A few years ago the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an interesting article on Passing: How posing as white became a choice for many black Americans. “The young unkempt woman still in her pajamas shuffled into her 8 a.m. college psychology class and sat down next to Barbara Douglass,” it began.
“There must be something wrong with your nose,” Douglass replied, “because one’s sitting right next to you and you can’t smell me.” Although Barbara Douglass never told anyone she was white, people see her porcelain skin and her silky hair and assume she is.
But Douglass … is a 53-year-old black woman. She could pass for white but she has never tried, she said.
“Growing up, I knew of people who did, and I was even instructed not to say, at that time, that they were colored. In order to get their jobs, they had to say they were white.”
In the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning Peter Schmidt discusses a new study that found that nearly three-fourths of the biracial people surveyed “reported concealing their white ancestry in applying for college, scholarships, financial aid, or jobs.” Those who describe affirmative action as reverse discrimination (instead of what it is: just plain, unmodified discrimination) might call this “reverse passing.” As one respondent told the authors,
If I’m trying to get more money from the government, I am “African American.” There is no white aspect to me.
One suspects that a large number of biracial blacks behave this way, especially influential leaders who insist on keeping all their college records private.
So what? we might ask, and the authors of the study do try to soften its probable impact by noting after all that
people from other segments of society have similarly been known to try to gain an advantage by manipulating how they are racially or ethnically classified. For example, colleges have long struggled with how to deal with white students who latch onto or falsely claim some small, far-removed portion of American Indian ancestry to gain an edge in applying for admission or financial aid. And a study on enrollments at three private California colleges, published in 2005, found evidence that white students were disproportionately more likely to fail to specify a race on college applications, thus probably inflating the declared minority enrollments of institutions that assume such students are multiracial.
One answer to the “so what?” question concerns the threat these findings pose to the reliability of “racial” data about college performance. It suggests, as Schmidt notes,
that many researchers start out with bad data that conflate information on students with two black parents with information on students with one white parent and one black one, even though those biracial students are less likely, on average, to have grown up with the same disadvantages.
Some influential educrats see no problem here.
C. Anthony Broh, a higher-education policy consultant who played a key role in the debate over the Education Department’s racial-classification system when he was director of research policy at the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, said he has no objection to biracial students identifying themselves as black to try to benefit from affirmative-action programs. Affirmative action, he said, is intended “to help students who are not part of the majority.”
Even aside from the fact that there is no “the majority” (are Asians and Jews part of this mythical majority?), most educrats, of course, pretend to disagree vehemently with Broh, insisting that affirmative action is intended only to provide “diversity” to the majority. In defending “diversity,” for example, Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle that “the message the university is sending to its students … is that ‘We no longer can live in our own world surrounded by people who are just like us.’” As I commented in The Patronizing Exclusiveness Of Inclusiveness,
note how he majestically divides the world (as nearly all “diversity”-mongering preferentialists must) into us and them. Who, after all, are “we”? What exactly is “just like us”?
The “message” here, whether Birgeneau et al. intend it or not, is that they — the black, the Hispanic, the gay, the community college graduate — are different from us, the people who naturally populate places like UC Berkeley. Special efforts must be made (often … paid for by patronizing rich people) at “inclusiveness” to let them into our world, because it short changes us not to be exposed to them.
As Schmidt notes, the study’s authors recognize that their findings
“raise broader questions about who should benefit from affirmative-action programs,” and whether beneficiaries should be required to have two black parents or whether the “one-drop rule” should be applied to people with biracial or multiracial backgrounds.
The best answer to their questions is that no one should benefit from race-based affirmative action. If no benefits were given or denied on the basis of race, the “one-drop rule” and official “racial classification systems” would be relegated to the dustbin of history where they belong.
