it from the Spanish speaking help in the mansion her parents, oil executives from the Midwest, lived in, are you Hispanic? I thought one family that said yes.
Whatever someone’s true ethnicity may be, the overall issue is that many applicants clearly perceive or believe that there is an advantage to be had in admissions in claiming, or pretending, to be a racial minority.
This survey appears pretty wonky, and in my work in college admissions, it’s not something I see.
Based on what evidence–that survey?
And yet I have the feeling that the people who “perceive or believe” that these advantages exist (to self-identifying as a racial or ethnic minority in college admissions) would demand much stronger, more rigorous evidence before they would be willing to “perceive or believe” that whites possess certain… “privileges” in broader society, beyond college admissions.
I mean, without the weak-ass survey, I suppose the claim makes sense: white people who’ve gotten race-based advantage after race-based advantage during their K-12 education may believe that during college admission, there’s a race-based advantage given to BIPOC students, and may think about taking that advantage for themselves, too. That’s not especially surprising.
But I need to see much better evidence that it’s actually happening than that survey.
Heh, this whole conversation is reminding me that my mother’s best friend is of Ecuadorean background, and at least one of her kids checked the “Hispanic” box on her college admissions forms, just in case it would help. Not exactly a lie, but I think at the time I thought of it as gaming the system at least a little bit, since we were all comfortably middle-class kids from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Mom’s friend’s kids wouldn’t have registered with anyone as “Hispanic” unless they told you so. Now that I’ve had more than a decade of experience interviewing scholarship candidates, I’m actually much more inclined to view this as a legitimate, honest answer. From the university’s perspective, you’re not just looking to identify kids who have experienced disadvantage or discrimination because of their ethnicity (which is what I thought it was all about when I was seventeen); you’re also trying to bring together students who have an interesting variety of backgrounds and life experiences so they can learn stuff by getting to know each other. (FWIW, the whole family actually had spent a significant amount of time in Ecuador.)
If admissions want to treat people fairly they should find an objective criteria that isn’t just correlated with lower life chances but that is actually a causal factor in itself. Could be parental income, could be family situation or history, could be any number of things.
That’s certainly a conversation worth having but if a rich, well connected and supported black student is automatically assumed to have greater need of assistance than a poor white kid from a single parent family in the shittiest part of town then you have a fundemantally broken and unfair admissions system.
Racism?
I’m not sure what you mean. An admissions policy should not be racist.
There you go!
That’s no clearer. Taking what I said before,
Would you say that the black student is more in need of help than the white student?
It depends. Was the black student attacked when he was a child by a racist and left paraplegic, and is the white child currently holding the winning Powerball ticket?
You can always come up with exceptions and you can always complicate the situation. Refusing to act whenever a complication comes up is a recipe for inaction. “Racism” describes the specific injustice and inequality that’s addressed by race-based affirmative action. Attempts to BUT NOT ALWAYS it are sus.
doesn’t it just?
Skin colour is a poor way, and a racist way, of deciding how to treat people.
If you are suggesting that a physical disability might be a suitable objective criteria by which to consider admissions, I think that may well be a interesting thought.
Whether the disabled person is black and is that way because of a racist attack or if they are white and disabled through Fetal Alcohol Syndrome passed on through their alcoholic,single mother, matters not one jot.
We have an employee at work with a German last name who identifies as Hispanic. I’d have no problem with the daughter of a Venezuelan born in the American Midwest identifying as Hispanic.