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Proposal Adds Options for Students to Specify Race
Basically, this change in the federal Education Department's policy allows bi- or multiracial college applicants to check off more than one of the race options (black, white, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American/Alaska Native) on their application. This change is a response to increasing pressure from multiracial students who do not want to be lumped into one category. I think this is interesting because it signals a shift in the way our culture, and our bureaucracy thinks about ethnicity and the composition of our society. This is an acknowledgement that the matter is not as cut and dried as we generally like to think.
As for myself, I sometimes circle "other" when presented with any document that asks me to identify my race. Sometimes I circle "white." It depends on my mood.
There are two reasons for this. One is that "Jewish" is often considered an ethnicity as well as a religion. I belive it used to be an option on the U.S. Census form before I was born, but they took it off. Now most of us who are of European or Russian descent mark off "white" (except for folks like my friend Danny, a white South African Jew who put "African American" on his college application). Ashkenazi Jews have been, more or less, "white" since after World War II, when anti-Semitism became unfashionable and socially unacceptable throughout a significant part of the U.S. That change smacks of assimilation more than acceptance, but I'm not going to get into that. Suffice it say, sometimes I am white, and sometimes, because there is no "Jewish" option, I am "other."
My second reason for circling "other" is that I see it as a kind of subversive act of protest; against knee-jerk racial classification, political correctness, and "othering" - the psychological and anthropological term that unfortunate human tendency to categorize people as "us" or "them." If I'm going to be othered by a piece of paper, I will do it on my own terms.
Basically, this change in the federal Education Department's policy allows bi- or multiracial college applicants to check off more than one of the race options (black, white, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American/Alaska Native) on their application. This change is a response to increasing pressure from multiracial students who do not want to be lumped into one category. I think this is interesting because it signals a shift in the way our culture, and our bureaucracy thinks about ethnicity and the composition of our society. This is an acknowledgement that the matter is not as cut and dried as we generally like to think.
As for myself, I sometimes circle "other" when presented with any document that asks me to identify my race. Sometimes I circle "white." It depends on my mood.
There are two reasons for this. One is that "Jewish" is often considered an ethnicity as well as a religion. I belive it used to be an option on the U.S. Census form before I was born, but they took it off. Now most of us who are of European or Russian descent mark off "white" (except for folks like my friend Danny, a white South African Jew who put "African American" on his college application). Ashkenazi Jews have been, more or less, "white" since after World War II, when anti-Semitism became unfashionable and socially unacceptable throughout a significant part of the U.S. That change smacks of assimilation more than acceptance, but I'm not going to get into that. Suffice it say, sometimes I am white, and sometimes, because there is no "Jewish" option, I am "other."
My second reason for circling "other" is that I see it as a kind of subversive act of protest; against knee-jerk racial classification, political correctness, and "othering" - the psychological and anthropological term that unfortunate human tendency to categorize people as "us" or "them." If I'm going to be othered by a piece of paper, I will do it on my own terms.
