I could see something like that happening in the 1980s, but not so much now.
In the early 1990s, I had a pen pal who was of Hispanic descent, and she had a cousin who was able to start a business with a loan aimed at Hispanic businesspeople.
Thing was, he was of Scandinavian descent, blond and blue-eyed; his birth father had died before he was born, and his mother married his Hispanic stepfather when he was a toddler and later legally adopted him.
Fair enough. A little blue eyed tow headed boy in Argentina whose great grandfather Helmut moved there after the war can fairly consider himself to be Hispanic. Right?
Possibly. Hispanic people can be any race, including Asian; there’s a sizable Asian-descent population in parts of South America. Here’s the best-known example.
I had an undocumented student from Mexico with a bright red hair, freckles, and a German last name. But yes, very Hispanic. Grandpa immigrated after WW2.
The family I mentioned was one where the mom was born/lived a couple years in Venezuela, but her dad was from the Midwest, the family moved back to the US, and that was it. The family’s entire Hispanic experience was a decade or so living as wealthy foreigners in an American enclave while dad did Oil Executive things. Calling her children “Hispanic” because she spent a few years there seems a tremendous stretch to me.
I know this is 7 years old but it reminds me of one of the stupider arguments I heard in favor of the government classifying people by race. It boiled down to “if you want the government to be color-blind, why are they still asking about race on the census?” Ummm, exactly? If I were Black, while it would possibly help identify ways to help people in my area, I’d be wary of how I answered the census question, as the information could also be used for nefarious purposes too, even worse than big-data gerrymandering although that’s what comes first to mind.
One of my fellow students in high school had the surname Ginoza. He got a few offers for Hispanic surname scholarships. He was of 100% Japanese descent.
One of the kids in the Explorer Post I used to be an advisor for had the last name of Cuan. His family emigrated from Hong Kong to Mexico before moving to the US.
When I was about to turn 30 I decided to legally change my name, for reasons that made sense to me at the time but in retrospect (after 30+ years) seem rather incomprehensible. The surname I chose has a Native American sound to it, a fact which had not occurred to me when I chose it. It was certainly not my intention to do anything which nowadays might be considered “cultural appropriation” (a term that did not even exist at the time).
I am frequently asked about my name, usually with the assumption that it is Native American. I have never tried to pretend that I have any Native ancestry (an impossibility, as none of my ancestors were even in the US until after 1900, and all of them are accounted for). Nonetheless, people have occasionally asked if “I was sure” about the origin of my name.
In my defense, I was rather stupid at the time. The way it came about was that you had to select a race via a touch-tone phone. I selected “black” out of immature petulance and a lack of understanding of the whole issue, but then had to go in in person to change it. Which I did, eventually.
Not proud of the whole episode!
Might it be that the high school guidance counselor writes a recommendation, and admissions looks to that, expecting the race there to match the applicant’s claim?
Does the guidance counselor recommendation usually have any sort of indication of the student’s race?
I think there are legitimate reasons to enable black students in the US to have an easier path to college over other races. Racism in the US is present for all races, but it’s institutionalized against black people and they will have more roadblocks to success. The more black people that can be successful, the less they can be marginalized and the more role models black children will have. And there is the societal debt from slavery to be rectified. Even if a black child comes from a well-to-do black family, that family has likely experienced more significant hardships and financial struggles compared to other minorities and white poor people.
A reasonable option might be to give extra consideration to descendants of slaves as opposed to anyone who is black. A black family who emigrates to the US from Europe should probably be treated as generic immigrants or minorities since they did not have to overcome being a slave in the US. But a black student who has slavery in their past will have had to deal with a lot of family trauma from that. Giving that student a fast-path into college is one way to help make up for that trauma.
How do you call out slave descendants separately, though?
I’m pretty sure that with public records like births, deaths, property, etc., most people in the US can trace their lineage back several generations. I would think a slave descendant could trace their lineage back to whoever was a slave. Considering there will be many great**-grandparents that could potentially be slaves, there should be sufficient documentation. Or another way could be to just show that their lineage goes back to 1900. Freed slaves might not have the best documentation records, but a family who has been here since 1900 very likely came from slavery.
Ha! As a family history researcher, I can promise you that documentation IS hard to come by for most people, especially if your family wasn’t wealthy, especially for women, and so much harder for descendants of slaves. Prior to about 1900 births, deaths, and marriages weren’t recorded in most areas of the US, and sketchy for some years after that (and worse for slaves, who were often referred to only by a first name). And ‘sufficient’ – how do you establish that a deed for Adam Johnson was your Adam Johnson? Nicknames (Sarah and Polly were common nicknames for Mary) don’t help, variable spellings (accents, and censuses were done orally), and apparently no one knew or cared what their actual birthdate was. Off my soapbox now. But, yeah, establishing who was descended from slaves would be nearly impossible.
Was this the Trevor Richards incident in Omaha in 2004? If so, apparently one of his friends nominated him, with Richards’ consent, as he posed for the poster his buddies put up around the school. Someone who alleges to be that kid (It’s Reddit, so who knows?) said the impetus was
Listening to talks every year, and learning about the ideals of Dr. King right before the award was given was enough to show the irony of their award.
and
We figured he wouldn’t win, but that it would force the school to say they were only giving it to black students.
Gee, an award for for African American Student of the Year had only been given to Black students. Someone noted the high school is predominantly white, and that if this had happened at Central High, which had a much larger Black population, it would’ve been seen as the racist BS it was. The kid who nominated Richards claims the award wasn’t canceled but was opened up to any student who represented the ideals of Dr. King. He got suspended and is still all pissy about it.