It’s hard to evaluate what the actual situation might have been from a fifth-hand story. It would be interesting to see what the actual wording of the scholarship was.
My brother’s wife is a white South African (English, Norwegian, and Boer ancestry), and in that sense my white nephews are African-Americans (not of course the actual meaning of the term in the US). On the other hand, my sister’s husband was a black Guyanese, so although my niece and nephew are black they are not African-American in the sense the term was originally employed, of being descended from slaves brought to the US from Africa.
Yes, Soul Man with C Thomas Howell. A spectacular film in that it manages to simultaneously rail against racism while perpetuating the horrific racism it is railing against. He ends up having to pay back the money.
I used to work in university admissions and dealt with overseas students. I got the university to change the (self-reported) racial category on the application form from “African-American” to “Black/African-American” on the basis that there was no category for black non-Americans. This wasn’t scholarship-related, by the way; it was just for demographic statistics purposes.
I was curious how this is handled in reality. So the requirements for The Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Scholarship Program from the United Negro College Fund include “be enrolled full-time as a rising senior at any accredited public or private four-year HBCU”. It says nothing about actually being black. On the other hand, the UNCF/Koch Scholars Program lists among the requirements that the applicant be African-American or black.
Given that Historically Black Colleges and Universities routinely accept white students, and that now some are even majority white, I would think that would mean that that scholarship is simply open to whites as well as blacks.
Isn’t any requirement/criteria/standard in and of itself discriminating?
Even randomly choosing from all applications discriminates against those who didn’t apply.
Where the line(s) are drawn is the debate.
You are what you identify as. That’s the law (exception is being a legal member of a Federally recognized tribe, but that has other benefits and issues). There was a girl in one of my classes, blondish hair, freckles, she Ids as black, turns out she was 1/4 black. But he family lived in a black neighborhood, etc. Who are you to say who is “obviously white”?
Next:
When and IF that becomes a real issue, except in the minds of bigots and homophobes, we can discuss it.
Isn’t that what such questions are for now, in most government entities? Because I thought the US Supreme Court killed affirmative action programs in college admissions years ago. (Scholarship programs, being private groups, can discriminate as they choose.)
Note that ‘cheating’ is possible on nearly any such restrictions, and usually it would cost more to set up a program to catch it than it’s worth. People can be really inventive.
At one time, our City added a requirement that police officers had to live within the city limits. When preparing a mailing of sample ballots to registered voters, I noticed 6 police officers, all ‘residing’ in a small studio apartment in the city. Two of them were married, but their spouses were registered to vote at houses in the suburbs.
As I recall, it was to be able to ensure that there wasn’t any discrimination in the admissions process. Ironically, before I joined they had tried to prevent discrimination by simply not asking for data on race…and then got penalized because they couldn’t demonstrate they weren’t discriminating because they didn’t have any data on race.
I can’t believe they didn’t give your school’s faultless program to eliminate discrimination the credit it deserves. Yeah, no school could possibly discriminate without race data. No school would ever discriminate against minorities by merely giving legacy preference to children of alumni, restricting their on-campus recruiting efforts to segregation academies in the south, and advertising only in “Aryan Nation Weekly.” They might even be able to dispense with the in-person interviews designed to ensure that little Charleston Langefordian Gillmontburger VII is a “good fit for the school.”
Let’s save the snark. Gyrate’s post didn’t imply any of that. In fact, most schools do ask such questions in order to have data to demonstrate that they don’t discriminate. Whether or not such questions prevent discrimination is another issue.
Mod note aside, I think you’re overestimating the target population of the university I worked at. If anything, top priority was given to anyone of any race who could tick the “Are you good at football?” box.
I wasn’t assuming anything about your school’s recruiting targets but I did want to push back against the idea that we can solve systemic racism in this country by allowing white people to pretend that “they don’t see color.” Failing to collect data about how minorities are treated is both a symptom and a cause of the problem. I am sorry that I harshly tried to make my point at your expense.