<p>Yeah, I hear you. Personally, I know my children all desire to attend colleges that are as ethnically diverse as the joint classes run by our homeschooling group and their soccer teams have already been, and for that matter as our neighborhood is. My oldest son is very likely to have occasion in the colege applications he will have to complete next year to write about his interaction with varied ethnic groups, including in his own immediate family. But I don’t think he thinks he is adequately described by any one of the checkboxes on college forms, nor by any combination of them. He does think of himself as a human being, period.</p>
<p>To inject a new viewpoint </p>
<p>Isn’t it far easier to identify as “just a human being” when your culture is the prevalent culture of the society in which you live? This is not the case for minorities in this country. As much as a minority may try to identify as “a human being”, as many do in childhood, as they encounter more “welcome to the real world” situations, whether it be racism or dating or anything, it becomes very apparent that no, we are not all just “human beings”, not at this point in time at least. </p>
<p>And while, no, race has no biological basis. Socially it is very VERY real, as shown by all of the destruction or racism throughout history, as well as the vibrant cultural ties many people maintain.</p>
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<p>That’s a good question. I actually received [the</a> suggestion to think about human beings as human beings](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061484356-post564.html]the”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061484356-post564.html) from a man who made that suggestion as a very lonely one-man minority in a room full of people who were largely ignorant (but politely curious) about his ethic group. That made a deep impression on me. He sincerely believed, it was quite apparent to me, that he was better off being my neighbor known by his given name than being one nameless member of a minority group. </p>
<p>It happens that I have lived an aggregate of six years of my life (in two three-year stays) in a country that is in a region of the world where anyone who looks like me or who speaks the local language with my inescapable accent will be identified as a foreigner, an “outside person,” in that country’s predominant language. I think before I went there I was already quite convinced that I’m part of humankind and not particular part of any one “race.” (The facts of genetics are overwhelmingly on the side of telling us that we are part of one common human race.) I haven’t lost the impression that I’m a human being, period, even after living for long, uninterrupted spans of time where I’m a member of a tiny minority group. I cherish being able to express common humanity with people from all over the world.</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061576409-post717.html]#717[/url]”>quote</a> …Isn’t it far easier to identify as “just a human being” when your culture is the prevalent culture of the society in which you live?..
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<p>From [Can</a> race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization](<a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full][i]Can”>http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full):</p>
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<p>So on any college application, they ask for your ethnicity. In my case, I can either put Caucasian or I don’t need to tell them. Since white male is basically the anti-minority, and since the Ivy League’s are all about diversity, I was thinking maybe I should just not tell them. What do you think?</p>
<p>white male & not listing ethnicity = no difference</p>
<p>lmao that sucks…</p>
<p>uhh… how is white male the “anti-minority”? every Ivy League is majority white…</p>
<p>White males are in a better position than all Asians and white females! They are actually quite in demand at some schools.</p>
<p>^^ That’s exactly the point…</p>
<p>How is white male anti-minority? Because ivy leagues put a priority admission with regards to race, and white males are at the bottom of the list. That is why.</p>
<p>Why are there are a lot of whites at Harvard? Because there are a hella lot more whites that apply, and whites make up a larger majority of the general population than any other race.</p>
<p>You should put your ethnicity. If you don’t, they will either assume you’re white or Asian, and it might be even more detrimental if they believe you’re Asian… Represent yourself wholly. I’m an ORM an I’m proud of it!</p>
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<p>As far as the law goes, it’s entirely your choice. You can decline to list any ethnicity, or you can indicate one or more categories (as defined by federal regulations) that you deem to fit your personal situation. </p>
<p>But if you are asking for general opinions about what you SHOULD do, my personal opinion is that you may as well decline to self-identify with any ethnic group (which leaves the college reporting you and hundreds of classmates to the feds as “race/ethnicity unknown” because that shows you are willing to be on an equal footing with all your compatriots.</p>
<p>wait, which is more OR…Asian or Caucasian?</p>
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<p>Please, post your proof, any proof to substantiate your assertion.</p>
<p>StitchInTime posted a link to a study </p>
<p>[Can</a> race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization ? PNAS](<a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full]Can”>http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full) </p>
<p>that I hope all of you will read. The conclusion is “What is most striking about these results is just how easy it was to diminish the importance of race by manipulating coalitionespecially given the repeated failure over decades to find other means to influence racial encoding. The sensitivity of race to coalitional manipulation lends credence to the hypothesis that, to the human mind, race is simply one historically contingent subtype of coalition. . . . This implies that coalition, and hence race, is a volatile, dynamically updated cognitive variable, easily overwritten by new circumstances. If the same processes govern categorization outside the laboratory, then the prospects for reducing or even eliminating the widespread tendency to categorize persons by race may be very good indeed.” </p>
<p>This is very important research and deserves further study to see if this result can be replicated and refined. It relates very directly to one of the central concerns about college admission policies: whether they are able to help bring about a society in which there is less invidious racial prejudice, which I think is a goal desired by essentially all participants in this thread.</p>
<p>^I am very interested in that study, but unfortunately you need access to scholarly libraries to view it, which I will not have until I enroll. </p>
<p>I think it is VERY good news that race is not a permanent thing. However as long as race correlates in society to certain “coalitions”, whether it be poverty or joblessness or crime, I don’t see how organizations seeking to improve racial equality would be better off ceasing to acknowledge race. If anything, this study proves that even if the government stops asking about race, people will still care about it because those “coalitions” still exist.</p>
<p>It would help much more if I could somehow view the study, so this is going based off the blurb that stitch posted.</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061580607-post732.html]#732[/url]”>quote</a> I am very interested in that study, but unfortunately you need access to scholarly libraries to view it, which I will not have until I enroll.
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<p>The [original</a> post](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061577539-post719.html]original”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061577539-post719.html) provided the link to the complete article. Here it is again:</p>
<p>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: [Can</a> race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization](<a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full]Can”>http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full)</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061580607-post732.html]#732[/url]”>quote</a>…If anything, this study proves that even if the government stops asking about race, people will still care about it because those “coalitions” still exist…
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<p>“Government” is a proxy for the college applicants (and census participants) self-identifying into various categories of ‘race’/‘ethnicity’. If the ‘[Fastest-Growing</a> Ethnic Category at Great Colleges: “Race Unknown”](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/441477-fastest-growing-ethnic-category-great-colleges-race-unknown.html]Fastest-Growing”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/441477-fastest-growing-ethnic-category-great-colleges-race-unknown.html)’ trend of not self-identifying continues, there will be no data on which to make a statistical analysis and/or ‘race’-informed admission decision. In essence, the concept of “coalitions” will be ‘voted out’ by applicants for college admissions.</p>
<p>History shows us that [humans</a> change behavior](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060834173-post103.html]humans”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060834173-post103.html) when a deeper understanding of our reality is revealed.</p>
<p>Hi, Tyler09, </p>
<p>I was able to read enough of the article to which StitchInTime linked (from the URL he provided and I copied) to get a clear picture of how the research was done. I would like to see a lot of attempts to replicate and extend that finding.</p>
<p>When I took the PSAT back in October 2008, I noticed the part of the preliminary form that read “If you are African American, fill in this bubble.” Being black, I filled it in, but reality dawned on me: if it had read “If you are white, fill in this bubble”, could you imagine the uproar by the press and the community?</p>
<p>I do stand to benefit from the concept of affirmative action, and I am grateful, but I do realize that it is inherently unfair because there is no way to regulate its use. It’s very similar to the idea of feminism - when it goes too far, nobody is there to ensure its fair use, and it becomes more unfair than the problem it was designed to solve. Therefore, the application of the concept is unfair by nature. </p>
<p>Until we come up with something better, however, I’ll shade in every bubble I can.</p>