So really, to get back to the OP - if a person is not receiving a financial benefit from making an incorrect claim of race or gender - what does it matter?
At one extreme, we have someone in the news a while ago who claimed she was black - and seems to have passed or been accepted for several years until she was called out. So who cares? At the other extreme, the first actual black president of the USA was raised in a white household as a son of a college professor (with some time spent in Asia) and son of someone born and raised in Africa, grew up in the most racially diverse state with a comparatively small black population, went to Harvard and excelled… about as far as you can get from an African-American “typical” experience and the consequent justification for affirmative action.
I suppose the point here is that no matter what the generalities, there are always going to be outliers and no specific rule can cover everything.
If a person is given a position or admission to school based on a claim that turns out to be false, what recourse is there? Presumably you can expel the person for incorrect application data; but then, you would likely have to show they would not have received the position with the correct information?
Not to speak for the OP, but I believe this is why he is asking about verification. You probably could not do much after the fact so perhaps there is a need to do it beforehand.
I think the OP’s question is still unanswered in that what does it mean to be a female or to be black/african-american?
So far, no one has provided evidence that with regard to college admissions or bathroom use those terms mean anything more than self-identification as such.
What those terms mean in a broader sense is beyond the scope of this thread, and probably of GQ.
If you really want to know what defense there is against a false claim of being African-American, call the United Negro College Fund and ask them. They’re probably the largest source of scholarships for black and African-American students. But I’m not volunteering to make the call.
But this is wide open for abuse. Right now, the number of cheaters in college admissions in this manner might be near zero, but if hypothetically there were a large number of white people who identified as black or Hispanic, etc. for the sake of edging in on college admissions, that would be completely counterproductive to the original interest of affirmative action - which was to promote the interests of disadvantaged minorities.
It would be like “We are giving preference in admissions to low-income students” and then a millionaire student steps in and says “I self-identify as a poor person” to try to snatch away that benefit. Or like a male athlete saying “I self-identify as female, without any hormone therapy or surgery” to try to snatch up medals in women’s sports (which is what the upcoming Canada Winter Games would actually technically allow.)
We are to be concerned about situations that are “wide open for abuse” but in reality produce little to no actual abuse at all? I think not, which explains the lack of such defenses in this situation.
A hypothetical problem doesn’t require a defense unless it becomes a real problem. And your question is whether such defenses are in place.
Any defense strategy depends on its costs and benefits. Under present conditions, the benefits are low, since there are few cheaters, and the costs are high, in terms of the effort needed to make an investigation and the bad publicity that would result from an erroneous accusation of cheating.
The real “defense” against this is not anything that could be imposed by the university but the social cost of being found out. Any cheater would need to weigh the financial benefit of the scholarship vs the enormous social cost of being found out. A white student who was found out trying to pass for black without being able to prove black ancestry would be likely to be ostracized by both his black and white classmates. And what good would the degree be if you applied for jobs looking white, while your resume listed a scholarship only available to blacks? I’m sure the company could find some reason not to hire you while not explicitly making it about race. And even if you did get hired, you would still be subject to ostracism by your co-workers.
Some of the “people you didn’t know were black” I linked to above like Soledad O’Brian and Walter Francis White were criticized by blacks because of they looked too white, but could authentically demonstrate black ancestry. A cheater would be unable to defend against the same criticism.
There’s probably a separate thread about it, and it’s not 100% on point here, but I think somewhat relevant: the recently announced mass indictments of parents and facilitators bribing their way to SAT cheating and fake athletic scholarships to get their kids into competitive colleges. One might have previously asked, ‘what’s the defense against that?’ (not a lot it appears). And one might have previously assumed ‘well there aren’t a lot of people doing that’. And those indictments don’t prove 1,000’s or millions of people are doing it, it’s several dozen caught up in that particular net. But who knows exactly how prevalent.
Same might go for this case. It’s plausible to say that fake claims of membership in groups given race preferences in college admissions is not a significant issue, but not entirely obvious that it isn’t. And also it depends how much cheating one thinks it takes to be a big problem. I guess many people (reasonably IMO) who have themselves or had their kids compete fairly for college admission in recent years are pretty upset about those bribery/fraud allegations, albeit again it’s only dozens of people caught doing it.
Whatever the frequency of this is now or has been, there’s sure to be more dispute as time goes on and intergroup marriage (especially wrt ‘Hispanics’ and ‘whites’) becomes routine. Assuming college race preferences last in the courts for much longer that is. The probable lack of longevity IMO is also related to this issue, for example the perceived fairness if my potential grand kids claim a race preference based on nominally being 1/2 Hispanic (but counting their mother as 100% Hispanic when her own mother is child of European immigrants to South America). Assuming they’d duck the anti-preference for being 1/4 Asian. The growing frequency of that kind of situation, plus the rise of a significant elite among blacks and Hispanics (Natives not as much), whose children are a disproportionate % of the black/Hispanic candidates for competitive schools, is making the race preference system unworkable. Outright cheating isn’t the system’s biggest problem.
The very basic difference there is that students who gained admission on the basis of bribery would not be identifiable visually.
Now I’ve made the point that it’s not absolutely possible to be sure that any given individual who appears white might not actually have some black ancestry. However, if there were significant numbers of students who appeared white applying for black scholarships that could suggest there was a potential problem, even if some of them did have black ancestry. But I think the number of students who appear white who apply for such scholarships is very small, whether they can prove African ancestry or not. In other words, you can set an upper limit on the potential problem, and that limit is very low.
There is no test for “black blood”. DNA sometimes can work, but not always. And then without being racist as all fuck- what’s your cut off? 1/8th? One drop? The only reliable way is self-identification. And once you say that’s the rule, there’s no possibility of abuse.
You are what you say you are- anything else is racist.
But you are making two assumptions both of which I dealt with in the previous post:
that the race preference system or the part we should care about is only that giving preferences to blacks. But there are also preferences given to Hispanics and Natives, and those are much less self regulating by people’s general sense of ‘what Hispanic/Native people look like’.
That it takes large scale cheating to undermine the legitimacy of a system of already dicey legitimacy in most Americans’ view (of all races according to some polls).
Again, I don’t think outright cheating is the big problem for this system or the main reason it’s likely to disappear or be much further curtailed before very long IMO.
I am in academics; and, my academic unit is in the top 10 for what we do across the country. It ain’t Ivy League, but there’s a line to get into the door. What’s more, I’ve served on admissions for a long time as a faculty member. (To other academicians, that conveys the between the lines truth that I’m not exactly every administrator’s favorite, Because Admissions is a high work-load, difficult committee to serve on, in part because of just the sort of imponderables this thread is about).
Sorry, folks, I sometimes get tripped up by this system, when my finger scrapes the enter key. I was busy trying to edit and repost, and y’all have swept me by. So to make this as short as possible (I was not) and hopefully not increase the ire of the moderator, I just was trying to suggest that the OP may be making an assumption about this issue, that admissions would necessarily think the process needs defense in the first place. Under represented minorities are, for us, in the single digits for applications. We would like to see our classes reflect our states demographics. On one hand, we don’t (and can’t) know for certain if a claim of membership in a URM demographic group is real or an imposture, but from our perspective, neither can anyone else. And in an environment where enhancing diversity by admitting students who state they are URMs is generally deemed a positive, I don’t know that admissions has any great interest in "defending " the veracity of the system. Just the way it is, given human frailties and shortcomings. I hope I’m not seen as debating, because that’s not my intent- I’m just sharing a reason it may not be a major concern for many tasked with the job- irresolvable, conflicting motivations.
Shoot. Another great post (trust me, it was wonderful) lost to my haste and cluelessness. I apologize for the foreshortened, and therefore meaningless post I wasted your collective time with.
The growing frequency of that kind of situation, plus the rise of a significant elite among blacks and Hispanics (Natives not as much), whose children are a disproportionate % of the black/Hispanic candidates for competitive schools, is making the race preference system unworkable. Outright cheating isn’t the system’s biggest problem.
