<p>@autinmshauri, some of what you’ve said in your posts is misguided about so many things I don’t even know where to begin. Let me just say that if you identified as Black and had a Black grandma you couldn’t begin to say some of the things you’ve said without your grandma beating your ear from one end of the house to the other and back again. </p>
<p>Do try to imagine that your experience is not necessarily everyone else’s experience; that many people who identify as one race might have a totally different American experience from people of another identification; and that what has been taught in American schools might be at odds with one person or one family’s reality. </p>
<p>Moreover, your instruction and perspective on the U.S. Civil Rights movement that you said you received in your education is indeed quite incomplete. The fact is, in today’s world of college admissions, URM as concerns black folks is used to identify the progeny of enslaved Africans brought to the U.S., as well as mostly any person of African ancestry that found themselves in the U.S. during the heydays of the ‘Black Codes’ and Jim Crow rule, and lingering anti-black discrimination in the U.S. </p>
<p>The reality is that in person, you get treated a certain way based on your looks. Affirmative Action of any type based solely on racial or ethnic background is dumb because clearly a poor white person, who grew up on Welfare, food stamps, and free lunches, is going to have a lot less in common with a suburban middle-class white person than with a black or NA person who grew up on Welfare, food stamps, and free lunches.</p>
<p>And conversely, Herman Cain’s family doesn’t have very much in common with the average inner city black kid - or inner city white or Hispanic kid either.</p>
<p>He was the son of a cleaning woman, my father’s mother was a cleaning woman. My father’s father was a metalworker. I’m sure his kids are better off than me and my siblings are, yet they get consideration for affirmative action, if it is only based on race.</p>
<p>IMHO, that’s why you just list what you are, because it really doesn’t matter at all what we look like on the outside, or who our parents are. Only thing that matters is what opportunities we have had, and a poor 100% white European heritage kid has as many opportunities as a poor 100% black African heritage kid. If you can get a bit of an increase in opportunities because of something so beyond your control as your family background, it’s not your fault or anything you did.</p>
<p>URM designation appears to have worked for our president, and he has no identifiable slave ancestors.</p>