Checking the Racial Box – IOTW Report

Checking the Racial Box

Powerline:

Via Steve Sailer, the Washington Post maps the minefield that high school students navigate as they describe their racial backgrounds:

Sabria Kazmi’s background defies easy classification. She has grandparents from Tennessee, Iraq and two countries in South Asia.

So when the 18-year-old filled out her college application, she puzzled over what boxes to check. The task is all the more sensitive this year amid the mounting debate over the role of race and ethnicity in admissions.

That debate has been going on for a long time, but the Asian students’ lawsuit against Harvard has moved it to the forefront.

First, Kazmi came to white. Check. Then Asian. Check. Followed by Middle Eastern and Pakistani. Check, check. She found a blank space to write in her Bangladeshi roots.

Kazmi, a high school senior in Northern Virginia, could have gone further because one grandmother is part Cherokee. But she stopped there.

Heh. Sailer adds: “She’s not Elizabeth Warren-level greedy about getting affirmative action bennies.”

Officials at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., helped The Post convene them for a 90-minute focus group on race and admissions. The seniors, all aiming for selective colleges, held strong and sometimes clashing views.

Wenxi Huang, 17, confessed to an “itching, nagging feeling” when he checked the box on his application indicating Asian ancestry. The Chinese American student felt the information should be irrelevant in admission decisions. “I just want to live in a country where my race doesn’t matter,” he said. “Where I’m never judged or picked or excluded for my race.”

He’s right to be worried. His Asian ancestry will hurt him. But not all students share his yearning for a racism-free America.

Jennifer Hernández, also 17, a Salvadoran American, wants colleges to take race and ethnicity into account.

Of course she does.  read more

8 Comments on Checking the Racial Box

  1. In a time when you can just SAY that you’re a different (or entirely made up) gender and be taken seriously, aren’t you whatever race/grievance group that your feels tells you?

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  2. What we (obviously) need is a “Race and Settlement Main Office,” (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, RuSHA) like our Demonrat forebears.

    They could sort, categorize, delineate, and bestow all rights and privileges – such as college entrance, employment rights and benefits, juridical standing, legal status, &c, based on the racial purity (or impurities) of the masses of “volk” using the latest scientific methods.

    A Brave New World, indeed …

    izlamo delenda est …

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  3. Several years back I started claiming my “Native American” status on government forms, explaining to any helpful clerk that I am proud to have been born in El Dorado, Arkansas. Not once has anyone challenged my claim that being born on American soil makes me a Native American and most have smiled in understanding.

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  4. I am an Anglo-surnamed heterosexual male American citizen born south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It seems that puts me in the dregs according to whose who fancy themselves my betters. I’d be most grateful if they’d simply leave me alone.

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