"Race" in College Admissions FAQ & Discussion 3

2collegewego · March 29, 2009, 11:59pm

Well, the kid who is 1/8 black and 7/8 white is Hispanic. I think under the ‘old’ system, he would have just checked Hispanic but now he has to put down a race too.

The kid who is part NA is also biracial. I don’t think people know what race this kid is, if that makes sense. On the one hand, I think whatever the parent is, the kid should be (so if dad could legitimately claim NA, the kid should too)… but with NA, I always wonder if they have to meet the blood quantum requirements.

Oh, and this isn’t necessarily for college applications. Our local school has asked all the parents to recertify the kids’ races. Parents used to just check 1, now they can check as many as apply with Hispanic being a separate question.

tokenadult · March 30, 2009, 12:17am

The federal regulation on all these matters is linked to post from post #2 in this FAQ thread. Note that all college applicants have the option of declining to self-identify with any ethnicity or race.

BRJ-CT · March 30, 2009, 5:21am

I liked knowing how many URM’s were at each school. It helps when you are looking for diversity and "not stated’ could be minorities or many could be students that were white that didn’t want to check race. I grew up never to be ashamed of being multi-racial and I wear my skin everyday. I’m judged on it sometimes without opening my mouth or doing any work. That, I feel will never go away and although I live with it, I don’t feel I’m more of a unit of people denying who I am on a form. It might hurt me in some ways, help me, but it’s part of who I am. I also realize from seeing and listening to many adults of different racial backgrounds, preference is not given very much in the real world with jobs, promotions and networking. Nothing in life is equal and it never will be with college admissions. Almost every class will have students that worked hard to get in, any race or background, students that lied and manipulated their applications, students that had enough money to pay full freight and get an edge, students that got in on 90% athletic ability, students that had connections, were a legacy, the list goes on.
I don’t think denying who you are is correct but I can only do what I feel is best. Everyone has to listen to their heart.

tokenadult · March 30, 2009, 10:35am

What we think here in my “multiracial” family is that we deny who we are when we identify with a group smaller than all of humankind. Anyway, the current rules give college applicants lots of opportunities for self-identification, all of them optional.

Bay · March 30, 2009, 11:42am

From Post #183:

How is race a recent human invention? People of different races have existed for thousand of years.

How is race not about biology? Are skin tone and physical features not biological in nature? Of course they are.

And what does it mean that the idea of race is “not found in nature?” Does this mean that discrimination among mates by humans or animals based on visual preferences does not exist in nature? Of course it does. Humans even choose pets based on a preference for physical appearance.

Finally, if race and racism are embedded in institutions and every day life, then the project seems to confirm that affirmative actions are necessary to combat the current state of affairs.

tokenadult · March 30, 2009, 12:41pm

Do redheads form a separate “race”?

Bay · March 30, 2009, 1:06pm

Not that I know of, but why do you ask that question? Are you saying that because not every member of each “race” as we define them has the exact same characteristics, then there can be no such thing as “race?”

Categorizations of race are generally based on inheritable skin tone, facial features and hair texture, not hair color.

Are you saying that if humans had not recently “invented” race, as stated in the article, then people would not take notice of any differences in appearance between Heidi Klum and her husband, Seal, for example? Would black people simply not notice that Seal looks like them, and whites not notice that Heidi looks like them?

How does the fact that humans have sight and a discriminating brain factor into your analysis that there is no such thing as “race?”

tokenadult · March 30, 2009, 1:10pm

There isn’t any biological definition of one race category as contrasted with another, as you have acknowledged. We’ve previously written replies to each other about the matter of whole countries full of people changing “race” categories in United States federal classification, which is further evidence that “race” categories are ultimately arbitrary. My own son, when he goes out in public, has been categorized in at least four different ways by onlookers, and he could probably pass for one or two other categories.

DunninLA · March 30, 2009, 1:32pm

token – this is the first I’ve visited this thread, so I apologize if my comment is repeated elsewhere…

I agree with your perspective on this. The term race is imprecise because humans everywhere only share the genetic code with an original group of (perhaps as few as 10-12) humans who migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. They may or may not have interbred with Neanderthal… that question is still open.

So when we say “chinese”, or more broadly “asian”, in comparison to say “american indian”, or “black”, or “caucasian”, these terms are no more exact than “cerulean blue” vs. “baby blue” vs. “navy blue”. In both cases, final colors, even those in a defined book such as the printer’s Pantone book, are mixes of other colors in different proportions. These terms are inventions… we need them so that in conversation, a hearer can have a general idea about what a speaker means when describing a color. But they are still inventions. And in the case of race, I’m not sure how it is ever relevant of defining, so I’m not sure what the piont is of calling out a race when speaking of a person. I can see how a person’s background is important – like those used by the UCs in defining characteristics of an applicant which deserve special admissions consiideration – single parent home, first generation college, academically underperforming high school, extreme poverty/working >20hrs. per week to support the family, and the like, which affect a person’s development, exposure and opportunities no matter in what proportion his/her genes have been mixed with groups from different parts fo the world.

The different physical characteristics (hair texture, nose shape, head shape, height, body type, skin color (at least we know the biological reason for dark vs. light skin as an adaptation to the amount of sunlight available) are similarly imprecise. There are some now obviously comically ignorant scientific publications by anthropoligists and the like from the mid part of the 20th century which underscore the arbitrary and silly nature of “race”.

I think it would be interesting to study (but I simply don’t have the time or resources) how inhabitants of Africa view each other’s people groups… the pygmy, the Watusi, bushmen, all “black” by our definition, but worlds apart in all physical characteristics and cultural experiences, united conceptually only by skin tone.

StitchInTime · March 30, 2009, 1:45pm

<a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062164994-post205.html]#205[/url]”>quote</a> …How is race a recent human invention? People of different races have existed for thousand of years…

[/quote]

All quotes below are from the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences: [The</a> Anthropological Perspective on Race: An Histrorical Overview.](<a href=“http://aabss.org/journal2001/wienker2001.jmm.html]The”>http://aabss.org/journal2001/wienker2001.jmm.html) Considering that our species (Homo Sapiens) has been around for about [90,000</a> years](<a href=“http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab12]90,000”>HOMO SAPIENS), the biological misconception/social concept of ‘race’ is recent:

An Historical Perspective on the Concept of Race in Biological Anthropology

A scientific interest in racial variation, as far as western society is concerned, dates to the time of the ancient Greeks, who associated racial characteristics with the environment. Today, we know that many human biological characteristics are environmentally influenced.

Linneaus (1806) was the first scientist to classify humanity into different types. In the mid 1700s he sorted Homo sapiens into a few finite categories, which were stereotyped phenotypically and behaviorally. For example, he described the European type as fair and brawny, blue eyed, inventive, and governed by laws; the Asian type was sooty, black eyed, melancholic, haughty, and governed by opinion. 

Johann Blumenbach (1795), later in the 18th century, coined the term Caucasian, after a skull from the Caucasus Mountains of central Eurasia. He described the skull as perfectly formed and Europeans came to be called Caucasians because they were thought to be descendents of the “perfect” people from the Caucasus area. As the unknown world was explored and different indigenous people encountered, naturalists, the scientists of the time, described their physical characteristics and classified different populations as to their relatedness. This typological approach, description and classification, was to be a focus of biological anthropology for a century and a half, even into the genetic age, the 20th century. Races were described in terms of their biological patterns or norms and modern humanity was classified in terms of the number of races and how they were biologically related to one another. Some naturalists recognized a handful of racial categories, while others put the number at considerably more.

During the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, the scientific literature on human races was filled with such schemes; often they were subtly, and sometimes overtly, racist. Populations were viewed in terms of their external phenotypic characteristics; arguments involved how many races existed, and how they were related to one another. There was no interest in the significance of the biological variation within Homo sapiens. Racial characteristics and human races themselves were viewed as static entities. Primary emphasis was put on norms and modes, usually of externally visible physical characteristics–on types; individual biological variation within groups was not considered, nor typically was biochemical or serological variation. Biological variation within a population, manifest in any human group, was ignored.

That perspective persisted into the 1940s, after evolutionary theory had become accepted as the underlying cause of biological variation in living things, and well after biological anthropologists began to focus on genetic variation among modern human populations. Biological anthropologists were slow to adopt evolution as the fundamental paradigm for their science. Today evolution is the theoretical foundation upon which all of biological anthropology rests.

Coon, Garn, and Birdsell (1950) infused evolutionary thinking into the consideration of human races by biological anthropologists in the early 1950s. While their work contained the traditional classification of human races, it was the first to view biological variations and human populations as dynamic entities. It was also the first to consider human races in terms of the evolutionary significance of global patterns of biological variation. Human races were understood to be populations that change in terms of their biological patterns and those patterns were understood to be the result of adaptation, among other evolutionary processes. Hulse’s (1962) classic paper, Race as an Evolutionary Episode, reflected the new way that biological anthropologists viewed human races. 

That is the basic fabric of human population biology today. Patterns of human biological variation across populations are viewed with evolutionary and biocultural lenses. Patterns of cultural variation, ecological parameters, and hereditary qualities result in the fact that people differ biological, both within and among populations…

<a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062164994-post205.html]#205[/url]”>quote</a> …How is race not about biology? Are skin tone and physical features not biological in nature? Of course they are.

And what does it mean that the idea of race is “not found in nature?” …

[/quote]

Traditionally, biological anthropologists have been the scientists that studied the nature of human racial variation. Until 50 years ago, the study of modern human biological variation focused on describing and classifying human races, which were viewed as static entities. About 50 years ago, evolutionary thinking influenced the bioanthropological focus on human races; study of their evolutionary dynamics and the significance of physical variation predominated. Scientists began seriously questioning the validity of biological races among humanity in the 1980s; by the mid 1990s most anthropologists and some professionals in other social and behavioral sciences had concluded that the biological concept of race had no scientific validity when applied to living Homo sapiens. Rather, human races are now understood to be social constructs. Cross-cultural views of race reveal no common cognitive framework to a consideration of human races and human racial variation. The criteria by which individuals are assigned to a particular racial category differ widely across cultures. Some cultures have relatively complex cognitive systems of reckoning races and others like our own, relatively simple ones. Thus, the modern anthropological view of human “races” represents an important pedagogical challenge to social and behavioral scientists…

More links to reseach can be found at: [The</a> Unhyphenated Amercian](<a href=“http://home.roadrunner.com/~justamerican/Links.htm]The”>http://home.roadrunner.com/~justamerican/Links.htm) including the [American</a> Anthropological Association Statement on “Race”](<a href=“http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm]American”>404 Page Not Found - The American Anthropological Association):

Finally, [post</a> #103](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060834173-post103.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060834173-post103.html) in “Race” in College Applications FAQ & Discussion may be food for thought:

Bay · March 30, 2009, 1:47pm

While I agree that categorizing different race is imprecise, I think it is ridiculous to assume that humans do not form judgments about and preferences for other people based upon their immutable inheritable physical appearance, and that history has shown that certain groups have and/or continue to be treated badly by others, based soley on their skin tone, etc.

DunninLA · March 30, 2009, 1:56pm

token – I visited the census bureau link from your Post #2. Here is one definition:

“Black or African American. A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa”

I believe it is within the last ten years conclusively proven through the analysis of mitochondrial DNA that 100% of the earth’s current human population has origings in a ‘black racial group of Africa’

DunninLA · March 30, 2009, 2:04pm

Bay… not just skin tone.

There is, in the US at least, a an apparent heirarchy in physical preferences:

<ul>
<li>large is preferred to small</li>
<li>light is preferred to dark</li>
<li>good looking is preferred to ugly or average</li>
<li>male is preferred to female</li>
<li>trim is preferred to fat</li>
<li>full physical function is preferred to a physical limitation</li>
</ul>

we have laws now addressing these physical characteristics as regards equal employment opportunities (excepting the large and good looking preferences).

There have been many business articles about attributes of success or leadership inferred from physical appearance. A large, fit, light colored, athletic looking person is assumed to be a more natural leader and more apt to be successful in the proposed job, etc. other factors being held equal. So from this we have the archtypical sales rep Steve Stunning, who is 6’3, fit, male, blond, good looking. And when Steve gets to where the grind of selling is old, he becomes the Regional Manager and hires people who remind him of himself — which means in a 20 minute interveiw, the look like himself.

I’m sorry I don’t have citations for these, but I have seen these studies, and magazine articles about this phenomenon that I don’t think citations at this point are even necessary.

DunninLA · March 30, 2009, 2:28pm

As regards the my third category above:

“good looking is preferred to ugly” – I should not have used the word average, for reasons I show below:

there was an article perhaps 10 years back whose conclusion was this: “good looking is defined as a set of facial features where no feature deviates from the ‘average’ of the values common to that feature”

so, take eyes. Their shape can vary from round to a narrow almond shape. What is the preferred shape? The statistical average of all available shapes.

take nose: Noses range from narrow and pointy, to broad and flat, from straight edged to humped in the middle. What is the preferred shape? The statistical average of all these available shapes.

and so on for head shape (round vs. oval), head size (large vs. small), hairline (very high forehead to very low forehead), the the width between eyes (from very narrow to very wide), to the slope of the forehead (sloped severely back, to straight up and down), to the position of the chin (from protruded in comparison to the upper jaw, to receded), etc.

The conclusion was that the concept of great beauty was really an absence of deviation from the statistical average for all features. The most beautiful person is the one that is the most statistically average.

Keilexandra · March 30, 2009, 2:34pm

^ Makes sense, if you look at it another way–beauty is “perfect,” and perfection is the lack of deviation.

fabrizio · March 30, 2009, 4:18pm

As Justice Powell wrote in 1978, “…the purpose of helping certain groups whom the faculty of the Davis Medical School perceived as victims of “societal discrimination” does not justify a classification that imposes disadvantages upon persons like respondent, who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered. To hold otherwise would be to convert a remedy heretofore reserved for violations of legal rights into a privilege that all institutions throughout the Nation could grant at their pleasure to whatever groups are perceived as victims of societal discrimination. That is a step we have never approved.”

The Supreme Court has never approved of the “redressing discrimination” rationale for affirmative action. It has only approved the “diversity” rationale (see Grutter). As I understand it, the Supreme Court almost overturned the “diversity” rationale in Parents Involved, but Justice Kennedy did not join the majority in declaring that “diversity” is never a compelling interest.

python38 · March 30, 2009, 4:22pm

^Just because some people judge people on appearance, and perhaps all of us do subconsciously, doesn’t mean that people should take race into account when admitting students into college, IMHO. It fosters resentment between us when you’ve got one guy realising, “He got in because he’s a URM; I didn’t because I’m not,” and the other guy thinking, “I only got in because I’m a URM; I’d have been rejected otherwise.”

Bay · March 30, 2009, 4:35pm

Ensuring that people of all colors and physical characteristics are represented in every facet of American life is the only way to deconstruct the heirarchy and change peoples’ perceptions about the equal worth of every individual, no matter what they look like.

fabrizio · March 30, 2009, 4:35pm

Re: #170

Interesting. Traditionally, supporters of affirmative action asserted that in the absence of affirmative action, numbers-only admissions would result in an overwhelming Asian college population. It never ceased to amaze me how easily well-educated people would succumb to the fallacy of thinking that ending affirmative action means removing subjective criteria. Ironically, for people who were arguing that race didn’t play a big role in admissions, they were more than willing to argue that ending its consideration meant not considering a whole bunch of other factors!

(Sidenote: you do realize that the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea are the second and third largest sources of international students in the United States, yes? Neither is in Southeast Asia.)

You, on the other hand, go one step further. You state that even if subjective criteria are included, the result will not change; universities will still be dominated by Asians.

Keilexandra · March 30, 2009, 4:43pm

I agree with you, Bay. However, I also strongly believe that if racial discrimination is used to achieve that end, no matter how noble, the result is tainted by immorality. And affirmative action IS racial discrimination.

"Race" in College Admissions FAQ & Discussion 3

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